Licence#

ACEMD licences:

Non-commercial licence is free for non-commercial use (the terms and conditions).
Commercial licence is required for commercial use. Contact Acellera (info@acellera.com) for details.

One can check the status of the commercial licence with the following command:

$ acemd --licence

Commercial licence#

Deployment options:

Node-locked licence is locked to a specific machine. It is recommended for invidual workstations and small HPC clusters.
Floating licence works by connecting to a licensing server hosted internally. It is recommended for large HPC clusters.
Cloud licence works by connecting to a licensing server hosted by Acellera. It is recommend for cloud and virtualized environments.

Node-locked licence#

A node-locked licence is locked to a specific machine by its MAC address. One will have to provide such address when purchasing the licence.

The licence is issued in a form of a licence file (licence.dat), which needs to be placed at one of the following locations:

~/.acellera/licence.dat
/opt/acellera/licence.dat

Alternatively, the path of the licence file can be set with the environment variable ACELLERA_LICENCE_FILE:

$ export ACELLERA_LICENCE_FILE=/tmp/licence.dat

To not have to export this environment variable every time a new shell is opened, one can add the command to the end of the shell configuration file (e.g. ~/.bashrc) depending on the shell being used.

To ensure the environment variable is set, open a new console and execute:

$ env | grep ACELLERA_LICENCE_FILE

which should print out the environment variable with the path.

Floating licence#

A floating licence works by connecting to a licensing server. Any machine having access to a licence server can use it. The maximum number of concurrent licences is agreed when purchasing the licence. Additionally, one will have to provide the MAC address of the machine where the licence server will be deployed.

The licence is issued in a form of a licence file (licence.dat), which needs to be deployed in the licence server. After deploying the license server, its IP address (or hostname) and port number is provided to a user.

The user has to set the IP address (e.g. 192.168.0.1) and port number (e.g. 27000) with the environment variable ACELLERA_LICENCE_SERVER:

$ export ACELLERA_LICENCE_SERVER=27000@192.168.0.1

Cloud licence#

A cloud licence works by connecting to a licensing server hosted by Acellera. Any machine having access to the licence server can use it. The maximum number of concurrent licences is agreed when purchasing the licence.

The licence is issued in a form of a public IP address (e.g. 35.237.46.128) and port number (e.g. 27000), which have to be set with the environment variable ACELLERA_LICENCE_SERVER:

$ export ACELLERA_LICENCE_SERVER=27000@35.237.46.128

Licence server#

The floating licence requires a license server. It should be deployed on a machine that is accessible via the network.

Requiments for the hosting machine:

CentOS 7 or other compatible OS
Fixed MAC address
root access

Download the server:

$ curl -s https://software.acellera.com/floating-licence-server.tar.gz | tar xzvf -

Install the server. Note that install.sh has to be executed as root user. By default, the server is installed to /opt/acellera and executed as sglmd user. This can be changed by setting the environment variables ROOT and USER, respecively:

$ cd floating-licence-server && sudo ./install.sh

Copy the licence file (license.dat) to /opt/acellera. Note, /opt/acellera/license.dat has to be readable by sglmd user.

Start the licence server:

$ service acellera.sglmd start

Validate that the server has started:

$ tail /var/log/acellera.sglmd.log
2020/01/01 00:00:00 Server starting on localhost, port 27000, max components 64, max connections 256
Enabling acemd 3.0 512 01-jan-2025
Ready...

This means that the server is accepting license requests on part 27000. It can issue up to 512 concurrent licences of ACEMD until the 1st of January, 2025.

Finally, validate the server from a remote machine. This assumes that the server is running on licence.internal.acellera.com and a firewall is configured to allow TCP connections to port 27000:

$ export ACELLERA_LICENCE_SERVER=27000@licence.internal.acellera.com
$ acemd --licence
# Licence:
#   Check floating licence:
#     ACELLERA_LICENCE_SERVER (27000@licence.internal.acellera.com) -- GRANTED
#     ACELLERA_LICENSE_SERVER -- not defined
#   Check node-locked licence:
#     ACELLERA_LICENCE_FILE -- not defined
#     ACELLERA_LICENSE_FILE -- not defined
#     /opt/acellera/licence.dat -- DENIED (Unable to locate target file)
#     /opt/acellera/license.dat -- DENIED (Unable to locate target file)
#     /home/raimis/.acellera/licence.dat -- DENIED (Unable to locate target file)
#     /home/raimis/.acellera/license.dat -- DENIED (Unable to locate target file)