INAM - A Scalable InfiniBand Network Analysis and Monitoring Tool

InfiniBand’s popularity in the field of cluster and high performance computing can be attributed to its open standard and high performance. As InfiniBand (IB) clusters grow in size and scale, predicting the behavior of the IB network in terms of link usage and performance becomes an increasingly challenging task. Although the IB specification proposes a detailed subnet management infrastructure to handle various aspects of the network, there currently exists no open source tool that allows users to dynamically analyze and visualize the communication pattern and link usage in the IB network. In this context, we design and develop a scalable InfiniBand Network Analysis and Monitoring tool INAM. INAM monitors IB clusters in real time and queries the various subnet management entities in the IB network to gather the various performance counters specified by the IB standard. We provide an easy to use web-based interface to visualize performance counters and subnet management attributes of a cluster in an on-demand basis. It is also capable of capturing the communication characteristics of a subset of links in the network, thereby allowing users to visualize and analyze the network communication characteristics of a job in a high performance computing environment. Our experimental results show that INAM is able to accurately visualize the link utilization as well as the communication pattern of target applications.