LSF (the Load Sharing Facility) is a set of tools developed, by Platform Computing, to equitably and transparently distribute a mixed batch/interactive workload across a cluster of machines. Load levelling is accomplished by dynamically submitting tasks to the least loaded machines of the complex.
LSF is effective for both interactive and batch work. Three brief documents are available to introduce LSF services:
LSF interactive commands a guide to using lsf interactively
LSF Batch Jobsa guide to using LSF for batch jobs
LSF Tasks a guide to identify tasks that might be eligible for remote execution via LSF.
Using lsmake a load sharing parallel make utility using the Load Sharing Facility
A full set of man pages. is also available.
IMPORTANT NOTE: To make use of any of the LSF commands, you must first: tap lsf. You must be on a machine that is running lsf and have configured that machine in an lsf cluster in order to use any of the lsf commands. At this time, only a few departments are running lsf clusters. For example, if the command lsid returns lsid: ls_getclustername failed: LIM is down; try later, the machine is likely not running lsf.