Storage Systems

Users of Koa are granted access to two storage locations by default and could be granted access to two other types of storage locations.

The two default storage locations users are given access to is home storage (home) and scratch storage (Koa Scratch).

The two additional storage locations could be granted access to include Lab storage (free) and KoaStore storage (for fee).

Home

Each user is provided a home storage location on Koa. Each user's home is provided 50 GB of space that can be used as the user chooses. Upon initialization user homes are setup with an examples directory, a symlink for Koa Scratch and other basic configurations needed to allow a users to take advantage of Koa.

Performance

Home is not a high performance filesystem. NFS is tried a true but it is not designed to handle the stresses an High Performance Computing cluster can place on it. As a result, home should not be used for writing output from multiple jobs or jobs that can generate a lot of data. Jobs of this nature should take advantage of Koa Scratch instead, which is a file system designed for the stresses an HPC can generate.

Home can be suitable for users with very modest/light needs and files that need to persist on Koa.

Details

Home is utilizing a ZFS over NFS RDMA. Currently home is served out utilizing a single Virtual Host that is connected to Koa at 200 Gbit. ZFS is configured to use zstd-3 compression allowing users to take full advantage of the inline compression and space savings zstd provides. As of this writing, on average users see a 2.16x compression ratio.

Koa Scratch