IBM Platform LSF
IBM Platform LSF is a powerful workload management platform for demanding, distributed HPC environments. It provides a comprehensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features that enable you to utilize all of your compute infrastructure resources and ensure optimal application performance.
The Challenge
HPC isn’t easy
Across enterprises of all sizes, application capability and data volumes continue to grow significantly, driving the need for more and more compute capacity and high performance management and analysis tools. Even in traditional high performance computing (HPC) environments, multiple compute silos, uneven processing, design cycle leaks and delayed results are common. Facing increasingly restrictive economic pressures, organizations are looking for better ways to improve IT performance, reduce infrastructure costs and expenses, and meet the demand for faster time to solution and market.
The Solution
Better, faster and smarter computing
The IBM® Platform™ LSF® product family is a powerful workload management platform for demanding, distributed and mission-critical HPC environments. It provides a comprehensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features that enable you to take full advantage of your compute infrastructure resources and ensure optimal application performance. A highly scalable and available architecture allows you to schedule complex workloads, and manage up to petaflop-scale resources.
The Benefits
Getting the most out of your systems
The Platform LSF product family helps you ensure that all available resources are fully utilized by enabling you to take full advantage of all technical computing resources—from application software licenses to available network bandwidth. The Platform LSF family can help:
- Reduce operational and infrastructure costs by providing optimal SLA management and greater flexibility, visibility and control of job scheduling.
- Improve productivity and resource sharing by fully utilizing hardware and application resources, whether they are just down the hall or halfway around the globe.
Whitepapers
- How IBM Platform LSF Architecture Accelerates Technical Computing
- Harnessing public clouds in HPC: Are all infrastructure providers created equal?
- Improving The Efficiency Of GPU Clusters
- IBM Platform Analytics: Work smarter not harder. Easier said than done?
- IBM Platform License Scheduler: Policy-based license sharing for higher utilization
Success Stories
Red Bull Technology
Though Red Bull Technology had made hefty investments in IT, the compute resources were operating below its full potential. Platform LSF intelligently scheduled workload and dynamically allocated resources which helped increase performance and throughput by more than 20 percent. Read the story (PDF, 957KB)
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute produces 120TB of raw data per week that has to be processed for analysis. Platform LSF helped the Institute run up to half a million sequence matching jobs a day, resulting in improved workload management, researchers’ efficiency and time-to-results. Read the story (PDF, 1.40MB)
World-class Animation Studios
This studio’s latest blockbuster required the equivalent of over 17 million processor-hours of computing time on some of the world’s fastest commercially available processors. Using Platform LSF the studio’s technicians were able to complete this complex rendering job in time to get the film released before the summer blockbuster season. Read the story (PDF, 942KB)
Compatibility Table
Product Editions |
Express |
Standard |
Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overview | Ideal for single-cluster environments and optimized for simple workloads and user grouping structures | Designed for grid environments and optimized for complex workloads and user grouping structures | Architected to support extreme scalability and throughput |
| Operating Systems |
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| Processors |
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Additional Product Capabilities
A family that grows as you grow
Optional add-ons extend Platform LSF to provide a complete set of workload management capabilities; all designed to work together to address your high performance computing needs.
LSF Addons |
Express |
Standard |
Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|
| IBM Platform Application Center | |||
| IBM Platform RTM | |||
| IBM Platform License Scheduler | |||
| IBM Platform Analytics | - | ||
| IBM Platform Process Manager | - | ||
| IBM Platform Session Scheduler | - | ||
| IBM Platform Dynamic Cluster | - |
IBM Platform Application Center
IBM Platform Application Center provides a flexible, easy to use interface for cluster users and administrators. Available as an add-on module to IBM Platform LSF, Platform Application Center enables users to interact with intuitive, self-documenting standardized interfaces. Learn more
IBM Platform RTM
IBM Platform RTM is an operational dashboard for IBM Platform LSF environments that provides comprehensive workload monitoring, reporting and management. Platform RTM provides a complete, integrated monitoring facility that is designed specifically for Platform LSF environments. Learn more
IBM Platform License Scheduler
IBM Platform License Scheduler enables license sharing between global project teams. It ensures that license availability is prioritized by workload, user and project, and that licenses are optimally used. Learn more
IBM Platform Analytics
IBM Platform Analytics is an advanced analysis and visualization tool for analyzing massive amounts of IBM Platform LSF and IBM Platform Symphony workload data. It enables you to correlate job, resource and license data from multiple clusters for data-driven decision-making. Learn more
IBM Platform Process Manager
Complex scripts are often used to automate lengthy computing tasks. But these scripts can be risky to modify, and may depend on the expertise of a few key individuals. IBM Platform Process Manager simplifies the design and automation of complex computational processes, capturing and protecting repeatable best practices. Learn more
IBM Platform Session Scheduler
IBM Platform Session Scheduler is designed to work with IBM Platform LSF® to provide high-throughput, low-latency scheduling in environments that run high-volumes of short-duration jobs and where users require faster and more predictable job turnaround times. Learn more
IBM Platform Dynamic Cluster
Platform Dynamic Cluster turns static IBM Platform LSF clusters into dynamic, shared cloud infrastructure. By automatically changing the composition of clusters to meet ever-changing workload demands, service levels are improved and organizations can do more work with less infrastructure. Learn more
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