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Interactive Terminal Sessions on Compute Nodes

Run a Shell♯

Use srun to request an interactive shell:

[juser@picotte001 ~]$ srun --nodes=1 --cpus-per-task=48 --mem=32G --time=00:15:00 --pty /bin/bash -l
[juser@node002 ~]$

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Temporary Directory♯

When requesting more than one task, i.e. --ntasks-per-node=N where N > 1, the TMP directory is not automatically created by srun. Check by doing:

[juser@node002 ~]$ ls -ld $TMP
/bin/ls: cannot access '/local/scratch/12345': No such file or directory

In that case, create the directory:

[juser@node002 ~]$ mkdir $TMP
[juser@node002 ~]$ ls -ld $TMP
drwxrwxr-x 2 juser juser 6 Mar 22 17:21 /local/scratch/12345

A better solution is to request only one task (or just omit the specification since the default is 1), and specify only "--cpus-per-task".

Run a Terminal-based Application♯

We will use Matlab as an example. The same applies to any application with a terminal interface, e.g. Stata, R, IPython, etc. Note that this runs on node002 (assigned at run time by Slurm):

[juser@picotte001 ~]$ module load matlab/R2020b
[juser@picotte001 ~]$ srun --nodes=1 --ntasks=1 --cpus-per-task=48 --mem=32G --time=00:15:00 --pty matlab -nodisplay -nodesktop -nosplash -noFigureWindows

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