Temporary Directories

Temporary Directory Guidance Changed Jun 29, 2026

A Slurm update on Jun 29, 2026 changed how users should use the local disk on HiPerGator.

Users can now use $TMPDIR or /tmp directly.

Job Temporary Directory

When a SLURM job starts, the scheduler creates a custom temporary directory for the job on the compute node's fast flash-based local hard drive. This directory also works great for jobs that need to use or generate a large number of small files, as the main UFIT-RC parallel filesystem (Blue storage) is optimized for large file streaming and is less suitable for small files.

The job temporary directory is owned by the user running the job. At the end of the job, the temporary directory is automatically removed unless the job fails in which case it's temporarily retained for troubleshooting.

This directory is accessible within the job via the $TMPDIR environment variable, or directly at /tmp or /var/tmp. You can use the ${TMPDIR} variable as a filesystem path in the shell script portion of the job script as an argument for any commands you run in a job.

You can also use the ${TMPDIR} variable in shell commands at the beginning of the job to copy data to the temporary job directory (staging out) and copy results back in to blue at the end of the job script.

Default Temporary Path

Many applications and programming languages use the $TMPDIR environment variable, if available, as the default temporary directory path.

If a personal Apptainer or Singularity container is used, make sure that the $APPTAINERENV_TMPDIR or $SINGULARITYENV_TMPDIR variable is set within the job to export the local scratch location into the Singularity container.