Speaker
Description
Monitoring is an indispensable tool for the operation of any
large installment of grid or cluster computing, be it high
energy physics or elsewhere. Usually, monitoring is configured
to collect a small amount of data, just enough to enable
detection of abnormal conditions. Once detected, the abnormal
condition is handled by gathering all information from the
affected components. This data is processed by querying it in a
manner similar to a database.
This contribution shows how the metaphor of a debugger (for
software applications) can be transferred to a compute cluster. The concepts of variables, assertions and breakpoints that are
used in debugging can be applied to monitoring by defining
variables as the quantities recorded by monitoring and
breakpoints as invariants formulated through these variables. It
is found that embedding fragments of a data extracting and
reporting tool such as the UNIX tool awk facilitates concise
notations for commonly used variables since tools like awk are
designed to process large event streams (in textual
representations) with bounded memory. Additionally, it is found
that a functional notation similar to both the pipe notation
used in the UNIX shell and the pointfree style used in
functional programming simplifies the combining of variables
that commonly occur when formulating breakpoints.
| Consider for promotion | Yes |
|---|
