Load Sharing Facility is a commercial computer software job scheduler

Job scheduler

A job scheduler is a software application that is in charge of unattended background executions, commonly known for historical reasons as batch processing....

 sold by Platform Computing

Platform Computing

Platform Computing is a privately held software company that is primarily known for its job scheduling product, Load Sharing Facility . It was founded in 1992 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is currently headquartered in Markham, Ontario with 11 branch offices across the United States, Europe and...

. It can be used to execute batch jobs on networked Unix and Windows systems on many different architectures.

In 2007, Platform released Platform Lava, which is a simplified version of LSF, licensed under GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

 v2. LSF was based on the Utopia research project at the University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

.

LSF Extensions and integrations

LSF Extensions includes some major extensions:

DRMAA:The Distributed Resource Management Application API handles job management in a range of distributed resource management systems.

HPC Profile Basic:This describes how JSDL, Basic Execution Service (BES) and existing web services security mechanisms can be used interoperable to address batch job scheduling use case.

LSF Perl API:This comprises two modules, Base and Batch, allowing Platform's LSF APIs to be called by Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

.

• Base module allows Perl applications to link the Load Information Manager (LIM) and Remote Execution Server (RES) daemons for LSF services e.g. retrieving system configuration and dynamic load information for distributed clusters hosts, task placement advice via LIM, and other related functions, thereby improving application performance and resources accessibility.
• Batch module allows Perl applications to retrieve information as well as the submission of information about the hosts, queues, users, jobs and configuration of the batch system.

SAGA (Simple API for Grid Applications): The SAGA C++ Reference Implementation

SAGA C++ Reference Implementation

The SAGA C++ Reference Implementation is a set of free cross-platform libraries written in C++ and Python which provide a set of high-level interfaces and runtime components that allow the development of distributed computing and grid computing applications, frameworks and tools...

 provides an LSF plug-in (adaptor) for its standardized job submission, control and monitoring API. The API is available for C++ and Python.

Python LSF wrappers: LSF's API written in C can be easily accessed using Python. Several implementations of LSF Python APIs exist.

LSF is one of the job scheduler mechanisms supported by GRAM (Grid Resource Allocation Manager

Grid Resource Allocation Manager

Globus Resource Allocation Manager is a software component of the Globus Toolkit that can locate, submit, monitor, and cancel jobs on Grid computing resources...

), a component of the Globus Toolkit

Globus Toolkit

The Globus Toolkit, currently at version 5, is an open source toolkit for building computing grids developed and provided by the Globus Alliance.-Standards implementation:The Globus Toolkit is an implementation of the following standards:...

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External links

• Platform Computing: LSF
• HPCCommunity.org HPC Community Discussion for various High Performance Computing related Projects