Interactive usage

A great use of Qibocal is to run routines interactively, processing the results of the routines in an interpreter or a notebook, or launching further ones only after receiving results in the same environment.

An example of this workflow is shown in the README.

How to run it on a queue

While Qibocal itself does not require any special handling for interactive usage, it is common enough to place shared resource behind a queue infrastructure.

In these cases, you may experience some additional complications, since Qibocal has to run on a machine with the capability of connecting to the control electronics.

To cater for this use case, the only additional requirement is to run your notebook (or intepreter) on the machine with instrument access, and possibly establish a suitable port forward for its interface just through ssh itself.

../_images/ssh-remote-port.png

Since it is potentially complex to identify which remote address and port to forward, the following script should help automating the process.

#!/bin/bash

read -rd '' getport <<EOF
import socket

s=socket.socket()
s.bind(("", 0))
print(s.getsockname()[1])
s.close()
EOF

IP=$(hostname -I | cut -d ' ' -f 1)
PORT=$(python -c "$getport")

echo "Forward your local port with:"
echo "  ssh <login-node> -L 9180:$IP:$PORT"

echo
echo "Connect to:"
echo "  https://localhost:9180"

jupyter lab --ip "$IP" --port "$PORT"
# you can also test this with:
# python -m http.server -b "$IP" "$PORT"

Once the required server is dispatched as queue job with the script, the instructions to connect will appear in the output (usually redirected by the queue system on a file).