Submitting Interactive Batch Jobs

The interactive batch mode makes full use of the LSF Batch system's job scheduling policies and host selection facilities, but keeps the job attached to the terminal session that submitted it. This mode is well suited to Sun MPI jobs and other resource-intensive applications.

The following example submits hpc-job to the queue named hpc in interactive batch mode. As before, this example is based on the assumption that hpc is configured to support parallel jobs.

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

The -I option specifies interactive batch mode.

The queue must not have interactive mode disabled. To check this, run

hpc-demo% bqueues -l hpc 

and check the SCHEDULING POLICIES: section of the resulting output. If it contains either

SCHEDULING POLICIES:  ONLY_INTERACTIVE

or

SCHEDULING POLICIES:

(that is, no entry), interactive batch mode is enabled.

When the queue accepts the job, it returns a job ID. You can use the job ID later as an argument to various commands that enquire about job status or that control certain aspects of job state. For example, you can suspend a job or remove it from a queue with the bstop jobid and bkill jobid commands. These commands are described in Chapter 7 of the LSF Batch User's Guide.