A screenshot of the 3D Real Time Monitor.
Image Courtesy GridPP.
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A popular grid monitor developed by the UK's GridPP project, the Real Time Monitor, has been given a makeover. Gidon Moont from Imperial College London has created a 3D upgrade for the monitor, which tracks sites participating in several grid computing projects, including EGEE and the LHC Computing Grid.
The new 3D system gathers information from resource brokers around the world, and uses images from NASA's Blue Marble Project to present a visualization of grids at work.
The old Real Time Monitor was an applet with no magnification and therefore had little room to accommodate the increasing number of sites and geographical spread of grid users. Moont's new system includes a zoom and so has the advantage of being able to plot sites at accurate locations.
"On the old monitor you can't see all the London sites accurately as they would always be on top of one another," he says. "This new one allows you to zoom in, so even if they are on top of each other when looking at the whole globe, you can focus in on the city to view each site individually."
Another important addition is the use of the Berkeley Database Information Index to automatically discover and plot new sites that join the grid projects tracked by the monitor. As before, different views can be requested that show the activity of a single virtual organization or all sites that participate in a certain project.
By clicking on each site, users can view lists of resource brokers, computing elements and jobs, which are also fully sortable. "By monitoring this data we can get a general feel of how busy and geographically dispersed the Grid is," says Moont. "It is a very useful way of seeing that the Grid already works at a large scale."
For more information visit the Real Time Monitor Web page.
—Helen Thomson, GridPP
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