Limit License usage (not number of jobs)

Hi Holger,

You can do this via the license options file (so it's a central setting, not a user preference):

How can I restrict a user to a certain number of seats of a license feature?

Andrew.

Hi Andrew,

as you wrote, this is a general setting (mostly done by admin) on the license server side.

I am wondering if the user himself could restrict the number of licenses used ?

What happened for example is, that I changed from a transient simulation to a PSS/Pnoise simulation and it took 5 licenses per job (instead of 1 license for Spectre).

Now, we (users) have to check the license usage every time we start a simulation (sometimes its not clear what number of licenses is used in different simulations).

I am looking for a way to set a personal limit of licenses to be used.

Any idea ?

BR

Holger

Hi Holger,

I'm not aware of any other real way of doing it. There's a client-side filter mechanism where you can define a script pointed to by $CDS_LICFLTR which gets passed the feature name and version (but not the quantity) and you can use that script to allow/deny the license access (based on the return value of the script). Potentially this could keep track of how many are in use by a particular person and at least keep it broadly under control (although I guess you could have 9 in use and then ask for 5 or 6 say, and that would take you above your 10 target - but that would be at least in the right ball-park). So that would probably be the way that I did it (either doing a live lmstat -f feature -c $CDS_LIC_FILE to check availability, or maybe doing a periodic cache to improve performance as this could be slow otherwise).

I've also seen queueing systems also try to manage license usage by having job pre-filter scripts to allow a job to be started or not based on sufficient licenses within an allowed user-resource.

Regards,

Andrew.

You could try to write a script that runs Spectre with the +query command-line option (see https://support.cadence.com/apex/ArticleAttachmentPortal?id=a1Od0000000nb0JEAQ ) before starting the actual simulation. Of course, if you are running several simulations in parallel, you will have to keep track of the current number of used licenses yourself.