How can I allocate extra disk space of my Google Cloud Platform(GCP) instance to my R server

Question

I would like to know how to allocate extra disk space of my VM to my R server on Google Cloud Platform(GCP)

I established an R server on GCP based on a number of tutorials on the internet. My instance runs on ubuntu 18.04LTS. I succeeded in installing base R and Rstudio. I could run some basic analyses with the server.

tutorial examples: https://towardsdatascience.com/r-studio-server-on-google-cloud-dd69b8bff80b https://yuhuisdatascienceblog.blogspot.com/2017/07/setting-up-r-studio-server-on-google.html

However, I realized that the disk usage of the working directory for my R server was too low after running du -h

#the working directory for my R server
twinring77@instance-1:~$ pwd
/home/twinring77

#the disk usage of my R server
twinring77@instance-1:~$ du -h
...
2.2G    ./yard/apps/cellranger-6.1.2
3.0G    ./yard/apps
3.0G    ./yard
4.2G    .

It turns out I cannot remotely download any files bigger than 4.2 GB to my working directory on my R server.

Thus I added an extra 1.1TB disk to GCP instance by adding an extra disk based on a tutorial that Google provided tutorial: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/add-persistent-disk

I also expanded the original free trial disk I was using (10GB) to 1.1TB

After that, I ran df –h to check extra disk space.

twinring77@instance-1:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev             59G     0   59G   0% /dev
tmpfs            12G  748K   12G   1% /run
/dev/sda1       1.1T   11G  1.1T   2% /
tmpfs            59G     0   59G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs            59G     0   59G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda15      105M  4.4M  100M   5% /boot/efi
/dev/sdb        1.1T   77M  1.1T   1% /mnt/disks/MOUNT_DIR
tmpfs            12G     0   12G   0% /run/user/1001

So essentially my instance has 2.2TB of free disk space

There were some tutorials online about resizing or adding disk space to a VM instance. However I was unable to find out how to precisely allocate it to a server established based on the instance.

In conclusion, I have plenty of free disk space in my instance that I can spare for my R server. I would like to how to allocate this free disk space for my R server so that I can download/process bigger data.

ps. I’m new to this community and this is actually my first question posted. I tried to make all my questions clear after reading many but I’m sorry if I made any mistakes in the process. Please feel free to let me know if I need to correct my questions

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Shutting down my gcp instance solved the issue.

The extra disk space can be allocated after the instance is stopped and will reflect on the next start.