Sometimes you might have to run the jobs on clusters interactively (programs that aren’t optimized to run by itself, programs that need user input for various steps or simply for de-bugging purposes). In those cases, it is better to run them in virtual terminals using screen command. I normally use this to order contigs using Mauve, where I need large memory/processors. Running this on head node, will get me an email from sysadmin. Here is an example:
After you SSH into the head node, open up a new screen session, assume that you will be running program1 here.
screen -S program1
This will begin the new terminal, that is virtual and doesn’t require a running computer to keep it alive (and thus it can run even after you close all your windows, turn off your PC). You can detach from this screen any time by pressing Ctrl+a followed by d. This will bring you back to your first terminal which you SSH’ed before.
You can open several of these screen sessions, for program2, program3 etc.,
screen -S program2
#press 'Ctrl+a' followed by 'd'
[detached]
screen -S program3
#press 'Ctrl+a' followed by 'd'
[detached]
Once you are back on head node, you can see all the running screen sessions by typing:
screen -ls
There are screens on:
1234.program1 (Detached)
1235.program2 (Detached)
1236.program3 (Detached)
You can re-attach to any screen you want, by:
screen -r 1234.program1
To close a particular screen session, simply attach to that session and enter Ctrl+a followed by : and type quit.
To get help, enter Ctrl+a followed by ?
Once you open a screen session, you can request a interactive run access via PBS script using:
qsub -I -l mem=256Gb,nodes=1:ppn=32,walltime=48:00:00 -N program1
# this might depend on your cluster settings
After your job gets accepted, you can start running any program just like you would on the head node, without being killed by sysadmin.
Alternatively, you can also add this as alias to your .bashrc file, so that you can quickly open an interactive session, just by typing qlive
alias qlive="qsub -I -l mem=256Gb,nodes=1:ppn=32,walltime=48:00:00 -N stdin"
I hope this helps!