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Launch an Interactive Job

If you need to perform tasks like transferring large files, compiling applications, or running heavy computations for test, debugging, and profiling, you can submit an interactive job instead of a batch job. This gives you direct, interactive access to a compute node, allowing you to run commands and work in real time.

Warning

Users should not use interactive jobs to reserve compute resources, as this prevents others from accessing them. NSCC monitors usage and may notify the principal investigator (PI) if this behaviour recurs.

Launch an Interactive CPU Job

You can submit an interactive CPU job to the scheduler using the following command:

qsub –I –l select=1:ncpus=4:mem=16G -l walltime=01:00:00 -q normal -P <project-id>

  • -I: Interactive job

  • -l select=1:ncpus=4:mem=16G: Request for 1 chunk of resource with 4 CPU cores and 16 GB of memory

  • -l walltime=01:00:00: The job will be terminated by the scheduler after one hour

Launch an Interactive GPU Job

You can submit an interactive GPU job to the scheduler using the following command:

qsub –I –l select=1:ngpus=1 -l walltime=01:00:00 -q normal -P <project-id>

  • -I : Interactive job

  • -l select=1:ngpus=1 : Request for 1 chunck of resources with 1 GPU

    • For every 1 GPU requested, CPU cores and memory will be allocated automatically:

      • ASPIRE 2A: 16 CPU cores and 110 GB of memory per GPU requested

      • ASPIRE 2A+: 14 CPU cores and 235 GB of memory per GPU requested

  • -l walltime=01:00:00: Interactive job will be terminated by the scheduler after one hour.