[Beowulf] HPC and Licensed Software

[John Hearns]

Brian,
I managed several cluster which used Star-CCM+ when I was at McLaren F1.
Can you tell us a little about what Pepsico are using CFD for?  It sounds
interesting!

Yes, the normal method is to NAT through the cluster head node.  Some notes
though:

a) the next step is then to have a license 'sensor' - which stops jobs
being launched if there are not enough licenses.
If you dont do that, then jobs will start, and not get enough licenses.
Altair have an example PErl script to do that with PBSPro, thogh these days
you would do it as a 'hook' script written in Python.
There are similar job prolog scripts around for Moab I am sure.

b) A reminder that Star-CCM+ have a cloud licensing scheme also, though I
would imagine you have an on-premise Flexlm license.
You can use an ssh tunnel to access the cloud license server.

c) If you install further clusters, use a unique internal cluster domain
name. You dont have to, but if all your clusters use for examplel
cluster.local or whatever then you can get slightly confused as to which
cluster is checking out the licenses.
(I am speaking from experience here!)

John Hearns











On 14 April 2017 at 20:34, Richter, Brian J {BIS} <
Brian.J.Richter at pepsico.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
>
>
> We just built our first HPC and I have what seems like a rather dumb
> question regarding best practices and compute nodes. Our HPC setup is
> currently small, we have a HeadNode which runs MOAB/Torque and we have 4
> compute nodes connected with IB. The compute nodes are on their own private
> network. My question is, what is the best way to handle software that
> requires licenses to run on the compute nodes? For instance we are trying
> to get STARCCM+ up and running on the cluster, the license server is on our
> general user network, the headnode is also on the user network, but when we
> submit a job to torque for STARCCM it keeps throwing errors that the
> software cannot connect to the license server. Is it best practice to
> create a network path from the compute nodes out to the license server
> through the HeadNode? I feel like I’m missing something really simple here.
>
>
>
> Thanks!
>
>
>
> *Brian J. Richter*
>
> Global R&D Senior Analyst *•* Information Technology
>
> 617 W Main St, Barrington, IL 60010
> Office: 847-304-2356 <(847)%20304-2356> *• *Mobile: 847-305-6306
> <(847)%20305-6306>
>
> Brian.J.Richter at pepsico.com
>
>
>
>
>
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