Accessing storage

Each user has a home directory on Lovelace, which is used to store their files. Home directories are available from all of Lovelace's compute nodes in order to minimise moving data around when running programs.

Home directpries on Lovelace are there to support running jobs and are not intended to be used as a long-term storage area. Users are expected to copy valuable results off Lovelace.

Please note that user home directories on Lovelace are NOT backed up. 

Your home directory on Lovelace can be accessed as a fileshare from on-campus PCs and laptops (and from off-campus when using the VPN).

It is available as \\hpc-storage\home\{yourgroup}\{yourusername} (whereyou should replace {yourgroup} and {yourusername} as appropriate – type “pwd” on thecommand line to see where your files are on Lovelace).

For Macintosh users, from the Finder select “Go” → “Connect to Server” and then enter

smb://hpc-storage/home/{yourgroup}/{yourusername}

When authenticating, check that the account you are authenticating with is the same account and password you would use to log in to Lovelace with, as the Mac will automatically select its own local user, which may be different.

On Windows systems files can be transferred graphically between your local computer and the remote cluster by using WinSCP program that is available on university desktops.

On Linux or Mac OSX systems the scp command can be used to copy files to and from your home directory, e.g. to copy a local file to your Lovelace home directory:

scp local_file.txt username@lovelace.lboro.ac.uk: