ARCHIVED: In Unix, how should I submit CPU-intensive jobs?
Several mechanisms are available for handling large jobs in Unix, including reducing the priority of a process, running a process in the background, and, on some systems, submitting batch jobs.
On this page:
Batch jobs
For information about the at
and batch
commands, see ARCHIVED: In Unix, what are the at and batch commands, and how do I use them to submit non-interactive job requests?
For information about using TORQUE (based on OpenPBS) on Karst, or Mason at IU, see ARCHIVED: Use TORQUE to submit and manage jobs on high performance computing systems
Although Big Red II uses TORQUE for resource management, Big Red II job scripts must contain commands and directives specific to Big Red II's programming environment and system architecture; see ARCHIVED: Run batch jobs on Big Red II
Changing a job's priority and running a job in the background
To immediately execute a process at a lower priority, use the nice
command. For example, to run a program called a.out
at lower priority, at the Unix shell prompt, enter:
nice a.out
To let the job run in the background (so you can keep working interactively), add an ampersand (&
) to the end of the command line:
nice a.out &
When the job is complete, you will see something similar to this:
[1] Done ls (csh/tcsh)
For more on the nice
command, see the manual (man) page, which you can access by entering:
man nice
For more information on how to work with background processes, see the man page for your shell (e.g., csh
, tcsh
, ksh
, bash
).
At Indiana University, for personal or departmental Linux or Unix systems support, see Get help for Linux or Unix at IU.
This is document abcz in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2018-01-18 09:05:04.