David,

Can you shed more lights on the mechanism of LSF License Scheduler within the 
most permissive territory?
It is the closest solution to the ideal as far as I know.

In a nutshell, FlexLM is not open-sourced and nobody knows the internals except 
the legal owner. And the only “interface” for end-user is “lmstat”.


Fred

From: David Bigagli [mailto:da...@schedmd.com]
Sent: 星期三, 七月 03, 2013 3:34
To: slurm-dev
Subject: [slurm-dev] Re: slurm integration with FlexLM license manager

That's exactly right: "since its customers, the Independent Software Vendors 
(ISVs), would actually sell fewer software licenses under this model". The 
Flexlm customers are the ISVs and not the ISVs' customers, Flexlm = Flexible 
License Manager for the ISVs, for their applications and not for the users of 
those applications.

/David

On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 6:06 PM, Gary Brown 
<gbr...@adaptivecomputing.com<mailto:gbr...@adaptivecomputing.com>> wrote:
Three years ago I tried to work with Flexera Software (FlexLM) to resolve race 
conditions that arose between a scheduler and FlexLM because the FlexLM license 
manager was also serving licenses to external users; i.e., the scheduler was 
not the only one trying to obtain licenses.
I proposed a "reservation/commit" model similar to that used by the credit card 
industry to handle charges where a retail establishment will obtain an 
"authorization" for a specific amount, which the credit card system "reserves" 
against a customer's credit limit, and then when the retail establishment 
"settles" the charge, the reserved amount is actually added to the customer's 
credit card balance and the "authorization" deleted.  This would properly 
handle the situation where a scheduler "reserves" licenses through FlexLM and 
the a running job actually "checks out" the reserved licenses.
Despite the company and product names, Flexera was completely inflexible and 
would not do anything in this direction since its customers, the Independent 
Software Vendors (ISVs), would actually sell fewer software licenses under this 
model, which is what users actually want, and Flexera's customers would take a 
very dim view of Flexera if it implemented this model.  No logic (cloud model 
also needs this), cajoling, or begging would get Flexera to budge.
I do not know if Flexera has done anything to resolve the issue of race 
conditions between when a scheduler tries to schedule licenses and when a job 
actually checks the licenses out during which interval an external user checks 
out licenses unbeknownst to the scheduler, but I suspect they have done nothing.
If anyone hears of anything different, I, for one, would be happy to know.

Gary D. Brown
On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 8:38 AM, David Bigagli 
<da...@schedmd.com<mailto:da...@schedmd.com>> wrote:
Indeed currently there is no integration between Flexlm and SLURM, but some 
ideas are being passed around what to do about it. I am one of the original 
designers and developers of Platform License Scheduler.
The item 1) you mentioned is certainly the first step but consider even that 
may not be easy, just imagine an electronic design application that is running 
in the cluster and jobs checking in and out hundreds of features per second. It 
is important to choose which features has to be managed by the scheduler and it 
has to be 'well behaved' one, meaning the behavior of the application from 
license perspective has to be well know. One of the difficulties is to 
understand how the application uses the licenses as you observed in item 2).
The only way to get license information out of Flexlm is indeed lmstat, which 
could be quite slow if the license servers and handling many applications there 
is no other supported interface, a possible alternative could be parsing the 
lmgrd log file.


/David

On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 2:57 PM, Hongjia Cao 
<hj...@nudt.edu.cn<mailto:hj...@nudt.edu.cn>> wrote:

I don't think there is integration with FlexLM in SLURM. There is a
simple license management in SLURM by counting the licenses used.

I am also considering the interaction between SLURM and FlexLM, but I
have no good result yet. The difficulty is that FlexLM has no open API
(except for a command line tool lmutil). And the function provided by
FlexLM is not enough for SLURM to totally controlling the licenses. For
now, I think the following issues should be addressed:

1. Keep the license count in SLURM consistent with FlexLM. There may be
applications run out of SLURM which may check out licenses. And  a job
may request wrong number of licenses (intentionally or unintentionally).

2. Force a job to release the licenses on job termination, even if there
are job processes not killed. With LS-DYNA I have run into the case that
after the application completes, the licenses will not be released until
a long time period (even with out job processes left). LS-DYNA is not
using FlexLM for license control and I am not sure whether this could
happen for FlexLM managed applications.

To handle various applications and the licenses managers, a license
plug-in should be introduced. But the interface of the plug-in is not
clear yet.

I'd like to know if anyone has experiences with SLURM integration with
FlexLM or other license managers. Any requirements or considerations
would also be welcomed.


在 2013-07-01一的 17:17 -0700,Eva Hocks写道:
>
>
> The documentation announced the integration since 2.4. I am running
> slurm 2.4.3.
>
> Could anyone please point me to where I can find how to onfigure the
> FlexLM license manager integration with slurm?
>
>
> Thanks
> Eva

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