A system and method which allows for burst licensing, particularly for use in a circuit design and analysis system in which designers use tools to assist in characterizing and verifying the circuit. Burst licensing is used to provide licenses on an `as and when required` basis to allow system users or customers to carry out massive parallelism of the simulation tasks when run from selected tools. When the system receives a request to start a task, the system checks-out a burst license for use in processing the task, and assigns the license to a particular CPU. The task is then performed at that CPU, and once completed the burst license is returned to the license pool.