Features
- Between-host user account mapping
The between-host user account mapping feature enables job submission and execution within a cluster that has different user accounts assigned to different hosts. Using this feature, you can map a local user account to a different user account on a remote host.
- Cross-cluster user account mapping
The cross-cluster user account mapping feature enables cross-cluster job submission and execution for a MultiCluster environment that has different user accounts assigned to different hosts. Using this feature, you can map user accounts in a local cluster to user accounts in one or more remote clusters.
- SSH
Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol that provides confidentiality and integrity of data using a secure channel between two networked devices. You can enable and use SSH to secure communication between hosts and during job submission.
- External authentication
The external authentication feature provides a framework that enables you to integrate LSF with any third-party authentication product—such as Kerberos or DCE Security Services—to authenticate users, hosts, and daemons. This feature provides a secure transfer of data within the authentication data stream between LSF clients and servers. Using external authentication, you can customize LSF to meet the security requirements of your site.
- LSF daemon startup control
The LSF daemon startup control feature allows you to specify a list of user accounts other than root that can start LSF daemons on UNIX hosts. This feature also enables UNIX and Windows users to bypass the additional login required to start res and sbatchd when the EGO Service Controller (EGOSC) is configured to control LSF daemons; bypassing the EGO administrator login enables the use of scripts to automate system startup.
- Pre-execution and post-execution processing
The pre- and post-execution processing feature provides a way to run commands on the execution host prior to and after completion of LSF jobs. Use pre-execution commands to set up an execution host with the required directories, files, software licenses, environment, and user permissions. Use post-execution commands to define post-job processing such as cleaning up job files or transferring job output.
- Preemptive scheduling
The preemptive scheduling feature allows a pending high-priority job to preempt a running job of lower priority. The lower-priority job is suspended and is resumed as soon as possible. Use preemptive scheduling if you have long-running, low-priority jobs causing high-priority jobs to wait an unacceptably long time.
- UNIX/Windows user account mapping
The UNIX/Windows user account mapping feature enables cross-platform job submission and execution in a mixed UNIX/Windows environment. Using this feature, you can map Windows user accounts, which include a domain name, to UNIX user accounts, which do not include a domain name, for user accounts with the same user name on both operating systems.
- External job submission and execution controls
The job submission and execution controls feature enables you to use external, site-specific executables to validate, modify, and reject jobs, transfer data, and modify the job execution environment. By writing external submission (esub) and external execution (eexec) binaries or scripts, you can, for example, prevent the overuse of resources, specify execution hosts, or set required environment variables based on the job submission options.
- Job migration
The job migration feature enables you to move checkpointable and rerunnable jobs from one host to another. Job migration makes use of job checkpoint and restart so that a migrated checkpointable job restarts on the new host from the point at which the job stopped on the original host.
- Job checkpoint and restart
The job checkpoint and restart feature enables you to stop jobs and then restart them from the point at which they stopped, which optimizes resource usage. LSF can periodically capture the state of a running job and the data required to restart it. This feature provides fault tolerance and allows LSF administrators and users to migrate jobs from one host to another to achieve load balancing.
- Resizable Jobs
Enabling resizable jobs allows LSF to run a job with minimum and maximum slots requested and have it dynamically use the number of slots available at any given time.
- External load indices
External load indices report the values of dynamic external resources. A dynamic external resource is a customer-defined resource with a numeric value that changes over time, such as the space available in a directory. Use the external load indices feature to make the values of dynamic external resources available to LSF, or to override the values reported for an LSF built-in load index.
- External host and user groups