Home | About

Grid Licence Models

The FlexNet scheme (floating licences from a single – possibly redundant -- server) or other Client-Server schemes are limited in their scope and scalability.  An extension of such a scheme to a scenario where licences are offered as standard resources in the grid therefore seems to be a logical step.

This scenario readily implies that licences have to be scheduled like other resources e.g. networks or CPUs. Licenses are typically an even more precious and expensive resource than compute-power.  It therefore is highly important that licenses are not unnecessarily blocked by queued jobs or that jobs, which already have allocated their computing-resources do not get blocked by missing license-keys. Interfaces to e.g. grid schedulers therefore are needed.

An extension of that scenario, where licence owners are allowed to re-sell their licences on a LSP basis should be feasible with respect to technology. This scenario extension would, however, certainly require the cooperation of ISVs.