Background

A batch queueing system allows coarse grained parallelism while maintaining interactive performance by providing a policy-based workload management and dynamic provisioning of application workloads.

That was quite a mouthful. Here are some examples of what a batch system does:

• It lets you submit multiple jobs at once. Suppose you want to create tissue classifications for each of your many subjects. Instead of running the required image processing steps one at a time, you can submit them all to batch, have a coffee, and come back a few minutes later.
• It schedules jobs so that all users using the batch system get approximately equal processing time. If everybody ran all their jobs at once interactively the computers would quickly become unresponsive.
• It can send you an email when a job finishes or fails.

If you want to use the SGE (Sun Grid Engine - http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/documentation.html) batch system, see How To Use Sge Batch.