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Octave

GNU Octave is a high-level, interpreted, programming language for numerical computations. Octave is a structured language (similar to C) and mostly compatible with MATLAB. You may use Octave to avoid the need for a MATLAB license, both during development and as a deployed application. By doing so, you may be able to run your application on more systems or more easily distribute it to others.

This section illustrates how to submit a small Octave job to a PBS queue. This Octave example computes the inverse of a matrix.

Prepare an Octave script file with an appropriate filename, here named myjob.m:

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% FILENAME:  myjob.m

% Invert matrix A.
A = [1 2 3; 4 5 6; 7 8 0]
inv(A)

quit

Prepare a job submission file with an appropriate filename, here named myjob.sub:

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#!/bin/sh -l
# FILENAME:  myjob.sub

module load octave
cd $PBS_O_WORKDIR

unset DISPLAY

# Use the -q option to suppress startup messages.
# octave -q < myjob.m
octave < myjob.m

The command octave myjob.m (without the redirection) also works in the preceding script.

Submit the job:

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$ qsub -l nodes=1:ppn=128 myjob.sub

View job status:

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$ qstat -u myusername

View results in the file for all standard output, myjob.sub.omyjobid:

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A =

   1   2   3
   4   5   6
   7   8   0

ans =

  -1.77778   0.88889  -0.11111
   1.55556  -0.77778   0.22222
  -0.11111   0.22222  -0.11111

Any output written to standard error will appear in myjob.sub.emyjobid.

For more information about Octave:

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