Software license service

SCD operates two general-purpose network license servers. The first of these is a fail-safe trio of small Linux machines dedicated to serving licenses for the Portland Group Compilers. The PGI compilers are used by most divisions of NCAR. Other license service comes from the E5500 fileserver. This server provides network licensing for analysis products such as Matlab, Mathematica, SAS, and IDL.

The Portland Group developed a suite of high-performance compilers that run on Windows and Linux systems. The popularity of the compilers has grown throughout the UCAR user community to the point where dedicated servers now host the license management software. License management lets users check out compilers while compiling models and other code. For a large-model run this might involve hundreds of accesses to the license management servers. Recently, ACCIS added license management to its list of important UCAR services. In the future other license management software might be housed on the license servers.

Divisional system administrators are responsible for making sure their users are referencing the correct servers.