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ISV Licenses

Guide to Managing Independent Software Vendor Licenses

On IT4I clusters, there are also installed commercial software applications, also known as ISV (Independent Software Vendor), which are subjects to licensing. Licenses are limited and their usage may be restricted only to some users or user groups, or based on other conditions.

Currently, Flex License Manager based licensing is supported on the cluster for products ANSYS, Comsol, and MATLAB. More information about the applications can be found in the general software section.

If an ISV application was purchased for educational (research) purposes and also for commercial purposes, then there are always two separate versions maintained and suffix "edu" is used in the name of the non-commercial version.

Overview of the Licenses Usage

Note

The overview is generated every minute and is accessible from the web or command line interface.

Web Interface

For each license, there is a table providing the information about the name, number of available (purchased/licensed), number of used and number of free license features.

Command Line

To check license usage via command line, use the LicenseChecker module with the lmstat utility:

ml LicenseChecker/1.0

For example, to check usage of Ansys licenses, use:

lmstat -a -c 1055@license.it4i.cz

or for a specific module (e.g. HPC):

lmstat -f aa_r_hpc -c 1055@license.it4i.cz

To list all Ansys modules, use:

lmstat -i -c 1055@license.it4i.cz

For other applications' licenses, change the port number in the command according to the Port column on the licelin website (requires IT4I VPN).

License Aware Job Scheduling

Barbora provides license aware job scheduling.

Selected licenses are accounted and checked by the scheduler of PBS Pro. If you ask for certain licenses, the scheduler won't start the job until the asked licenses are free (available). This prevents batch jobs crashes due to unavailability of the needed licenses.

The general format of the name is license__APP__FEATURE.

Supported application license features:

Application Feature PBS Pro resource name
ansys aa_r_hpc license__ansys__aa_r_hpc
matlab-edu MATLAB license__matlab-edu__MATLAB
matlab-com MATLAB license__matlab-com__MATLAB

Do not hesitate to ask IT4I support for support of additional license features you want to use in your jobs.

Warning

Resource names in PBS Pro are case sensitive.

Example of qsub Statement

Run an interactive PBS job with 1 Matlab EDU license:

qsub -I -q qprod -A PROJECT_ID -l select=2 -l license__matlab-edu__MATLAB=1

The license is used and accounted only with the real usage of the product. So in this example, the general MATLAB is used after MATLAB is run by the user and not at the time, when the shell of the interactive job is started. In addition, the Distributed Computing licenses are used at the time, when the user uses the distributed parallel computation in MATLAB (e.g. issues pmode start, matlabpool, etc.).