Access to Mills File Systems

On July 8, 2019, the Mills cluster took another step toward its eventual shutdown (complete retirement on January 1, 2020¹⁾):

• all compute nodes were taken offline
• the head node was rebuilt with a newer OS

From this time forward, the Mills head node (mills.hpc.udel.edu) will serve the single purpose of allowing continued access to the following file systems:

• /home – user home directories
• /lustre/work – workgroup storage
• /archive – additional workgroup storage (file archival, etc.)

Users can still ssh to the head node to use a shell to interact with these filesystems. In addition, transfers of files off the cluster are permissible using:

• sftp
• scp
• rsync
• rclone

Users are asked to not upload new data to mills.hpc.udel.edu or attempt to execute any computational programs.

For workgroups or users looking to move data off Mills and onto Farber or Caviness, the /home and /lustre/work file systems have been made available on those clusters' head/login nodes. For example, a simple cp can be used to copy data from a user's Mills home directory to the user's Caviness home directory:

[frey@login00 ~]$ mkdir ~/from-mills

[frey@login00 ~]$ cd $HOME_MILLS

[frey@login00 1001]$ pwd
/mnt/mills/home/1001

[frey@login00 1001]$ ls -l comsol.qs 
-rw-r--r-- 1 frey everyone 3985 Jul  3  2018 comsol.qs

[frey@login00 1001]$ cp comsol.qs ~/from-mills

All Mills file systems are mounted read-only, so users will not be able to copy data in the other direction.

Every user on Farber and Caviness will have the environment variable HOME_MILLS present in their environment at login. The variable contains the directory at which his/her Mills home directory will be present.

Users who did not have a Mills account will see the following error message when trying to access the directory (where #### is the user's Unix uid number):

-bash: cd: /mnt/mills/home/####: No such file or directory

When entering a workgroup with the workgroup command on Farber and Caviness, the WORKDIR_MILLS environment variable will be set. The variable contains the directory at which the Mills workgroup directory will be present.

Workgroups that did not have a presence on Mills will see the following error message when trying to access the directory:

-bash: cd: /mnt/mills/lustre/work/«workgroup»: No such file or directory

Additionally, the /archive file systems have been made available on Farber and Caviness under /mnt/mills/archive/«workgroup».

Workgroups that did not have a presence on Mills will see the following error message when trying to access the directory:

-bash: cd: /mnt/mills/archive/«workgroup»: No such file or directory