Each host has one or more network addresses; usually one for each network to which the host is directly connected. Each host can also have more than one name.
The first name configured for each address is called the official name.
Other names for the same host are called aliases.
LSF uses the configured host naming system on each host to look up the official host name for any alias or host address. This means that you can use aliases as input to LSF, but LSF always displays the official name.
is powerful and flexible, but it is difficult to configure in systems where a single host name has many aliases, and in multihomed host environments.
In these cases, the hosts file can become very large and unmanageable, and configuration is prone to error.
The syntax of the LSF hosts file supports host name ranges as aliases for an IP address. This simplifies the host name alias specification.
To use host name ranges as aliases, the host names must consist of a fixed node group name prefix and node indices, specified in a form like:
The node list does not need to be a continuous range (some nodes can be configured out). Node indices can be numbers or letters (both upper case and lower case).
Some systems map internal compute nodes to single LSF host names. A host file might contains 64 lines, each specifying an LSF host name and 32 node names that correspond to each LSF host:
...177.16.1.1 atlasD0 atlas0 atlas1 atlas2 atlas3 atlas4 ... atlas31177.16.1.2 atlasD1 atlas32 atlas33 atlas34 atlas35 atlas36 ... atlas63...
In the new format, you still map the nodes to the LSF hosts, so the number of lines remains the same, but the format is simplified because you only have to specify ranges for the nodes, not each node individually as an alias:
You can use either an IPv4 or an IPv6 format for the IP address (if you define the parameter LSF_ENABLE_SUPPORT_IPV6 in lsf.conf).