Platform Load Sharing Facility (or simply LSF) is a workload management platform, job scheduler, for distributed HPC environments. It can be used to execute batch jobs on networked Unix and Windows systems on many different architectures. LSF was based on the Utopia research project at the University of Toronto.
In 2007, Platform released Platform Lava, which is a simplified version of LSF based on an old version of LSF release, licensed under GNU General Public License v2. The project was discontinued in 2011, succeeded by OpenLava.
In Jan 2012, Platform Computing was acquired by IBM.
IBM Platform Application Center: Web interfaces for job submission, management and remote visualization.
IBM Platform RTM: A real-time dashboard for monitoring global workloads and resource.
IBM Platform License Scheduler: License management tool with policy-driven allocation and tracking of software licenses.
IBM Platform Analytic : Analytic tool for visualizing and analyzing workload data.
IBM Platform Process Manager: An interface for designing complex engineering computational processes
IBM Platform Session Scheduler: High-throughput low-latency scheduling solution for LSF environments.
IBM Platform Dynamic Cluster: Cloud management solution to change static cluster into dynamic share cloud resources.
LSF Extensions and integrations
LSF Extensions includes some major extensions:
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 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), a component of the Globus Toolkit.
