Interactive session

Interactive session provides interactive shell on a computing unit (compute, memory, and GPU nodes). It is benefit for debugging, quick tests, or working with interactive tools that need a terminal. It also enables the X11, therefore it is able to do a small visualization to quickly check graphical results.

1 Initiate interactive session
2 Terminating the interactive session
3 Enabling X11 forwarding
4 Specifying partition and resource
5 Checking whether you are in an interactive session

Initiate interactive session

To start interactive session, use sinteract command and then choose the account that you want to use.

sinteract is only available on lanta.nstda.or.th; It is NOT available on transfer.lanta.nstda.or.th

For example,

hpcuser@x3002c0s7b0n0:~> sinteract

No account specified. Please select account to charge from:

  [1] lt200190
  [2] lt200191
  [3] lt200192

  [q] Quit

Please type a selection: 2
Running interactive job using lt200191 account
srun: job 917751 queued and waiting for resources
srun: job 917751 has been allocated resources

By default, sinteract will allocate a 1 CPU core on compute-devel partition for 30 minutes.

Terminating the interactive session

To terminate the interactive session, use exit command

For example,

hpcuser@x3002c0s9b0n0:~> sinteract

No account specified. Please select account to charge from:

  [1] lt200190
  [2] lt200191
  [3] lt200192

  [q] Quit

Please type a selection: 3
Running interactive job using lt200192 account
srun: job 917891 queued and waiting for resources
srun: job 917891 has been allocated resources
hpcuser@x1001c3s7b1n0:~> hostname -A
x1001c3s7b1n0.hostmgmt2001.lanta.nstda.or.th lanta-c-159
hpcuser@x1001c3s7b1n0:~> exit
exit
hpcuser@x3002c0s9b0n0:~>

Before initiating the interactive session, the machine code is x3002c0s9b0n0 (starting with x300). In the interactive session, the machine code is x1001c3s7b1n0 (starting with x100). After exiting, the machine code is back to x3002c0s9b0n0.

Enabling X11 forwarding

To enable X11 forwarding in the interactive session, specify -X option.

For example,

sinteract -X

Please note that, to run an application with GUI, the following requirements also have to be satisfied.

The ssh session have to allow X11 forwarding.
There is a X11 server running on your local machine.

Specifying partition and resource

Specify the following option to specify resources you require.

Option	Description

Option	Description
`-p, --partition`	specify partition for job allocation.
`-G, --gpus`	specify number of required GPUs. Must be specified if GPU(s) are required
`-c, --cpus-per-task`	specify number of required CPUs.
`-t`	specify maximum wall-time for running the interactive session (HH:MM:SS).

For example,

a. requesting for a compute node with 4 CPU cores for 30 minutes. X11 is also enable.

b. requesting for a compute node with 32 CPU cores for 3 hours.

c. requesting for a GPU for an hour.

d. requesting for 4 GPUs for 4 hours.

Checking whether you are in an interactive session

To check whether you are in an interactive session and which machine are you running on, use hostname -A command.

code name	Description

code name	Description
login[xx]	Frontend or Login node
lanta-c-[xxx]	compute node
lanta-m-[xxx]	memory node
lanta-g-[xxx]	GPU node

For example,