LSF Version 7.3 - Administering Platform LSF

Network Floating Licenses
262 Administering Platform LSF
Configuring counted host-locked licenses
You configure counted host-locked licenses by having LSF determine the number
of licenses currently available. Use either of the following to count the host-locked
licenses:
◆ External LIM (ELIM)
◆ A check_licenses shell script
Using an External
LIM (ELIM)
To use an external LIM (ELIM) to get the number of licenses currently available,
configure an external load index
licenses giving the number of free licenses on
each host. To restrict the application to run only on hosts with available licenses,
specify
licenses>=1 in the resource requirements for the application.
See External Load Indices on page 260 for instructions on writing and using an
ELIM and configuring resource requirements for an application.
See the Platform LSF Configuration Reference for information about the
lsf.task
file.
Using a
check_license
script
There are two ways to use a check_license shell script to check license availability
and acquire a license if one is available:
◆ Configure the check_license script as a job-level pre-execution command
when submitting the licensed job:
bsub -m licensed_hosts -E check_license licensed_job
◆ Configure the check_license script as a queue-level pre-execution command.
See Configuring Pre- and Post-Execution Commands on page 562 for
information about configuring queue-level pre-execution commands.
It is possible that the license becomes unavailable between the time the
check_license script is run, and when the job is actually run. To handle this case,
configure a queue so that jobs in this queue will be requeued if they exit with values
indicating that the license was not successfully obtained.
See Automatic Job Requeue on page 469 for more information.
Network Floating Licenses
A network floating license allows a fixed number of machines or users to run the
product at the same time, without restricting which host the software can run on.
Floating licenses are cluster-wide resources; rather than belonging to a specific host,
they belong to all hosts in the cluster.
LSF can be used to manage floating licenses using the following LSF features:
◆ Shared resources
◆ Resource reservation
◆ Job requeuing
Using LSF to run licensed software can improve the utilization of the licenses. The
licenses can be kept in use 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. For expensive licenses, this
increases their value to the users. Floating licenses also increase productivity,
because users do not have to wait for a license to become available.
LSF jobs can make use of floating licenses when: