File systems at TACC

The first thing you'll want to do is transfer your sequencing data to TACC so you can process it there. Here is an overview of the different storage areas at TACC, their characteristics, and Linux commands generally used to perform the data transfers:

TACC storage areas and Linux commands to access data
(all commands to be executed at TACC except
laptop-to-TACC copies, which must be executed on your laptop)

Local file systems

There are 3 local file systems available on any TACC compute cluster (Lonestar5, stampede2, etc.), each with different characteristics. All these local file systems are very fast and set up for parallel I/O (Lustre file system).

On ls5 these local file systems have the following characteristics:


HomeWorkScratch
quota10 GB1024 GB = 1 TB2+ PB (basically infinite)
policybacked upnot backed up,
not purged
not backed up,
purged if not accessed recently (~10 days)
access commandcdcdwcds
environment variable$HOME$STOCKYARD (root of the shared Work file system)
$WORK (different sub-directory for each cluster)
$SCRATCH
root file system/home/work/scratch
use forSmall files such as scripts that you don't want to lose.Medium-sized artifacts you don't want to copy over all the time. For example, custom programs you install (these can get large), or annotation file used for analysis.Large files accessed from batch jobs. Your starting files will be copied here from somewhere else, and your final results files will be copied elsewhere (e.g. stockyard, corral, or your BRCF POD).

When you first login, the system gives you information about disk quota and your compute allocation quota:

--------------------- Project balances for user abattenh ----------------------
| Name           Avail SUs     Expires | Name           Avail SUs     Expires |
| genomeAnalysis       673  2021-03-31 | BioinformaticsResour 100  2020-06-30 |
| UT-2015-05-18       1000  2021-03-31 | DNAdenovo           4969  2021-03-31 |
| CancerGenetics      4856  2020-09-30 | A-cm10              8867  2020-12-31 |
------------------------ Disk quotas for user abattenh ------------------------
| Disk         Usage (GB)     Limit    %Used   File Usage       Limit   %Used |
| /home1              0.0      10.0     0.10          153     1000000    0.02 |
| /work             614.5    1024.0    60.01        61094     3000000    2.04 |
| /scratch         2676.6       0.0     0.00        32442           0    0.00 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

changing TACC file systems

When you first login, you start in your home directory. Use these commands to change to your other file systems. Notice how your command prompt helpfully changes to show your location.

cdw
cds
cd

The cd (change directory) command with no arguments takes you to your home directory on any Linux/Unix system. The cdw and cds commands are specific to the TACC environment.

Stockyard (shared Work)

TACC compute clusters now share a common Work file system called stockyard. So files in your Work area do not have to be copied, for example from ls5 to stampede2 – they can be accessed directly from either cluster.

Note that there are two environment variables pertaining to the shared Work area:

A mechanism for purchasing larger stockyard allocations (above the 1 TB basic quota) from TACC are in development.

The UT Austin BioInformatics Team, a loose group of bioinformatics researchers, maintains a common directory area on stockyard.

ls /work/projects/BioITeam

Files we will use in this course are in a sub-directory there. The $CORENGS environment variable set in your login profile refers to this path.

echo $CORENGS
ls /work/projects/BioITeam/projects/courses/Core_NGS_Tools

Corral

corral is a gigantic (multiple PB) storage system (spinning disk) where researchers can store data. UT researchers may request up to 5 TB of corral storage through the normal TACC allocation request process. Additional space on corral can be rented for ~$85/TB/year.

The UT/Austin BioInformatics Team also has an older, common directory area on corral.

ls /corral-repl/utexas/BioITeam

A couple of things to keep in mind regarding corral:

Ranch

ranch is a gigantic (multiple PB) tape archive system where researchers can archive data. All TACC users have an automatice 2 TB ranch allocation. UT researchers may request larger (multi-TB) ranch storage allocations through the normal TACC allocation request process.

There is currently no charge for ranch storage. However, since the data is stored on tape it is not immediately available – robots find and mount appropriate tapes when the data is requested, and it can take minutes to hours for the data to appear on disk. The metadata about your data – the directory structures and file names – is always accessible, but the actual data in the files is not on disk until "staged". See the ranch user guide for more information: https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/user-services/user-guides/ranch-user-guide.

Once that data is staged to the ranch disk it can be copied to other places. However, the ranch file system is not mounted as a local file system from the stampede2 or ls5 clusters. So remote copy commands are always needed to copy data to and from ranch (e.g. scp, rsync).

Staging your data

So, your sequencing center has some data for you. They may send you a list of web or FTP links to use to download the data.

The first task is to get this sequencing data to a permanent storage area. This should not be your laptop! corral (or stockyard) is a great place for it, or a server maintained by your lab or company.

Here's an example of a "best practice". Wherever your permanent storage area is, it should have a rational sub-directory structure that reflects its contents. It's easy to process a few NGS datasets, but when they start multiplying like tribbles, good organization and naming conventions will be the only thing standing between you and utter chaos!

For example:

Download from a link – wget

Well, you don't have a desktop at TACC to "Save as" to, so what to do with a link? The wget program knows how to access web URLs such as http, https and ftp.

wget

Get ready to run wget from the directory where you want to put the data.

Don't press Enter after the wget command – just put a space after it.

mkdir -p $WORK/archive/original/2020.core_ngs
cd $WORK/archive/original/2020.core_ngs
wget 

Here are two web links:

Right-click (Windows) or Control+click (Mac) on the 1st link in your browser, then select "Copy link location" from the menu. Now go back to your Terminal. Put your cursor after the space following the wget command then either right-click (Windows), or Paste (Command-V on Mac, Control-V on Windows). The command line to be executed should now look like this:

wget http://web.corral.tacc.utexas.edu/BioITeam/yeast_stuff/Sample_Yeast_L005_R1.cat.fastq.gz

Now press Enter to get the command going. Repeat for the 2nd link. Check that you now see the two files (ls).

