LSF Version 7.3 - Administering Platform LSF

Administering Platform LSF 607
Running Interactive and Remote Tasks
Interactive processing and scheduling policies
LSF lets you run interactive tasks on any computer on the network, using your own
terminal or workstation. Interactive tasks run immediately and normally require
some input through a text-based or graphical user interface. All the input and
output is transparently sent between the local host and the job execution host.
Shared files and user IDs
When LSF runs a task on a remote host, the task uses standard UNIX system calls
to access files and devices. The user must have an account on the remote host. All
operations on the remote host are done with the user’s access permissions.
Tasks that read and write files access the files on the remote host. For load sharing
to be transparent, your files should be available on all hosts in the cluster using a file
sharing mechanism such as NFS or AFS. When your files are available on all hosts
in the cluster, you can run your tasks on any host without worrying about how your
task will access files.
LSF can operate correctly in cases where these conditions are not met, but the
results may not be what you expect. For example, the
/tmp directory is usually
private on each host. If you copy a file into
/tmp on a remote host, you can only read
that file on the same remote host.
LSF can also be used when files are not available on all hosts. LSF provides the
lsrcp command to copy files across LSF hosts. You can use pipes to redirect the
standard input and output of remote commands, or write scripts to copy the data
files to the execution host.
Shell mode for remote execution
On UNIX, shell mode support is provided for running interactive applications
through RES.
Not supported for Windows.
Shell mode support is required for running interactive shells or applications that
redefine the
CTRL-C and CTRL-Z keys (for example, jove).
The
-S option of lsrun, ch or lsgrun creates the remote task with shell mode
support. The default is not to enable shell mode support.
Run windows
Some run windows are only applicable to batch jobs. Interactive jobs scheduled by
LIM are controlled by another set of run windows.
Redirect streams to files
By default, both standard error messages and standard output messages of
interactive tasks are written to
stdout on the submission host.
To separate
stdout and stderr and redirect to separate files, set
LSF_INTERACTIVE_STDERR=y in
lsf.conf or as an environment variable.
1 To redirect both stdout and stderr to different files with the parameter set:
lsrun mytask 2>mystderr 1>mystdout