Using portable monitoring for heterogeneous clusters on Windows and Linux operating systems

Abstract

This paper describes the advances obtained with the XPVM-W95 2.0, a novel monitoring tool for parallel applications that employ PVM-W95 (PVM for Windows) as well as PVM for Linux. The tool provides, at runtime, the appropriate information about parallel virtual machine configuration, parallel applications and workload from each node. The three more important aspects of the XPVM-W95 are: friendly graphical interface, portability and ability to deal with heterogeneity. These items were improved by version 2, mainly when considering the modularity rearrangement. Experiments demonstrate that XPVM-W95 has a stable behavior and reached the objectives proposed. XPVM-W95 allows a great portability of its source code and also allows the monitoring using different metrics. Empirical studies, realized by means of one single application, demonstrated an intrusion of 17,0% on Windows and 0,13% on Linux.