LSF Resource Management Viewpoint

The LSF software has a cluster viewpoint of resource management. It is essentially unaware of other resource controls which may be implemented on the hosts that make up the LSF cluster. The LSF software assumes that all the resources within its cluster are at its disposal. Network bandwidth is not a major concern of the LSF software since the batch jobs it controls do not generate much network traffic and neither does the monitoring or management of jobs running on execution hosts.

In the Sun HPC environment, a high speed interconnect is used for message passing between hosts running parallel applications. Since this is a dedicated channel, resource control of the traffic on the interconnect is not required.

LSF Cluster Viewpoint

The term cluster is widely used to describe a configuration of computers in a network that some how share resources. In LSF terminology, a cluster is a federation of computers, each running LSF software. There are no special hardware configuration requirements except that the computers be networked together and running TCP/IP.

There are no special software dependencies as long as all the systems in the cluster are running one of the supported operating systems. File sharing between the systems is recommended, but not required. Running a directory service such as NIS makes things easier, but again, is not a requirement.

To create an LSF cluster, the LSF software must be loaded on each computer and a configuration file modified to reflect the cluster's available resources. The role of the master host is determined automatically by the LSF software, so no manual configuration is required.