SmartLM Final Review

The final review of the SmartLM project took place on 17 September 2010 in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The project dealt with intelligent licence management for location-independent application execution.

One of the drawbacks in contemporary licenced applications is the tight coupling of the right of execution to local domains or even specific physical nodes. SmartLM allows the flexible use of licences not only at the local site, but also in distributed Grid and Cloud environments. Licences are bound to the actual execution of a job, that can potentially run anywhere. The job is executed without needing an online connection to a licence server with free licences, which is another limitation of current licence mechanisms. Independent software vendors participated in the project and aided in developing new business models along with the technical solution, because the provision of such flexible licencing mechanisms requires support in licence contracts.

Demonstrations of the SmartLM solution were given during the review, showing that users can execute applications of the participating software vendors on different compute sites in Europe using the UNICORE Grid middleware.

The project outcome is a product supported by three of the project partners, which is expected to be marketed next year.

(Contact: Björn Hagemeier, ext. 1584)

from JSC News No. 190, November 2010