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Managing Home Directory Storage

/home directories on ASU supercomputers have a 100 GiB limit. If your home directory becomes full, you may receive errors during running jobs or terminal commands. You will also be unable to create new sessions from the web portal.

In terminal sessions, this may show up like: Error: No space left on devices

However, SSH access is not affected by home directory fullness, so SSH is the best method to identify files that can be removed so you can return your account to a usable state. For help connecting with SSH, read up on using a terminal client.

The goal is to reduce your used storage capacity below 100GB, so you will want to delete unnecessary files or move important files to another storage system. Below are methods to check space usage and address common issues.

Identifying Large Files and Directories​

These examples use ~ as a shorthand for /home/$USER, but these commands can be used for any directory. Using these commands without an explicit path (e.g., gdu or ncdu will default to the current file path).

gdu​

gdu is a fast and user-friendly tool for analyzing disk usage.

To see which files or directories are taking up space in $HOME, use:

gdu ~

Once in gdu:

  • Use the arrow keys to navigate up and down the list or into directories.
  • Press d to delete a file or directory directly from the interface.
  • Press q to quit.

ncdu​

ncdu (ncurses Disk Usage) offers similar functionality. You can therefore alternatively use:

ncdu ~

Common Space-Consuming Applications and Solutions​

Mamba​

mamba, the Python package manager, stores temporary files, cached tarballs, and environments in your home directory. To free up space:

  1. Remove any unused environments:
mamba env remove -n <envName>
  1. Clean up unnecessary packages, tarballs, and cache:
mamba clean --all

Pip​

We recommend using mamba over pip for Python package management whenever possible. If you do use pip, you can safely clear out pip cache files with:

rm -rf ~/.cache/pip

Hugging Face​

Hugging Face libraries frequently download large models to your home directory, storing them in ~/.cache/huggingface by default. To free up space and relocate these files to scratch storage:

  1. Move the cache directory:
mv ~/.cache/huggingface $SCRATCH
  1. Update your shell to reflect this change:
echo "export HF_HOME=$SCRATCH/huggingface" >> ~/.bashrc
  1. Reload your shell (or start a new terminal session):
source ~/.bashrc