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Licenses♯

Open-Source Software♯

A great deal of the software used in research computing is licensed through one of the many open-source licenses

Commercially available software typically includes a finite number of simultaneous users or seats available for use, and are typically restricted to the groups, departments, or colleges that own the license.

Since HPC clusters have considerably more processor cores than a standard workstation or desktop, it is very easy for jobs to consume all available licenses and prevent anyone else on campus from running the software.

Managing licenses in Slurm jobs♯

In order to ensure both that our users do not exhaust licenses, and that jobs do not fail without warning due to lack of licenses, Slurm local licenses have been defined to restrict the number of simultaneous running instances of certain software.

Generally, use the -L/--licenses option to sbatch, e.g.

#SBATCH --licenses=fluent:1

Software license details♯

Please see the individual page for the software you would like to use for details on licenses.

Viewing Available Licenses♯

Slurm can show license status with the scontrol command:

[juser@picotte001 ~]$ scontrol show lic
LicenseName=fluent
    Total=25 Used=0 Free=25 Reserved=0 Remote=no
LicenseName=stata48
    Total=10 Used=0 Free=10 Reserved=0 Remote=no