License management in grid and high performance computing

Abstract

Commercial codes usually come with a licensing mechanism in order to restrict their use. The lack of license management schemes is becoming a major obstacle for the commercial exploitation of existing Grid infrastructures. In this paper we present a complete license management architecture that enables a pay per use license management, which can be deployed together with an on-demand computing scenario. In order to cover the entire license management process, a complete Grid-friendly license management architecture was implemented and is presented here. The license management architecture we present is based on the requirements we collected from 18 real buisness applications [1]. The Grid-friendly solution that we developed has various benefits that we believe will lead to a fast adoption by independent software vendors (ISVs) and their clients and hence pave the way for commercial applications in grid environments.