Translations:Running jobs/3/en

What's a job?

On computers we are most often familiar with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). There are windows, menus, buttons; we click here and there and the system responds. On Compute Canada servers the environment is different. To begin with, you control it by typing, not clicking. This is called a command line interface. Furthermore, a program you would like to run may not begin immediately, but may instead be put in a waiting list. When the necessary CPU cores are available it will begin, otherwise jobs would interfere with each other leading to performance loss.