Storing and Moving Data
Zilu Wang, Steve Lantz
Cornell Center for Advanced Computing
12/2025 (original)
Vista is the forerunner to Horizon, which will ultimately be one of the largest academic supercomputers in the world. It is a resource provided through The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), where it serves as a bridge to the NSF's Leadership Class Computing Facility (LCCF). Vista, like Horizon, is targeted towards scientific computing projects that require highly capable resources for AI and other HPC applications. It accordingly features NVIDIA "superchips" that closely couple CPUs with GPUs.
This topic deals with the filesystems where you can store your data on Vista, and how you transfer your files from or to them.
Objectives
After you complete this topic, you should be able to:
- Explain filesystem configuration in Vista
- Describe how to keep track of available storage
- Name several different tools that are used to transfer files
- Discuss the need for file striping in Lustre
Prerequisites
Vista is intended as a bridge to a leadership-class system, so its prospective users are already likely to have a high degree of familiarity and experience with HPC and parallel computing. The pace of this topic is meant to be relatively brisk, for that reason.
With that being understood, there are no formal prerequisites for this Virtual Workshop topic. A working knowledge of Linux is recommended; if you need more preparation in Linux, try working through the Linux roadmap first.
CVW material development is supported by NSF OAC awards 1854828, 2321040, 2323116 (UT Austin) and 2005506 (Indiana University)