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Jobs work directory and temportary directory
Problem description
Workdir
The workdir is the directory associated to a user’s job. It is the directory where all the files are created, when a path is not specified, or used to map a relative path into an absolute path. It is basically the current directory (the path specified in the $PWD environment variable) from where a process, a job, is run. In many configurations a batch job is run from a workdir contained in the unix user’s home directory. Often the home directories are imported by worker nodes from a shared file system. This could raise serious performance issues for the file servers, having many jobs accessing to a distributed file system, not really needing distributed data.
Temp dir
The temporary directory is used by jobs to create large, temporary files. The unix convention is to use the /tmp directory. However in some configurations it would be better to point the jobs to a better file system for large temporary files, for performance issues or to avoid clashes between jobs running in the same worker node.