Upcoming changes to home directories.

tl;dr – At some point over the next month, your home directory will be
changing from /home/*/USERID to /users/USERID.

Recently we purchased a new storage array for the JHPCE cluster, with the
intention of consolidating a number of our older, smaller arrays onto this new
storage array. This new storage array is much larger, will perform faster,
and will be less expensive to use than our existing smaller arrays. One of
the older storage array that we are migrating is the current Amber1 array,
which contains the home directories for all of the JHPCE cluster users.

Throughout May an June we will be migrating users’ home directories in
several phases to this new storage system. For each phase, we will be
notifying the users affected prior to their being moved, and again once the
move has been completed. During the migration of your home directory, you
should refrain from being logged into the cluster, or running jobs on the
cluster. We will strive to be flexible in the scheduling of the migrations,
so as to affect the fewest running jobs as possible.

When your home directory is moved, the path name will change from
/home/*/USERNAME to /users/USERNAME. We are eliminating the various
partitions under /home (/home/bst, /home/mmi, /home/other…) and consolidating
all user directories under /users. Please make note that any scripts or
programs that you have that include a hardcoded path to /home/… will need to
be changed.

As part of this migration to the new storage array, we will be increasing
everyone’s quota in their home directory from 25GB to 100GB. This should
hopefully ease some of the pressure felt by those who occasionally need more
space than what is available in the current home system, but are unable to
justify the purchase of an allocation on one of our larger arrays.

We also expect the monthy cost of home directory space to decrease when
we migrate to the new array. The old Amber1 array is a 7 year old system
for which we pay a considerable amount to Sun/Oracle for a yearly support
contract.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

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