Running license protected applications with SmartLM and UNICORE

SmartLM provides a generic and flexible licensing virtualization technology based on standards for new service-oriented business models. The software licenses are implemented as Grid services, providing platform-independent access just like other Grid resources and being accessible from resources outside organizational boundaries. The License Service is responsible for creating licenses based on the user requirements. These licenses are governed as Service Level Agreements based on evolving standards, and describes all specific conditions of the application usage like license owner, issuer, validity period, usage records, pricing, features, wall time, etc. The Orchestration Service co-allocates licenses and computing resources both in time and space, assuring that these resources are available at the same time for the execution of application. The Orchestrator retrieves license token from the License Service and transport it to selected computational resources while bei ng sure that the license required is available to the application upon start-up and during execution. Secure agreements are used to transport license tokens through the Grid to computing resources. The license and compute agreements and conditions of use for an application are reached through negotiation between service providers and service customers. The Orchestrator integration with UNICORE is realized through UNICORE Integration Service that provides WS-Agreement based interface to interact with UNICORE servers. The orchestrator client, an extension of UNICORE rich client, is used to steer the license and computing resources negotiation, computing resources selection, data staging, job submission and execution management.