Host-locked and floating licenses

Standard licenses are locked to a specified list of machines and are not floating. Floating licenses and even mixed host-locked/floating licenses are now also offered, although certain restrictions apply. The floating licenses are recommended if ADF is to be used on a large parallel machine, but if the expected ADF usage is fairly limited.

Floating licenses with ADF work only if the machines can all access a shared directory. In practice this means that it only works for a single cluster, but not for an arbitrary network of machines.

Floating licenses are only offered for ADF and BAND at this moment, not for ADF-GUI or BAND-GUI.

A minimum number of CPU's/cores applies to floating and mixed floating/host-locked licenses of 4 floating CPU's or cores per cluster.

Example floating vs host-locked license

If you have a 128-CPU/core compute cluster, you have the following options:

• Purchase a host-locked license for the whole machine. This is the most expensive option and allows you to fill the whole cluster with ADF jobs.

• Purchase a host-locked license for part of the machine (e.g. 16 CPU's/cores). This is much cheaper, but allows you to run ADF jobs only on those 16 CPU's/cores of the cluster which you send us for inclusion in the license file.

• Purchase a floating license for part of the machine (e.g. 16 CPU/core floating license). This is much cheaper than a license for the whole cluster, but a bit more expensive (approx. 25% in this example) than a host-locked license. The floating license allows you to use any node in the cluster for ADF jobs, up to the maximum of 16 simultaneous ADF processes. If another ADF job is started which causes this limit to be exceeded, then it will quickly terminate itself.