Creating an Interactive Job

The /home directories are not intended for active job I/O. Output from run your processing should be directed to either /work or /common.

Submitting an interactive job is done with the command srun.

$ srun --pty $SHELL

or to allocate 4 cores per node for 3 hours:

$ srun --nodes=1 --ntasks-per-node=4 --mem-per-cpu=1024 --time=3:00:00 --pty $SHELL

Submitting an interactive job is useful if you require extra resources to run some processing by hand.  It is also very useful to debug your processing.  

An interactive job is scheduled onto a worker node just like a regular job.  You can provide options to the interactive job just as you would a regular SLURM job. The default job runtime is 1 hour, and can be increased by including the --time argument.

Priority for short jobs

To run short jobs for testing and development work, a job can specify a different quality of service (QoS). The *short* QoS increases a jobs priority so it will run as soon as possible.

SLURM Specification
--qos=short
Limits per user for ‘short’ QoS
  • 6 hour job run time
  • 2 jobs of 16 CPUs or fewer
  • No more than 256 CPUs in use for short jobs from all users
Using the short QoS
srun --qos=short --nodes=1 --ntasks-per-node=1 --mem-per-cpu=1024 --pty $SHELL