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.
LSF can be used to manage floating licenses using the following LSF features:
Using LSF to run licensed software 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 and increases productivity because users do not have to wait for a license to become available.
If all jobs requiring licenses are submitted through LSF, then LSF could regulate the allocation of licenses to jobs and ensure that a job is not started if the required license is not available. A static resource is used to hold the total number of licenses that are available. The static resource is used by LSF as a counter which is decremented by the resource reservation mechanism each time a job requiring that resource is started.