As of January 6, 2025, the LAS Pronto cluster was merged into the campus-wide Nova cluster. Information here may or may not work on Nova. Please contact Research IT if you have questions.

Frequently Asked Questions¶

Interactive session example¶

To get an interactive session for an hour on one node with 8 cpus. Any of the arguments you've seen for sbatch can be provided here too

srun --time=01:00:00 --nodes=1 --cpus-per-task=8 --partition=interactive --pty /usr/bin/bash

I want a GPU¶

Add the following line to your existing sbatch script

#SBATCH --gres=gpu:1 #If you just need one gpu, you're done, if you need more you can change the number
#SBATCH --partition=gpu #specify the gpu partition

If you want a specific type of GPU, see our article about GPU types.

I want to run on a specific machine¶

This is done by selecting a specific partition if you're looking to for example use the 'biocrunch' machines.

#SBATCH --partition=biocrunch # specify which partition your job should be submitted to

if you want to get even more advanced, and for some reason you need a specific node

#SBATCH --partition=gpu # ask for the gpu machine partition
#SBATCH --nodelist=crysis # specifically say that you need to run on this list of nodes, in this case the single node crysis

I want to use X Forwarding to run a GUI program¶

Follow the directions in X Forwarding for Mac and Windows. Be sure to add the -X flag to your ssh command when connecting to pronto.

Then request an interactive session as described above, but add the --x11 flag to the srun command. Example:

srun --x11 --time=01:00:00 --nodes=1 --cpus-per-task=8 --pty /usr/bin/bash

I want to know more¶

Please see the sbatch documentation for more information.

You can also find this documentation on the cluster by using the man command.

man sbatch