The need for entitlement-centric software license management is only going to get more intense in the future. As Patrick Thibodeau writes on ComputerWorld.com this week (article here) teraflop and petaflop supercomputer speeds will soon be trumped by, “something that can reach an exaflop, or a million trillion calculations per second, (one quintillion).” A system that requires an estimated 10 million to 100 million cores.

Typically these systems are thought for cloud computing and SaaS, which will have a direct effect on the software licensing.

As this excerpt from the article predicts, software for these systems are going to have to drastically adapt:

Bland also sees future systems as hybrids, and points to chip development by both Intel and AMD that combine CPUs and co-processors.

"We believe that using accelerators is going to be absolutely critical to any strategy to getting to exaflop computers," he said.

Addison Snell, CEO of InterSect Research, an HPC research firm in Sunnyvale, Calif., said accelerators are capable of providing vast computational capability for specific applications, and the applications that can take advantage of them can move toward exascale first." Eventually, a general-purpose exascale system will arrive, "but special-purpose will probably come first."

As the physical environment advances, software publishers will be forced to adapt licensing terms. At some point software licensing is going to have to accommodate for hardware this powerful and complex and seemingly endless virtual environments.

The result will be license T&C that place ever-decreasing significance on the hardware. Asset-centric software asset management will be rendered out-dated. entitlement-centric software license management, on the other hand, will be able to stay one step ahead of the game. The hardware and virutal environment will dictate the direction of the licensing, so entitlement-centric solutions, which build processes around the license information will be able to anticipate and prepare for evolving license management challenges and requirements.

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