Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
commercial ISV applications in these environments. Consequently, a large number
of commercial users are not able to use ISV applications in such environments.
The LMA, Licence Management Architecture, capability described in
Dimitrakos (2009a) is to our knowledge the first complete solution for HPC utility
or Cloud platforms solving this problem. LMA is architected as a bundle of capa-
bilities, shown in figure 8.5, which combined enable managing software licences
for shared resource use. One notable innovation has been the ability to transparently
reroute the socket-based communication via a SOCKS proxy-chain that is scalable
and suitable for supporting legacy and proprietary client-server protocols that are
currently used in commercial environments. Another innovation has been a mecha-
nism to authorise access based on one-time credentials (in close analogy to PIN/
TAN solutions) that is suitable for use over open infrastructures with varying levels
of trust and enable run-time authorisation and context-based accounting.
The LMA capability is generic, independent of specific middleware choice, and
features cost-unit based accounting. It enables using licensed ISV applications in
HPC utility or Cloud platforms in a wide range of provisioning scenarios. In combi-
nation with secure access to the licence server, LMA facilitates the non-interruptive
business transition to pay-per-use models while supporting the current legacy tech-
nology that used to manage software licences. It therefore enables increasing of the
market size in the area of SOI and on-demand Cloud Computing.
Aspects of LMA have been validated in various HPC utility contexts including
a BE that demonstrated the use of a large scale multidisciplinary compute Grid to
generate cost-effective and optimised solutions for water management (see BE06
2009), and a Business Experiment that demonstrated a solution to reduce the tech-
nical and economical risks that are implicit in large and complex ship building
projects (see chapter 10).
Fig. 8.5:
Overview of the architecture of the License Management capability
