Interactive Jobs

Interactive command line sessions are helpful for more intensive computations that are not appropriate for the submit nodes, such as testing workflows, interactive data wrangling, or compiling software.

To allocate an interactive session, the salloc command is combined with Slurm resource directives to request desired hardware.

For example, to work interactively on a compute node with a single processor core for one hour, use the following command:

$ salloc --nodes=1 --ntasks=1 --mem=1G --time=01:00:00

Or, using short options:

$ salloc -N 1 -n 1 --mem 1G -t 1:00:00

The above commands submit a request to the scheduler to queue an interactive job. When the resources become available and the job is launched, an active prompt will return, now displaying the name of the compute node in place of the previous submit node.

This session is terminated either when the time limit is reached or when the exit command is entered. After the interactive session completes, the session will return to the previous node.