Launching interactive apps

The ‘Interactive Apps’ menu shows a range of different apps that provide a GUI. When you launch an interactive app, Open OnDemand first submits an interactive job to the cluster in your account. Once the interactive job starts, the app is automatically launched inside the interactive session.

To launch an interactive app, you need to fill out the resources form. Most of the options in the resources form are shared across all apps and are explained below. The app-specific options will be detailed in their respective sections. See also the section on choosing your resources for resources recommendations. Beware that launching an app will cause your interactive job to end up in a regular queue, so requesting a large amount of resources might result in a long queue time.

Once you’ve specified all your resources, press the Launch button and your job will be queued.

Shared resources

Resource	Description
Cluster	Select one of the supported clusters.
Partition	Select a supported partition in the selected cluster.
Number of hours	Select the time limit (in hours) for your interactive app session.
Number of nodes	Select the number of nodes. Only 1 node should be used in most cases, unless you are sure the app can and will use more than 1 node effectively.
Number of cores	Select the number of cores per node.
Number of GPUs	Select the number of GPUs per node. Check the VSCdochardware section for the device type that corresponds to the selected cluster/partition. Only request a GPU if you are sure the app can and will use the GPU effectively.
Pre-run scriptlet	Add optional shell commands to your job before launching the app. For example, loading extra modules that you need within the app, sourcing a specific script, or defining specific environment variables.
Working Directory	Specify the working directory for your app, or use the handy Select Path button below the text field to select it from a file browser.

Warning

Be careful when using the Pre-run scriptlet, because you will be modifying the behavior of your session.

Choosing your resources

Choosing the correct resources for your interactive session is mostly the same as selecting them when launching regular batch jobs. For this reason, we strongly recommend consulting the documentation on how to effectively choose your job resources:

Documentation on resources is available in the section on job submission.

For light-weight (testing) work, we recommend using the Anansi cluster, which also contains 4 shared GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPUs for improved rendering performance.

Once you have passed the testing phase and are ready to start conducting experiments, we recommend switching to batch jobs, as they will not require your presence to start your code.