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Roland Geisler
UIUC Computer Science Department
NLANR Application Support Team
<geisler@uiuc.edu>

Kai Chen
NLANR Application Support Team
<kchen@nlanr.net>

Prof. Klara Nahrstedt
UIUC Computer Science Department
<klara@cs.uiuc.edu>

Introduction

This is a project to build a Remote Monitor System for distributed applications using the Dynamic Soft Real-Time (DSRT) scheduler and a centralized directory server as a resource directory. The DSRT was built to achieve guaranteed CPU allocations to real-time applications while sharing processing bandwidth with time-sharing applications. In a distributed and connected environment where people use remote resources, it is important for users and applications to know about the available resources and the behavior of their programs during runtime in order to use these resources effectively. Our Remote Monitoring System for distributed applications gives users the possibility to find out about available CPU bandwidth in a distributed environment, and lets the user monitor the running applications at a remote host. Our system publishes distributed resource information to a centralized directory server, where user can retrieve the resource and process information. The idea of using a centralized directory server is enlightened by the Globus MDS. Therefore, this system is easy to integrate into the Globus framework.

Architecture

The remote monitoring system consists of three parts, a local monitor, a LDAP directory server, and a remote monitor.

First of all, a DSRT scheduler should be running on a host to be monitored. The local monitor is running at the same host as the DSRT scheduler. It reports to a LDAP directory server periodically. According to Globus MDS, each host under an organization has its entry at the LDAP tree. The entry uniquely identifies the host. The information associated with the host is kept in the entry. The remote monitor written in Java can run on the user's desktop computer. It queries the LDAP server periodically to retrieve information about the status of the DSRT scheduler, and the status of the running applications. The remote monitor then presents the information to the user via a dynamically updated monitor.

Experiments have been done to evaluation the performance of updating and retrieving information from the LDAP server. When a local LDAP server is used,  update frequency can be as high as 5 seconds. If the Globus MDS LDAP server is used, update time has to be larger than 5 minutes. For complete description of the experiments, please refer to Roland's Master Thesis.

Howto Page

The Remote Monitor System is bundled with the distribution of the DSRT scheduler. Please check out the DSRT Howto page. It also includes detail description of how to run the scheduler and the monitors.

Bugs, Comments, and Feature Requests

This is a prototype research project, so please help us improve the system by sending comments and feature requests.