Copy from a corral location - cp or rsync

Suppose you have a corral allocation or stockyard area where your organization keeps its data, and that the sequencing data has been downloaded there. You can use various Linux commands to copy the data locally from there to your $SCRATCH area.

cp

The cp command copies one or more files from a local source to a local destination. It has the most common form:

cp [options] <source file 1> <source file 2> ... <destination directory>/

Make a directory in your scratch area and copy a single file to it. The trailing slash ( / ) on the destination says it is a directory.

mkdir -p $SCRATCH/data/test1
cp $CORENGS/misc/small.fq  $SCRATCH/data/test1/
ls $SCRATCH/data/test1

# or..
mkdir -p ~/scratch/data/test1
cd ~/scratch/data/test1
cp $CORENGS/misc/small.fq  .
ls

Copy an entire directory to your scratch area. The -r argument says "recursive".

mkdir -p $SCRATCH/data
cds
cd data
cp -r $CORENGS/general/ general/

Exercise: What files were copied over?

ls general
BEDTools-User-Manual.v4.pdf  SAM1.pdf  SAM1.v1.4.pdf

local rsync

The rsync command is typically used to copy whole directories. What's great about rsync is that it only copies what has changed in the source directory. So if you regularly rsync a large directory to TACC, it may take a long time the 1st time, but the 2nd time (say after downloading more sequencing data to the source), only the new files will be copied.

rsync is a very complicated program, with many options (http://rsync.samba.org/ftp/rsync/rsync.html). However, if you use the recipe shown here for directories, it's hard to go wrong:

rsync -avW local/path/to/source_directory/ local/path/to/destination_directory/

Both the source and target directories are local (in some file system accessible directly from ls5). Either full or relative path syntax can be used for both. The -avP options above stand for:

Since these are all single-character options, they can be combined after one option prefix dash ( - ). You could also use options -ptlrvW, separately, instead of using -a for "archive mode".

The trailing slash ( / ) on the source and destination directories are very important for rsync (and for other Linux copy commands also)!

rsync will create the last directory level for you, but earlier levels must already exist.

mkdir -p $SCRATCH/data
cds
rsync -avWP $CORENGS/custom_tracks/ data/custom_tracks/

Exercise: What files were copied over?

ls $SCRATCH/data/custom_tracks
# or
ls ~/scratch/data/custom_tracks
# or
cds; cd data/custom_tracks; ls

Now repeat the rsync and see the difference.

Use the Up arrow to retrieve the previous command from your bash command history.

rsync -avWP /work/projects/BioITeam/projects/courses/Core_NGS_Tools/custom_tracks/ data/custom_tracks/

The bash shell has several convenient line editing features:

  • use the Up arrow to scroll back through the command line history; Down arrow goes forward
  • use Ctrl-a to move the cursor to the beginning of a line; Ctrl-e to the end
  • use Backspace to remove text before the cursor; Delete to remove text after the cursor

Copy from a remote computer - scp or rsync

Provided that the remote computer is running Linux and you have ssh access to it, you can use various Linux commands to copy data over a secure connection.

The good news is that once you have learned cp and local rsync, remote secure copy (scp) and remote rsync are very similar!

scp

The scp command copies one or more files from a source to a destination, where either source or destination, or both, can be a remote path.

Remote paths are similar to local paths, but have user and host information first:

user_name@full.host.name:/full/path/to/directory/or/file

– or –

user_name@full.host.name:~/path/relative/to/home/directory

Copy a single file to your $SCRATCH/data/test1 directory from the server named gapdh.icmb.utexas.edu, using the user account corengstools. When prompted for a password, use the one we have written on the board (or copy/paste the password from this file: $CORENGS/tacc/gapdh_access.txt)

cds
cat $CORENGS/tacc/gapdh_access.txt
scp corengstools@gapdh.icmb.utexas.edu:~/custom_tracks/progeria_ctcf.vcf.gz ./data/test1/
ls ./data/test1

Notes:

remote rsync

rsync can be run just like before, but using the remote-host syntax. Here we use two tricks:

Don't forget to change userid below.

rsync -ptlrvP corengstools@gapdh.icmb.utexas.edu:~/custom_tracks/ ~/scratch/data/custom_tracks/

Exercise: Was anything copied?

No, because all the source files were already present in the destination directory (you copied the same files earlier) with the same timestamps and file checksums. So rsync had nothing to do!

Scavenger hunt exercise

Here's a fun scavenger hunt for more practice. Issue the following commands to get practice what you've learned so far:

Hit Tab Tab as much as possible to save typing!

To get started:

cd
cp -r $CORENGS/linuxpractice/what what
cd what
cat readme

Where are you when you're all done?

ls5:~/what/starts/here/changes/the/world

step by step answers

From inside your ~/what directory:

mkdir starts
cd starts
cp /work/projects/BioITeam/projects/courses/Core_NGS_Tools/linuxpractice/steps/nextInstr .
cat nextInst

From inside your ~/what/starts directory:

mkdir here
cd here
wget http://web.corral.tacc.utexas.edu/BioITeam/step3.txt
cat step3.txt

From inside your ~/what/starts/here directory:

scp -r scp -r /work/projects/BioITeam/projects/courses/Core_NGS_Tools/linuxpractice/changes/ changes/
# or
rsync -ptvP /work/projects/BioITeam/projects/courses/Core_NGS_Tools/linuxpractice/changes/ changes/

# Then
cd changes 
more largeFile.txt

From inside your ~/what/starts/here/changes directory:

rsync -avP corengstools@cobras.ccbb.utexas.edu:~/the/ the/
cd the
cat instr5.txt
cd world
cat instr6.txt