We have licensed applications such as ansys, abaqus, and Schrodinger. These applications have a license server with a limited number of licenses, and you need to check out the licenses when you use the software each time. One problem is that the job scheduler, Slurm, doesn't communicate with the license server. As a result, a job can be launched even there are not enough licenses available, and it fails due to insufficient licenses.
In order to prevent this happen, you need to add the software flag to your job script. The software flag will register your license requests to the Slurm license pool so that Slrum can prevent launching jobs without enough licenses available.
The syntax for software flags is
#SBATCH -L {software flag}@osc:N
where N is the requesting number of the licenses. If you need more than one software flags, you can use
#SBATCH -L {software flag1}@osc:N,{software flag2}@osc:M
For example, if you need 1 ansys and 10 ansyspar license features, then you can use
$SBATCH -L ansys@osc:1,ansyspar@osc:10
For interactive jobs, you can use, for example,
sinteractive -A {project account} -L ansys@osc:1
When you use the OnDemand VDI, Desktop, or Schrodinger apps, you can put software flags on the "Licenses" field. For OnDemand Abaqus/CAE, COMSOL Multiphysics, and Stata, the software flags will be placed automatically. And, for OnDemand Ansys Workbench, please check on "Reserve ANSYS Parallel Licenses," if you need "ansyspar" license features.
We have the full list of software associated with software flags in the table below. For more information, please click the link on the software name.
| Software flag | Note | |
|---|---|---|
| abaqus |
abaqus(350), abaquscae(10) |
|
| ansys | ansys(50), ansyspar(900) | |
| comsol | comsolscript(3) | |
| schrodinger | epik(10), glide(20), ligprep(10), macromodel(10), qikprep(10) | |
| starccm | starccm(80), starccmpar(4,000) | |
| stata | stata(5) | |
| usearch | usearch(1) | |
| ls-dyna, mpp-dyna | lsdyna(1,000) |
*The number within the parentheses refers to the total number of licenses for each software flag
It is critical you follow our instructions because your incomplete actions can affect others' jobs as well. We are actively monitoring the software flag usages, and we will reach out to you if you miss our instructions. Failing to make corrections may result in temporary removal from the license server. We have a Grafana dashboard showing the license and software flag usages. There are software flag requests represented as "SLURM", and actual license usages as "License Server".
If you want to make sure your license usage, you can use ~support/bin/myLicenseCheck.
usage: ~support/bin/myLicenseCheck [-h,--help] SOFTWARE
-h, --help print help messages
SOFTWARE supported software: ansys, abaqus, comsol, schrodinger, and starccm.
This tool will tell you how many licenses you are actually using from the license server and how many licenses you have requested to the Slurm. But, this won't tell you about each job. So, if you want to figure out for a specific job, please make sure that the job is the only running job while you use the tool.
Contact OSC Help for assistance if there are any questions.