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sinteractive

Persistent interactive sessions on Slurm compute nodes, built on tmux.

sinteractive submits a batch job that starts a detached tmux session on the allocated node, then connects you to it. Because the shell lives in tmux, the session survives SSH drops and can be reattached later. It is a clean-room reimplementation inspired by the original sinteractive by Pär Andersson (NSC, Sweden) and the CU Boulder adaptation by Jonathon Anderson, and is developed for the Bodhi cluster at the RNA Bioscience Initiative — but it is cluster-agnostic: scheduler details are driven by SINTERACTIVE_* environment variables.

Why use sinteractive instead of srun --pty bash?

srun --pty bash sinteractive
Survives SSH disconnects No — session is lost Yes — tmux keeps it alive
Multiple terminal panes No Yes — tmux split/window support
X11 forwarding Manual setup Automatic on connect (ssh -X)
Reconnect to session Not possible sinteractive --attach JOBID

When to use which

Use srun --pty bash for quick, throwaway interactive work. Use sinteractive when you need a session that persists through network interruptions or when you want tmux features like split panes.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/rnabioco/sinteractive
cd sinteractive
make install

As a regular user this copies the script, man page, and bash completion to ~/.local/bin, ~/.local/share/man, and ~/.local/share/bash-completion (make sure ~/.local/bin is on your $PATH); as root it installs to /usr/local instead. To install to a different location:

make install PREFIX=~/bin

Requirements: a Slurm cluster, tmux ≥ 3.7 available on the compute nodes (path configurable via SINTERACTIVE_TMUX), and SSH access to the nodes for the initial attach. Admin targets for building tmux and fanning binaries out to nodes are described in Deploying on a Cluster.

How it works

  1. Submits a batch job — sbatch launches the script itself on a compute node, where it starts a tmux session.
  2. Waits for the job to start — polls squeue every 5 seconds until the job is running, showing why it is pending and Slurm's estimated start time. Ctrl-C here cancels the pending job.
  3. Connects via SSH — once running, it SSHs into the compute node with X11 forwarding (-X) and attaches to the tmux session.
  4. Stays alive until you exit — the SLURM job remains running as long as the tmux session exists. Detaching (Ctrl-b d) or losing your SSH connection leaves the job running so you can reconnect. Exiting tmux (exit) ends the job.
sequenceDiagram
    participant L as Login Node
    participant S as SLURM
    participant C as Compute Node

    L->>S: sbatch (submit job)
    S->>C: start tmux session
    L-->>L: poll squeue until RUNNING
    L->>C: ssh -X (attach to tmux)
    Note over C: you work here

Next: Usage covers options, environment variables, and reconnecting; Scripting & Agents covers headless/JSON mode.