Non-Interactive Jobs

Non-Interactive jobs are much more common, however they require what we call a job script. This is just a text file that might look like the following:

#!/bin/tcsh
#PBS -N demojob
#PBS -l nodes=1:vortex:ppn=12
#PBS -l walltime=00:30:00

echo "Hello world!"

We have the same list of arguments in this file that we had in our interactive job, except now we've given it a name using the -N argument.

Example

First login in to Vortex and make sure you are in your home20 directory using the pwd command.

Next, make a folder called demo and navigate into it using the commands:

mkdir demo
cd demo

Once you're in your demo directory, make a new file called job.

touch job

Now, open your new job file in an editor in your terminal by running:

nano job

Within the nano editor, paste the code from above:

!/bin/tcsh
#PBS -N demojob
#PBS -l nodes=1:vortex:ppn=12
#PBS -l walltime=00:30:00

echo "Hello world!"

To exit the nano editor, use the following commands:

ctrl + x

y

enter

Now, type qsub job into your terminal. This will submit the job to the job queue. A string of digits (most likely starting with 9) will printout into your terminal. This is your job ID and means that the job has been successfully submitted!

After a couple seconds, type ls into your terminal. If you only see your job script, wait a few seconds longer and check again until you see two files that look similar to:

The two new files are your job output files. They will have the naming convention [JOBFILENAME].e[JOBID] and [JOBFILENAME].o[JOBID]. The file with a .e contains a printout of any errors that caused your job to fail. In this case, the file should be empty. Check that it is by running more job.e9777417.If nothing prints out, then your job ran successfully!

Next, check the job output file by running more job.o9777417

Ignore the Warning line and the line that starts with 'Thus'. The bottom line should say "Hello World!" thanks to our echo statement in the job script we submitted!