Within an organization, sites may have separate, independently managed LSF clusters. Having multiple LSF clusters could solve problems related to:
When you have more than one cluster, it is desirable to allow the clusters to cooperate to reap the following benefits of global load sharing:
Access to a diverse collection of computing resources
Enterprise grid computing becomes a reality
Get better performance and computing capabilities
Use idle machines to process jobs
Use multiple machines to process a single parallel job
Increase user productivity
Add resources anywhere and make them available to the entire organization
Plan computing resources globally based on total computing demand
Increase computing power in an economical way
MultiCluster enables a large organization to form multiple cooperating clusters of computers so that load sharing happens not only within clusters, but also among them. MultiCluster enables:
Load sharing across a large numbers of hosts
Co-scheduling among clusters: Job forwarding scheduler considers remote cluster and queue availability and load before forwarding jobs.
Resource ownership and autonomy to be enforced
Non-shared user accounts and file systems to be supported
Communication limitations among the clusters to be taken into consideration in job scheduling