| Friday, March 6 |
| 9:00 am - 10:30 am | |
| |
Grid License Management BoF
(90 mins)
Mathias Dalheimer
(Grid License Management BoF) Presentation
Software licensing hinders the adoption of grid computing technology in the industry. We will explore the technical, legal and business challenges. The following talks are planned:
1. Mathias Dalheimer: „GenLM: Flexible License Management for Grids and Clouds“
The talk will introduce the challenges of license management in grid and cloud computing. Beside the technical problems license management needs to adress various business and legal issues – a toolsuite for handling these problems will be presented. Our work in the German grid project „PartnerGrid“ shows that the successful implementation of a license management mechanism needs to be done in close collaboration with ISVs. In addition the needs of both users and resource providers need to be incorporated.
2. Yona Raekow: „Client-Server Based License Management in the Grid�
License Management is currently not supported in any Grid middleware. Since most small and medium enterprises (SME) use commercial codes with associated licensing issues, this lack of support is becoming a major obstacle for the commercial exploitation of Grid infrastructure. In our work we present the process of eliciting license management related requirements, the subsequently derived license management components and their corresponding design patterns as well as details of implementation patterns. In order to cover the entire license management process, a complete Grid-friendly license architecture was implemented.
The benefit of the solution we present is that no change of technology is required from the point of view of an independent software vendor (ISV) and only minor modifications have to be made at time of job submission. In particular, the ISVs are so far objecting to relax their license management schemes, let alone adjusting their codes, in such a way that licenses can be used in a grid environment. This is due to the fact that they would have to move away from a stable and predictable revenue, to a more dynamic, unforeseeable source of income. The solution we present is meant to introduce the use of commercial codes with corresponding licenses in Grid quickly and to show the ISVs that providing a license model for a Grid infrastructure can be indeed a profitable business model.
3. Silvina Grad-Freilich and Arjav Chakravarti: „Parallel Computing with MATLAB in Grids“
MATLAB is a popular programming environment with over 1,000,000 users worldwide, primarily scientists and engineers engaged in technical computing. In 2004, The MathWorks introduced tools for parallel computing that enable MATLAB users to take advantage of high-performance environments to solve computationally- and data-intensive problems. Engineers and scientists can now develop parallel MATLAB applications independently of the resources that are available for execution; they can prototype applications on their desktops and then scale to computer clusters and Grids without doing any code changes. This presentation will discuss the technical and licensing challenges that have been resolved so that scientist can take advantage of the grid for their collaborative research activities.
4. Vangelis Floros, EGEE NA4 Deputy Activity Leader: “Licensed Software in the EGEE infrastructure�
The EGEE project has established the largest European Grid infrastructure providing access to a vast amount of computational and storage resources across more than 200 sites distributed across the continent. This infrastructure is used routinely by thousands of scientists for research and collaboration. The majority of software tools deployed in the EGEE Grid are either free-licensed or developed from within the user communities themselves. Nevertheless, a significant number of applications running in EGEE depend on licensed software. This talk will present our experience so far with the usage of licensed software in EGEE and the various approaches followed for license management.
Wolfgang Ziegler: "SmartLM - Software Licence Technology for Grids, Clouds, SOA"
The main conclusion highlighted in The 451 Group’s 2005 report on "The Impact of Software Licensing in Grid" was that “Software licensing practices are limiting the acceleration of Grid adoption�. Since 2005 additional paradigms of distributed computing like Clouds and SOA have emerged, however, traditional software licensing practices have not been adapted. Until now, software licenses
are provided on the basis of a named user, node-locked host, number of concurrent jobs, or possibly a site license. These models are not sufficiently flexible to use commercial applications in Grids, Clouds or SOA that include
access to resources beyond the current administrative domain. Moreover, the rapid emergence of mainstream multi-core processors and virtualization environments is requiring an evolution in software licensing models. We will
introduce and discuss SmartLM license technology developments and corresponding business models that enable use of license protected applications in Grids.
