TopoMon: A Monitoring Tool for Grid Network Topology

Abstract

In Grid environments, high-performance applications have to take into account the available network performance between the individual sites. Existing monitoring tools like the Network Weather Service (NWS) measure bandwidth and latency of end-to-end network paths. This information is necessary but not sufficient. With more than two participating sites, simultaneous transmissions may collide with each other on shared links of the wide-area network. If this occurs, applications may obtain lower network performance than predicted by NWS. In this paper, we describe Topo Mon, a monitoring tool for Grid networks that augments NWS with additional sensors for the routes between the sites of a Grid environment. Our tool conforms to the Grid Monitoring Architecture (GMA) denned by the Global Grid Forum. It unites NWS performance and topology discovery in a single monitoring architecture. Our topology consumer process collects route information between the sites of a Grid environment and derives the overall topology for utilization by application programs and communication libraries. The topology can also be visualized for Grid application developers.KeywordsTopology InformationGrid EnvironmentBorder Gateway ProtocolCollective CommunicationGrid SiteThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.