Copying Data Between Hosts

How to use the SCP command to copy data


Part of the Working with Data and Files series

In a HPC environment there is likely to be a shared filesystem, so it is not normally necessary to copy data directly between nodes in the research environment. Users simply need to place the data to be shared in their home-directory on the login node, and it will be available on all compute nodes in the same location.

If necessary, users can use the scp command to copy files between nodes. For example, the following will copy the file myfile.txt stored under /tmp/ on node01 to the cwd (.) of this host:

scp node01:/tmp/myfile.txt .

Alternatively, users could login to a host that has unshared data on and copy the data back to the shared filesystem.