Partial licensing

Not all hosts in the cluster need to be licensed for the same set of LSF products. Partial licensing allows you to run some LSF products on specific hosts in the cluster, instead of licensing all the hosts in the cluster.

For example, only some of your hosts might need the license for Platform Make.

Partial licensing allows you to purchase only as many licenses as you need, rather than licensing the entire cluster for products that are only needed by a few hosts. You can save money by distributing your licenses efficiently.

Compatibility

Many LSF products do not support partial licensing, only full licensing. Those products must be enabled for the entire cluster, or not at all.

Partial licensing is supported for:

  • Platform Make

  • Platform Session Scheduler

Configure partial licensing

When you configure partial licensing and define the licenses for each host, you also define the order in which your licenses are given out to hosts.

  1. If the product keyword (LSF_Make or LSF_Session_Scheduler) is in the PRODUCTS line in LSF_CONFDIR/lsf.cluster.cluster_name, remove it.

    This disables full licensing. Partial licensing will not take effect if full licensing is configured.

  2. To enable partial licenses, edit the Host section of LSF_CONFDIR/lsf.cluster.cluster_name and add the product keyword in the RESOURCES column for specific hosts.
    • Platform Make

      • Add LSF_Make in the RESOURCES column.

      • If you configure partial licensing for LSF_Make, the same host will automatically be configured to use an LSF_Base license also.

    • Platform Session Scheduler

      • Add LSF_Session_Scheduler in the RESOURCES column.

      • If you configure partial licensing for LSF_Session_Scheduler, the same host will automatically be configured to use LSF_Base and LSF_Manager licenses also.

    When the LSF cluster starts, the master LIM reads the lsf.cluster.cluster_name file and determines the LSF products that each host is licensed to use.

    For a permanent license, the license manager retrieves the appropriate licenses for the cluster, and distributes the licenses to the hosts in the order they are listed in lsf.cluster.cluster_name.

Display licensed products

Use the lshosts -l command to view what products are licensed for any host in the cluster.

In this example, hostA is licensed for LSF_Base and LSF_Manager, which means the host can run Platform LSF only.

lshosts -l hostA 
HOST_NAME:  hostA
type    model  cpuf  ncpus ndisks maxmem maxswp maxtmp rexpri server nprocs ncores nthreads
LINUX86 PC6000 116.1 2     1      2016M  1983M  72917M 0      Yes    1      1      2
 
RESOURCES: Not defined
RUN_WINDOWS:  (always open)
 
Licenses enabled: (LSF_Base LSF_Manager)
 
 
LOAD_THRESHOLDS:
 r15s r1m r15m ut pg io ls it tmp swp mem tmp2 nio console
 -    3.5 -    -  -  -  -  -  -   -   -   -    -   0.0