How to run an interactive job on ARC
Background
Running jobs is the main and the only way to run computations on ARC.
Normally, a user creates a job script and submit it to SLURM on ARC using the sbatch command to run a computation.
The login node, ARC's gateway, is only intended to do management work, such as
- data management,
- software management, and
- job management.
The login node could also be used to software development, if you write scripts, or if you work on some new code for your research. The login node, however, cannot be used to run anything that is CPU heavy and relates to research, that is not management. (See our guidelines and policies).
Sometimes, there is a need to run some research work related commands that are CPU heavy,
but which can be difficult or tedious to run as normal non-interactive batch jobs.
Possibly you may want to do some interactive work using the command line,
transform your data, collect results of a large set of computations, try or test new methods or software.
For this kind of work, the best approach is to request an interactive job from ARC's SLURM.