Interactive Jobs

It is possible to request and use a farm node for interactive work. This allows users to do interactive work with more resources than they would have on the ifarm machines. Interactive slurm sessions can be used from the command line and will soon be used for other services such as Jupyter notebooks.

From an ifarm machine, it is possible to create a shell on a farm node like so:

ifarm> salloc -p ifarm
salloc: Granted job allocation 5956045

ifarm> srun --pty bash

bash-4.2$ echo "This is running on host `hostname`"
This is running on host farm180301

bash-4.2$ exit
exit

ifarm> exit
exit
salloc: Relinquishing job allocation 5956045

 

Note that there are two steps: First is getting an allocation on the slurm ifarm partition. The second is attaching to the session on the farm node. Once the job is attached to farm node all computation happens there. The shell session is a conduit for the interaction.

It is important to relinquish your allocation when you are done with it.