Home Accounts

The University of Iowa HPC cluster system has home accounts with a 1-TB quota. The home accounts are available as a storage file share which is accessible both a) from every cluster node as your home directory, and b) from other computers on campus as an SMB/CIFS share, using your HawkID and password. These home accounts have automatic snapshots taken periodically, saving the state of the account at that point in time. Note that snapshots are not backups as they will expire. To access the snapshots, refer to the following documentation:

Accessing Snapshots on HPC Home Storage

You can connect your HPC home share to another system on the campus network in the following ways, replacing "myHawkID" with your own HawkID username. Note that your username (your HawkID) and the name of your home share happen to be the same, but they're separate entities. In these instructions, replace "myHawkID" with your actual HawkID.

Mount your HPC home share on your Linux system:

You must have root or sudo access on your system, and it must have the cifs-utils system package installed. Run the following commands at a command line shell on your system, depending on which HPC home you wish to access. Each command should print nothing if successful, and should print an error if something is wrong.

1. On your system, create a directory where you will mount your home share

   sudo mkdir -p /mnt/argon/myHawkID
   

2. On your system, mount your HPC home share into that directory

   sudo mount -t cifs //data.hpc.uiowa.edu/argon_home \
   -o user=myHawkID,domain=iowa,uid=$(id -u $(whoami)),gid=$(id -g $(whoami)) \
   /mnt/argon/myHawkID

   Regardless of sudo, the mount command will always prompt you to enter the password of the user you specified with the "user=" and "domain=" options (i.e. your HawkID), not your local account's password. Check your prompt carefully!

   At this point your home share should be mounted in the directory you created, so you can access it as a normal directory.

3. When you're done, make sure to run the following command to disconnect:

   sudo umount /mnt/argon/myHawkID

Bring up the "Connect to Server" dialog, either by selecting "Connect to Server..." from the "Go" menu in the Finder or by pressing CMD + K.

Then, enter this as the Server Address:

smb://IOWA;<your_hawkid>:*@data.hpc.uiowa.edu/argon_home

Then click the "Connect" button. Remember to use your HawkID password.

Mount your HPC home on your a Windows-based system:

Using the Explorer address bar, enter the server and share name. Note that the form required on Windows uses backslash characters as shown here:
\\data.hpc.uiowa.edu\argon_home

If you are on a Healthcare-managed system using your HealthcareID, or any other system where you don't log in using your HawkID (such as a personal system), you also need to tick the box to "Connect using different credentials". Then click "Finish".

If you specified connecting with different credentials, you will be prompted to enter your HawkID credentials here. Remember to specify the IOWA domain in front of your HawkID like this:
IOWA\myHawkID

What to do if your storage quota is reached

If you receive a message stating that your home account has reached its quota, and you cannot fill it any farther, you must remove some large files from your home directory. Sometimes, the rm command will fail with a message of "Quota has been reached." If this happens, here is what you can do to correct the issue.

1. Pick a large, unwanted file to remove. 

2. Copy the contents of /dev/null to this file. This will basically make the file a pointer to NULL values with a size of 0.

   cp /dev/null name_of_file_to_delete

3. Once you have done this, you can use 'rm' as you normally would to free up more space.