Submitting Jobs in Batch Mode

The simplest way to submit a Sun MPI job to the LSF Batch system is in batch mode. For example, the following command submits hpc-job to the queue named hpc in batch mode and requests that the job be distributed across four processors.

hpc-demo% bsub -q hpc -n 4 hpc-job

Batch-mode is enabled by default, but can be disabled by the system administrator via the INTERACTIVE parameter.

You can check to see if a queue is able to handle batch-mode jobs by running bqueues -l queue_name. Then look in the SCHEDULING POLICIES: section of the bqueues output for the following entries.

• ONLY_INTERACTIVE - This entry means that batch mode is disabled; interactive and interactive batch modes are enabled.

• NO_INTERACTIVE - This entry means batch mode is enabled; interactive and interactive batch modes are disabled.

• No reference to INTERACTIVE - If there is no entry containing the term XXX_INTERACTIVE, all modes are enabled; this is the default condition.

The example queue shown in Figure 2-1; has a SCHEDULING POLICIES:setting of NO_INTERACTIVE, which allows batch-mode jobs, but not interactive batch.

As soon as hpc-job is submitted in batch mode, LSF Batch detaches it from the terminal session that submitted it.

If you request more processors than are available, you must use process wrapping to allow multiple processes to be mapped to each processor. Otherwise, LSF Batch will wait indefinitely for the number of resources to become available and the job will never launched. Process wrapping is discussed in "Specify the Number of Processes".