USF HII Compute Portal

HII-HPC Cluster

HII-HPC Cluster

Interactive Shell

Discussion

Although it is possible to run interactive work on a head node, hii.rc.usf.edu or hii2.rc.usf.edu, doing so may adversely affect others who are utilizing the system for its core functionality of transferring and submitting jobs which are queued and dispatched to run on compute nodes dedicated to running computationally-intensive work.

When it is necessary to run work interactively please use the Slurm partition hii-interactive which provides real-time sessions on a high-performance compute node.

Invocation

To obtain an interactive session, run the following command modifying your CPU, memory, and time requirements as necessary.

srun --pty --partition=hii-interactive --cpus=4 --mem=30G --time=0-8 /bin/bash

Example

In the following example, we request a shell on a compute node providing 4 Cores and 30GB of RAM for 8 hours from which we may run an interactive R session:

hii$ srun --pty --partition=hii-interactive --cpus=4 --mem=30G --time=0-8 /bin/bash

svc-3024-1-1$ module load apps/R/3.2.3

svc-3024-1-1$ R
> (run R commands and quit)

svc-3024-1-1$ exit

The interactive session will terminate when you exit the shell or the time limit you set expires.

Exclusive

You may use the --exclusive option instead of specifying --cpus and --mem to ask for all resources on a node:

hii$ srun --pty --partition=hii-interactive --exclusive --time=0-8 /bin/bash

Notes

  • Note: sinfo --partition=hii-interactive to view availability of interactive nodes.

  • Note: hii-interactive was set-up to provide an interactive shell in a timely manner since no batch jobs should be running on the hii-interactive partition, however if all nodes in the hii-interactive partition are allocated, feel free to subsititute --partition=hii-test or --partition=hii02 in the examples but realize if a partition is saturated with batch-jobs your interactive session may wait many minutes or hours to start.