...
And I imagine that if you wanted to do something else interactively, that the qsub command above would also work.
QIIME
You can also get qiime to work, using the qsub command above to get interactive computing and use:
module add qiime
I have yet to get it to work, but at least I loaded it.
Space
So I was able to make my own directory in /data/ and /scratch/, but it didn't exist before I made it:
mkdir /scratch/spacocha
mkdir /data/spacocha
I'm able to write to that folder, so I think it should work fine.
Summary
In summary, this cluster might be good for a few specific tasks, but it's not good for long term storage, and it's geared towards the earth science crowd and modeling ocean circulation etc. It might have some functional capabilities that you could use (i.e. Matlab), but be careful not to leave data on their scratch because it will be deleted.