Submitting interactive jobs using PBS

This technical note may only apply on OSCAR software

In the document of GradEA cluster, you can submit interactive jobs if you just want to run simple jobs on a not-so-busy machine. Since our cluster is also using PBS to allocate these available computing resource just like GradEA, surely we can do it, too.

[mjhsieh@cluster1 ~]$ qsub -I -l nodes=1:ppn=1
qsub: waiting for job 9787.cluster1 to start
qsub: job 9787.cluster1 ready

[mjhsieh@oscar019 ~]$ find . -name \*.trj -exec bzip2 -9 {} \;
[mjhsieh@oscar019 ~]$ exit
logout

qsub: job 9787.cluster1 completed

See? It seems pretty easy. The most important thing is, you don't need to run the risk of killing the cluster server when you want to do something essential like compressing data.

Now it comes up with a problem. How would you use X-forwarding if you want to run X-interface jobs? I tried a lot of combination, I found that we can not utilize the ssh tunnel for X-forwarding from the nodes when you qsub an interactive job. You still can specify your DISPLAY variable for your GradEA account though we can't in our cluster. The reason is simply that our computing nodes doesn't have access outside the local network.