Interactive Jobs

To start an interactive session for running serial or threaded programs on an Oscar compute node, simply run the command interact from the login node:

interact

By default, this will create an interactive session that reserves 1 core and 4GB of memory for a period of 30 minutes. You can change the resources reserved for the session from these default limits by modifying the interact command:

usage: interact [-n cores] [-t walltime] [-m memory] [-q queue]
                [-o outfile] [-X] [-f featurelist] [-h hostname] [-g ngpus]

Starts an interactive job by wrapping the SLURM 'salloc' and 'srun' commands.

options:
  -n cores        (default: 1)
  -t walltime     as hh:mm:ss (default: 30:00)
  -m memory       as #[k|m|g] (default: 4g)
  -q queue        (default: 'batch')
  -o outfile      save a copy of the sessions output to outfile (default: off)
  -X              enable X forwarding (default: no)
  -f featurelist  CCV-defined node features (e.g., 'e5-2600'),
                  combined with '&' and '|' (default: none)
  -h hostname     only run on the specific node 'hostname'
                  (default: none, use any available node)
  -a account      user SLURM accounting account name
  -g ngpus        number of GPUs   

For example, the command

$ interact -n 20 -t 01:00:00 -m 10g

requests an interactive session with 20 cores and 10 GB of memory (per node) for a period of 1 hour.

Keeping Interactive Jobs Alive:

If you lose connectivity to your login node, you lose access to your interactive job. To mitigate this issue you can use screen to keep your connection alive. For more information on using screen on the login nodes, see the software section