Interactive jobs

Tip

Contact Secretariat System Administrators with HPC Questions!

Vijay Shankar

John Poole

Maria E. Adonay

vshanka@clemson.edu,jopoole@clemson.edu,madonay@clemson.edu

Contact IHG Research Cores with Research Questions!

ihgcores@clemson.edu

Attention

When testing code on Secretariat, it is important that you not run your commands on the head node (secretariat-master).

When you follow the instructions on the Logging in page, you are connecting to the head node. To make sure that you are testing your code appropriately, please read the following.

srun

To create an interactive session on Secretariat, use srun.

Attention

You should use srun only to test your code. Once your code works, you should transfer it to a script. For more information on this, see the Batch jobs page.

Consider the sbatch header in the example script from the Batch jobs page:

1#!/bin/bash
2#
3#SBATCH --job-name=fastp_ex
4#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
5#SBATCH --partition=compute
6#SBATCH --time=00:30:00
7#SBATCH --mem=2G
8#SBATCH --output=/opt/ohpc/pub/workshop/toyout/logs/fastp_ex.%j.out
9#SBATCH --error=/opt/ohpc/pub/workshop/toyout/logs/fastp_ex.%j.err

When initiating your session, you should specify your resource requests in your command. Make sure that you specify parameters for the options in lines 4-7, at least:

srun --cpus-per-task=1 --partition=compute --time=00:30:00 --mem=2G --pty bash

where

  • --pty: instructs srun to run in “pseudo terminal mode”

  • bash: creates an “interactive bash shell”

Every option that you could include in your sbatch header should be possible to include in an srun command. Please see the Slurm documentation for more details.