TACC also offers their idev command (for interactive development) as a convenient way to initiate interactive work on their compute nodes, via Slurm. It works very much like srun and even takes many of the same options. But by making a few assumptions, idev shortens the path for you to start an interactive session:

idev -n 1 -N 1 -p development -t 00:05:00

The equivalent command with srun would be:

srun -n 1 -N 1 -p development -t 00:05:00 --pty /bin/bash -l

Evidently, with idev, a couple of things become implicit: the option for pseudo-terminal mode, --pty, and the command to start a default login shell, /bin/bash -l.

Another benefit of idev is that it remembers your preferences for certain command-line options, such as -A and --tasks-per-node=<t>, so they don't need to be re-entered each time. These preferences are stored in $HOME/.idevrc.

Finally, idev supports X11 forwarding by default. This capability allows you to run an X11 application directly on a compute node, while you interact with it in a normal way through its graphical user interface.