Software and licenses

The grid may have software installed that may be too expensive to install on every grid machine. Using a grid, the jobs requiring this software are sent to the particular machines on which this software happens to be installed. When the licensing fees are significant, this approach can save significant expenses for an organization. Some software licensing arrangements permit the software to be installed on all of the machines of a grid but may limit the number of installations that can be simultaneously used at any given instant. License management software keeps track of how many concurrent copies of the software are being used and prevents more than that number from executing at any given time. The grid job schedulers can be configured to take software licenses into account, optionally balancing them against other priorities or policies.