Oh no, will I have to learn something new?

I've just received a polite email from the manager of the computer cluster I'm using, asking that I learn to run my jobs properly (by submitting them to the queue) rather than just running them from the terminal. The only reason I haven't been doing the right thing is that I don't know how.

So he pointed me to a web page with instructions, which were rather opaque to me because I don't really speak Unix. So then I asked the post-doc who's been doing this with her Perl program, and she pointed me to a set of instructions I'd scribbled down about 18 months ago, when I first learned about this computer cluster from a whiz-bang grad student in another lab.

So I've more-or-less blindly followed these instructions, and submitted my first job to the queue. I know I did that part correctly because I can ask the terminal to show me the queue and my job is indeed in it, along with about a zillion other jobs. Mine is 53rd, so there are a zillion-53 jobs after mine. There are also about half a zillion jobs already running, so maybe being 53rd is pretty good. Some of the jobs that are running aren't predicted to finish for more than a week.... (You can probably tell that I'm out of my depth here.)

The really annoying thing is that I don't get any feedback until my job is done, when I'll get an email. Guess I'd better learn how to work this system.