Getting data to and from the cluster

You can transfer files to and from the cluster using e.g SFTP, scp and rsync (basically any method that runs on top of SSH logins).

In the examples below, the tetralith.nsc.liu.se login node in the Tetralith cluster is used. If you are running on another cluster, substitute the appropriate login node name for that cluster in the commands.

scp

scp is a simple tool that is useful for copying a single of a few files to or from a remote system. Example - copy a local file named local-file to your home directory on Tetralith:

$ scp local-file username@tetralith.nsc.liu.se:

Example - copy a file from Tetralith back to the local computer (where it will end up in the current directory under the same name as on Tetralith):

$ scp username@tetralith.nsc.liu.se:tetralith-file .

sftp

sftp is an interactive file transfer program, similar to ftp (but running on top of SSH). Example:

$ sftp username@tetralith.nsc.liu.se:testdir
Connecting to tetralith.nsc.liu.se...
Changing to: /home/username/testdir
sftp> ls
file-1  file-2
sftp> get file-2
Fetching /home/username/testdir/file-2 to file-2

There are also graphical SFTP clients available.

rsync

rsync is a file copying tool that can be used both locally and over the network. Its main advantage over scp and sftp is that is handles copying of whole directory trees well, and that rsync transfers can easily be restarted without having to re-transfer data. Example - copy the directory tree named local-tree to Tetralith:

$ rsync -av local-tree username@tetralith.nsc.liu.se:

Swestore

If you need to transfer data to/from Swestore, please read the SNIC knowledge base docs.

Windows clients

There are several Windows applications that implements the scp, sftp and rsync protocols. E.g PuTTY and Filezilla.

We have received reports of slow scp performance when using Cygwin (4MB/s on 1Gbps Ethernet). Using PowerShell gave a significant (>10x) speedup in that case.