Licence Management related Extension of Job Description and Submission

: LM-Cap #1: Licence Management related Extension of Job Description and Submission (Click to enlarge)

This Common Capability covers the extension of the job description and its submission with respect to licence management.

In a first step the job description simply would be complemented by the ip address(es) of the licence servers the user intends to access in corresponding sequence. In order to support future Licence Management extensions like brokering and scheduling of licences, care should be taken to also allow refined requests with respect to e.g number of licences and specific licence features in the modified job description. In passing we note that the validity of these latter more detailed requests cannot be checked within the scope of a FlexLM driven Licence Management.

The above Common Capability (CC) allows a user to:

Request licence resources in a similar manner as currently implemented in grid middlewares for any other resource (cpu, memory, etc)
By passing a list of licence servers, the application is able to access them in the intended sequence until all required licences are obtained. For example a licence owned by the home organization of the user might be in use at job start. The application would then obtain the requested licence at a LSP licence server on a pay-per use basis. If on the other hand the owned licence is available at job start, the application would obtain it, allowing for a very cost-efficient licence model. Remarkably such a feature is already supported by the Flex-LM licence management.