# Interactive and batch jobs

Users typically interact with research environments by running either interactive or batch (also known as non-interactive) jobs.

• An interactive job is one that the user directly controls, either via a graphical interface or by typing at the command-prompt.
• A batch job is run by writing a list of instructions that are passed to compute nodes to run at some point in the future.

Both methods of running jobs can be equally as efficient, particularly on a personal, ephemeral research environment. Both classes of job can be of any type - for example, it’s possible to run interactive parallel jobs and batch multi-threaded jobs across your research environment. The choice of which class of job-type you want to use will depend on the application you’re running, and which method is more convenient for you to use.