Interactive
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-24-96 -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 be 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-16-64 -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-16-64 -J interactive --time=12:00:00 --mem-per-cpu=6G --pty bash
You can select the other compute, gpu or hmem queue by changing the -p option.