[Beowulf] Background Survey for thesis papers

[Bj örn Lindberg]

Hello we are three students from University West, Trollhattan, Sweden that are writing three different thesis papers regarding supervising of a mixed cluster environment.

The environment has around 200 off-the-shelf computers, 20 midrange computers and a few high-end computers. The off-the-shelf hardware is 3.2 GHz, 1GB RAM, midrange hardware is 2 * dual core 2.2 GHz, 16GB RAM and high-end hardware is Itanium II and they are connected with a Cisco 48 ports 1GB switches. Operation system on off-the-shelf and midrange nodes is RedHat 3 cluster edition update5. And the environment run a lot of different CFD- FEM-software but mainly Fluent, MSC.Marc, MSC.Nastran and MSC.Ansys

The subjects of the three thesis papers are: 1) Availability, 2) Capacity handling, 3) Resource Managing. And now we are carrying out a background survey within these three subjects.  These thesis papers will be used to create SLA (Service Level Agreement) and help out queuing jobs into the queue handler. In our background survey we have some questions.

We are supposed to get continuous measurable variables. What variables would you measure?

Which parameters should be taken into consideration regarding these applications? E.g. swap size, CPU load, bandwidth, memory, etc.

What kind of tools would you use to get a hold of this data, and are there any applications that could gather all data necessary?

It would be most appreciated if you could add links to homepages or papers that could help us with our tasks.

All suggestions and feedback are most welcome.

Thanks in advance.
Björn Lindberg, 	bjorn.lindberg at student.hv.se

Master of Science with specialization in Computer Networks.
University West, Trollhattan, Sweden.


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From:
Björn Lindberg
bjorn.lindberg at student.htu.se
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