Minnesota Supercomputing Institute

Common PBS commands

MSI uses a PBS scheduler. It's easy to find a lot of information online about how to use PBS, but here are some commonly used functions.

qsub mypbsscript.pbs  # submit a PBS script to schedule a job
qsub -t 1-22 arrayscript.sh # submit an array job 
qstat                 # check on job status
showstart <jobid>     # check when your scheduled job is due to begin (note this is always 
                      #   an overestimate, as it depends on walltimes for all running 
                      #   and queued jobs

Example

First, submitting a job is easiest with a PBS batch script. The following script, called kinship.pbs, runs a program called vcf2kinship to create a kinship matrix on MCTFR genotypes. It requests a single node and 12 processors on that node. It requests 25 GB of memory.

#!/bin/bash -l                                                                                                                                                              
#PBS -l walltime=10:00:00,nodes=1:ppn=12,mem=25gb                                                                                                                           
/home/vrie0006/hyoung/software/rvtests/executable/vcf2kinship --inVcf /home/vrie0006/hyoung/genotypes.vcf.gz \
      --bn \
      --thread 10 \
      --out /home/vrie0006/hyoung/kinship

That script can then be submitted for scheduling to the mesabi short queue on msi (MSI list of queues) as follows:

qsub -t short kinship.sh

You can then check the status of this job by running various commands.

To see when your job might start running use showstart <jobid> like this:

[ln0006:hyoung] showstart 4560951
job 4560951 requires 10 procs for 10:00:00

Estimated Rsv based start in                 2:10:44 on Wed Nov 29 23:58:00
Estimated Rsv based completion in           12:10:44 on Thu Nov 30 09:58:00

Best Partition: mesabipar

To check status use qstat:

[ln0006:hyoung] qstat
Job ID                    Name             User            Time Use S Queue
------------------------- ---------------- --------------- -------- - -----
4560955.mesabim3.msi.umn.edu kinship.sh       vrie0006        01:02:54 R small