The IBM® Platform Load Sharing Facility (LSF®) product family is a workload management platform for demanding, distributed, and mission-critical high-performance computing (HPC) environments. It provides a set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features so that you can fully take advantage of all of your compute infrastructure resources and ensure optimal application performance. By using the highly scalable and available architecture, you can schedule complex workloads and manage petaflop-scale resources.

This IBM Redpaper™ publication explains how to use IBM Platform LSF features for cluster workload management, including job scheduling, job submission, and application profiles examples. It describes the general challenges for (HPC) clusters, and how IBM Platform LSF can help such clusters. This publication includes some of the major features of IBM Platform LSF and the way these features can help to address the challenges of HPC clusters.

Valid hardware resources to ensure that the setup can use IBM Platform LSF

Sizing for I/O-intensive clusters

Considerations for GPGPU intensive clusters

Job queues

Job scheduling

Goal-oriented scheduling

Job submission

Compute units

Application profiles

Job submission prechecks and setup

Job resizing

Idle job detection

Defining external resources (elims)

Using advance reservations

Hyper-Threading technology

Changing the paradigm with guaranteed resources