Link of the week - Visualizing the state of your grid with GridMaps

The GridMap prototype show the status of different sites in the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid. Green indicates the site is “OK,” orange indicates degraded service and red indicates that the site is down. Image © CERN openlab/EDS

Which of your grid sites are operational at any instant?

How much does each site contribute to which virtual organization?

How can you have all this information and more at your fingertips?

With GridMaps, a top-level grid services monitoring visualization produced as a collaboration, initiated by EDS Fellow Rolf Kubli, between CERN openlab and EDS undertaken within the Grid Deployment Group at CERN.

“This style of data monitoring requires much less space than conventional tables or bar charts,” says EDS senior engineer Max Böhm, architect and developer of the GridMap prototype.

“It also allows you to page quickly through different points or focus on different metrics to help discover correlations, patterns and failure mechanisms.”

The prototype GridMap interface is simple, interactive and super user-friendly:

• Grid sites or services are represented by rectangles; the size of the box indicates the number of CPUs at that site.
• The status of each site is represented by a different color: red means the site is down; orange indicates a degraded level of service; green means all systems are go, go, go.

The visualized GridMap data comes from the underlying Service Availability Monitoring (SAM) framework, a tool for monitoring services at grid sites.

With a click of the mouse GridMap can shift views to show data from different virtual organizations and geographical perspectives. Users can also plumb deeper into each site. 

“This same type of visualization can be used for top-level, regional, and VO-specific views,” says Böhm.“It has very broad application and can be adapted to suit specific needs. The size of each box can be adapted to indicate the number of jobs running, or the colour could indicate site availability... The possibilities are exciting.”

CERN openlab is a framework for evaluating and integrating cutting-edge IT technologies or services in partnership with industry. EDS, a leading global technology services company, is one of several corporate partners and contributors to the 2007 program.