Starting Interactive Sessions

Normally, compute nodes are only accessible to programs or jobs submitted as batch scripts to the scheduler. This mode of operation is ideal for well understood research computing pipelines, but may need to be approached more piecemeal through interactive sessions on compute nodes. This page documents how to obtain interactive shell sessions on our compute nodes, but please note that interactive graphical sessions are available through the webapp. For Agave: login.rc.asu.edu. For Sol: sol.asu.edu

Once logged in, to launch an interactive compute session, simply run the following command:

This will launch an interactive compute session on one of the conventional compute nodes (specifically granting one core for up to four hours within the htc partition).

Once the session launches, you can begin using the system.

X11 Forwarding is Automatic

There is no special switch or option needed for X11 forwarding to work, it is always enabled.

So if you need to run an X11 base program, just launch an interactive session and run the program from within it.

However, this will only work if you are logged in through X2Go or through SSH with X11 forwarding turned on.

Interactive Session Options

The interactive command will work with many of the same options and switches as other slurm job-launching commands. This is because interactive is an sbatch job in disguise. Any option that would be passed within an sbatch script or to the sbatch command itself, will be accepted by interactive and will override its defaults.

In particular, you can specify how many cpu cores your want your interactive session to use with the -n number option.

You can also specify how long you would like your session to run with the -t days-hours:minutes option.

An example of using these options to launch an interactive session that uses 8 cpu cores on one node, runs for zero days and 4 hours