Floating Licences

When using a Feko legacy installation, a floating licence scheme can be set up to allow a limited number of licences to be shared among users.

Figure 1 shows the licence manager with a typical floating licence.

If the secfeko.dat file contains one or more floating licence servers, then the server names and port numbers are displayed at the top of the licence manager. This also includes the status of a floating licence server, whether it is active or not. A quorum of licence servers must be active for the Feko floating licence scheme to work (so if you have one server this must be active, but if you are running three redundant floating licence servers, then at least two of them must be active).

Click Update to update the state of the licences.

Note: Floating licences are checked in and out as they are being used. As a result, the information is not static as is the case with node-locked licences.

Apart from the machine code of each licence, all the information displayed for node-locked a licence is also applicable to floating licences. For both floating and node-locked licences, a line with a green background indicates a preferred licence and a line with a light blue background indicates a licence that is in use.

For each licence that is in use, the table displays the user and hostname where this licence is used, and the Parallel column indicates how many solver instances are available. If a user has a 16-node licence, he may start two concurrent 8-process parallel jobs, but not an 8-process job and a 10-process job.

In addition, expanding the licence shows information on when the licence was checked out and what components are in use. The user and hostname to which each component has been checked out to, as well as the process ID (PID), is shown for each component. This allows each component process to be uniquely identified and located for administrative and tracking purposes. It is possible to manually check in a licence to make it available for a new user.