Triton Interactive Jobs

HPC clusters primarily take batch jobs and run them in the background—users do not need to interact with the job during the execution. However, sometimes users do need to interact with the application. For example, the application needs the input from the command line or waits for a mouse event in X windows. Use bsub -Is -q interactive command to launch interactive work on Triton.

[username@triton ~]$ bsub -Is -q interactive bash

or

[username@triton ~]$ bsub -Is -q interactive -XF $(java -jar ~/.local/apps/ImageJ/ij.jar -batch ~/.local/apps/ImageJ/macros/screenmill.txt)

Upon exiting the interactive job, you will be returned to one of the login nodes.

Interactive Job Utilizing X11 client

Additionally, the interactive queue can run X11 jobs. The bsub -XF option is used for X11 jobs, for example:

[username@triton ~]$ bsub -Is -q interactive -XF
Job <50274> is submitted to queue <interactive>.
<<ssh X11 forwarding job>>
<<Waiting for dispatch ...>>
<<Starting on n003.triton.edu>>

Upon exiting the X11 interactive job, you will be returned to one of the login nodes.

To run an X11 application, establish an X tunnel with SSH when connecting to Triton. For example,

ssh -X username@triton.ccs.miami.edu

Note that by default, the auth token is good for 20 minutes.  SSH will block new X11 connections after 20 minutes. To avoid this on Linux or OS X, run ssh -Y instead, or set the option ForwardX11Trusted yes in your ~/.ssh/config.

In Windows, use Cygwin/X to provide a Linux-like environment.  Then run ssh -Y or set the option in your ~/.ssh/config file.