The goal of the BoF session is to present the challenges of license management in highly distributed environments. Projects from academia and industry present the current state of the art. The following 15-minute presentations are planned:
1. Mathias Dalheimer: „GenLM: Flexible License Management for Grids and Clouds“
The talk will introduce the challenges of license management in grid and cloud computing. Beside the technical problems license management needs to adress various business and legal issues – a toolsuite for handling these problems will be presented. Our work in the German grid project „PartnerGrid“ shows that the successful implementation of a license management mechanism needs to be done in close collaboration with ISVs. In addition the needs of both users and resource providers need to be incorporated.
2. Yona Raekow: „Client-Server Based License Management in the Grid�
License Management is currently not supported in any Grid middleware. Since most small and medium enterprises (SME) use commercial codes with associated licensing issues, this lack of support is becoming a major obstacle for the commercial exploitation of Grid infrastructure. In our work we present the process of eliciting license management related requirements, the subsequently derived license management components and their corresponding design patterns as well as details of implementation patterns. In order to cover the entire license management process, a complete Grid-friendly license architecture was implemented.
The benefit of the solution we present is that no change of technology is required from the point of view of an independent software vendor (ISV) and only minor modifications have to be made at time of job submission. In particular, the ISVs are so far objecting to relax their license management schemes, let alone adjusting their codes, in such a way that licenses can be used in a grid environment. This is due to the fact that they would have to move away from a stable and predictable revenue, to a more dynamic, unforeseeable source of income. The solution we present is meant to introduce the use of commercial codes with corresponding licenses in Grid quickly and to show the ISVs that providing a license model for a Grid infrastructure can be indeed a profitable business model.
3. Silvina Grad-Freilich and Arjav Chakravarti: „Parallel Computing with MATLAB in Grids“
MATLAB is a popular programming environment with over 1,000,000 users worldwide, primarily scientists and engineers engaged in technical computing. In 2004, The MathWorks introduced tools for parallel computing that enable MATLAB users to take advantage of high-performance environments to solve computationally- and data-intensive problems. Engineers and scientists can now develop parallel MATLAB applications independently of the resources that are available for execution; they can prototype applications on their desktops and then scale to computer clusters and Grids without doing any code changes. This presentation will discuss the technical and licensing challenges that have been resolved so that scientist can take advantage of the grid for their collaborative research activities.
4. Vangelis Floros, EGEE NA4 Deputy Activity Leader: “Licensed Software in the EGEE infrastructure�
The EGEE project has established the largest European Grid infrastructure providing access to a vast amount of computational and storage resources across more than 200 sites distributed across the continent. This infrastructure is used routinely by thousands of scientists for research and collaboration. The majority of software tools deployed in the EGEE Grid are either free-licensed or developed from within the user communities themselves. Nevertheless, a significant number of applications running in EGEE depend on licensed software. This talk will present our experience so far with the usage of licensed software in EGEE and the various approaches followed for license management.
Wolfgang Ziegler: "SmartLM - Software Licence Technology for Grids, Clouds, SOA"
The main conclusion highlighted in The 451 Group’s 2005 report on "The Impact of Software Licensing in Grid" was that “Software licensing practices are limiting the acceleration of Grid adoption�. Since 2005 additional paradigms of distributed computing like Clouds and SOA have emerged, however, traditional software licensing practices have not been adapted. Until now, software licenses
are provided on the basis of a named user, node-locked host, number of concurrent jobs, or possibly a site license. These models are not sufficiently flexible to use commercial applications in Grids, Clouds or SOA that include
access to resources beyond the current administrative domain. Moreover, the rapid emergence of mainstream multi-core processors and virtualization environments is requiring an evolution in software licensing models. We will
introduce and discuss SmartLM license technology developments and corresponding business models that enable use of license protected applications in Grids.
Agenda:
See session summary
Location: Da Vinci
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| | Slides: Introduction + GenLM License Management for Grids & Clouds (M. Dalheimer) |
| | Slides: Licence Management in Grid - A result from the BEinGRID Project (Y. Raekow) |
| | Slides: Licensed Software in the EGEE infrastructure (V. Floros) |
| | Slides: SmartLM Overview (W. Ziegler) |