SNIC Standardized Environment Variables at HPC2N

(SNIC) Standardized Environment Variables at HPC2N

These environment variables are available on most Swedish HPC resources (formerly SNIC centres), so they are set as default for all users at HPC2N. They can be used in e.g. job scripts, and it is preferred that the variables are used instead of the absolute value.

Here follows a short description of the variables:

  • SNIC_BACKUP is the user's primary directory at the centre (the part of the centre storage that is backed up at HPC2N is your home directory - everything under $HOME)
  • SNIC_NOBACKUP is the recommended user directory for project storage without backup in batch jobs (the part of the centre storage that is NOT backed up)
  • SNIC_TMP is the recommended directory for best performance during job runs. At HPC2N it is local scratchdisk on nodes.
  • SNIC_RESOURCE contains information about which compute resource you are running on. At HPC2N it can have the value 'kebnekaise'
  • SNIC_SITE contains information about which SNIC site you are running at. At HPC2N, this variable has the value 'hpc2n'

SNIC_BACKUP and SNIC_NOBACKUP are located on site-wide shared file systems, while SNIC_TMP is node-local scratch space.

You can see which SNIC variables are set with this command:

$ env|grep SNIC|sort

Here is an example of what you get when you run the above command (for the user user123, on the cluster Kebnekaise):

$ env|grep SNIC|sort
SNIC_BACKUP=/home/u/user123
SNIC_NOBACKUP=/proj/nobackup/<your-proj-storage>
SNIC_RESOURCE=kebnekaise
SNIC_SITE=hpc2n
SNIC_TMP=/scratch

 

Updated: 2024-03-19, 10:33