Disk quota exhausted

On RCAC clusters, each user's $HOME only has a quota of 25GB. $HOME is the ideal place to store important scripts, executables, but it should not be used to run jobs and store data of large size. If the quota of $HOME is exhausted, it will have a big affect and users even cannot submit or run jobs.

Link to section 'ncdu' of 'Disk quota exhausted' ncdu

RCAC has deployed a nice and easy tool called ncdu to help users check sizes of files and subdirectories in a specific directory. For example, if users want to check which files/folders occupy how much disk quota of $HOME, you can easily run ncdu like this:

$ ncdu $HOME

You will see results similar to this:

ncdu 1.17 ~ Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help
--- /home/zhan4429 -------------------------------------------------------------
  3.3 GiB [###########] /.singularity
  1.4 GiB [####       ] /myapps
  1.1 GiB [###        ] /Fidelity
  776.8 MiB [##         ] /projects
  240.9 MiB [           ] /.local
  177.9 MiB [           ] /R
  174.9 MiB [           ] /git
  113.8 MiB [           ] /Downloads
  107.4 MiB [           ] /.vscode-server
  101.2 MiB [           ] /svn
   72.4 MiB [           ] /spack
   35.4 MiB [           ]  cpu-percent.log
   35.0 MiB [           ] /.celltypist
   33.9 MiB [           ] /Desktop
   32.9 MiB [           ] /alphafold

There are a few hidden directory can occpuy a lot of disk space, including ~/.cache, ~/.conda/pkgs, and .singularity/cache. Since these folders just contain cache files, it is safe to delete them.