How to use local storage on ARC's compute nodes

Background

On ARC cluster’s compute nodes, the local file systems /tmp (disk-based) and /dev/shm (memory-based) offer fast, node-local storage that avoids network latency. They are ideal for workloads needing quick access to temporary data, such as intermediate files, caches, or scratch space. Access to data in these storage locations is much faster than to shared network storage, such as /home or /scratch. They are limited in total size but have no file count quotas. Since they are private to each node and cleared after the job ends, they’re best for short-lived data that doesn’t need to persist.

These file systems are not shared between compute nodes, so if you have a very large number of small files which you want to process, your job will have to, possibly, decompress the files on the the local storage at the beginning.