Interactive sessions

Interactive sessions should be used for

  • writing code
  • testing code before setting batch jobs running
  • running interactive sessions that need your active input
  • running GUI applications eg Stata, Matlab, gview
  • managing data - moving data around in your filespace, or moving data to and from the cluster
  • analysing output

There is no longer a separate command for gui use of interactive.  To start an interactive session type :

interactive

interactive-x  (for exclusive use of a node - should used sparingly - it denies resources to other users)

You can run interactive sessions on other queues by using

  • interactive-gpu
  • interactive-gpu-x
  • interactive-hmem

The aliases above mean that you don't have to worry about the more complicated command which is actually running.

srun -n1 -p compute -J interactive --time=12:00:00 --mem=4G --pty bash

Jobs which need a graphical user interface

eg Matlab, Stata - You need to have x forwarding configured for this to work.

interactive

interactive-x  (for exclusive use of a node - should used sparingly - it denies resources to other users)

Requesting additional slots for an interactive job

If you need to run a test interactively that requires more than one slot, you will need to specify the number of slots you need.

srun -n4 -p compute -J interactive --time=36:00:00 --mem=30G --pty bash

Requesting additional memory for an interactive job

The following example would start an interactive session, 6GB of memory, with a runtime of 12 hours

srun -n1 -p compute -J interactive --time=12:00:00 --mem-per-cpu=6G --pty bash

You can select the gpu or hmem queue by changing the -p option.