# Local Jobs

A job can be loosely defined as an automated research task, for example, a bash script that runs various stages in an OpenFoam simulation on a model.

Jobs vary in size, resource usage and run time. A job could utilise multiple cores through parallel libraries or simply run on a single core.

When using a personal research environment there isn’t a need to monitor resource usage as closely as multi-user systems where miscommunication and overloaded resources can negatively impact research progress. With all the resources available to one user it is quicker and easier to run jobs simply through a terminal than using a queue system.

Local jobs also have the benefit over schedulers by launching immediately and providing all output through a single terminal.

Local job scripts can be written in any language supported within the research environment. In most cases this is likely to be bash as it’s a flexible and functional shell scripting language which enables users to intuitely navigate the filesystem, launch applications and manage data output.

In the event that a job script is executable, contains a shebang(#!) specifying the launch language, and is in the current directory, it’s as simple to run as:

[flight@chead1 ~]$ ./myjob.sh