A logical counterpart to sbatch to help users submit interactive jobs.
In Slurm pre-20.11, the recommended way of submitting an interactive job was to type a mouthfull of
salloc [allocation options] [--x11] srun --pty --cpu-bind=none $SHELL -l
It had some issues with GPUs (and GRES in general), but generally worked... but it was a mouthful, and this was the raison-d'etre of this tool.
Slurm 20.11 has introduced a default behavior change with which the above
command no longer became a recommended way to start interactive jobs (due
to it breaking any subsequent srun and mpirun calls). The new
preferred way is to set LaunchParameters=use_interactive_step in your
site's slurm.conf, and then simply call
salloc [allocation options] [--x11]
See https://slurm.schedmd.com/faq.html#prompt for more details on this.
sinteractive does its best to abstract the underlying complexity from the
user. It is smart to detect current Slurm version and presence/absence of
the use_interactive_step parameter, and invokes the appropriate
underlying command.
Lev Gorenstein, Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, Purdue University, 2020-2023. Please note that as of September 2023 I am no longer affiliated with Purdue University.
Contribute: https://github.com/lgorenstein/sinteractive