With LSF, remotely run jobs behave just like jobs run on the local host. Even jobs with complicated terminal controls behave transparently to the user as if they were run locally. LSF can run batch jobs automatically when required resources become available, or when systems are lightly loaded. LSF maintains full control over the jobs, including the ability to suspend and resume the jobs based on load conditions. LSF can run both sequential and parallel jobs.
Some jobs speed up substantially when run on a group of idle or lightly loaded hosts.
For example, the LSF Make program allows you to do your software builds or automated tests many times faster than with traditional makes. With LSF, you can transparently run software that is not available on your local host. For example, you could run a CAD tool that is only available on an HP host from your Sun workstation. The job would run on the HP and be displayed transparently on your Sun system. LSF allows you to write your own load sharing applications, both as shell scripts using the lstools programs and as compiled programs using the LSF application programming libraries.