Automatic Services Discovery, Monitoring and Visualization of Grid Environments: The MapCenter Approach

The complexity of Grid environments is growing as more projects and applications appear in this quick-evolving domain. Widespread applications are distributed over thousands of computing elements, various communities of users are aggregated into virtual organizations, resources availability is more and more dynamic and final locations of jobs cannot be foreseen. In such contexts, new paradigms and constraints which deeply impacts monitoring and visualization possibilities must be addressed. As nodes and even sites appear and disappear quickly in grid, automated resources and services discovery must be performed and regularly launched with an adequate frequency compared to the dynamicity of grid elements. The numerous production sites interconnected by grids have their own security policies and system administration principles and procedures, which can eventually be outsourced. A global Grid monitoring system must be efficient and not intrusive to respect security policies and do not interfere with site local rules like logging and auditing. On top of nodes and sites, the large number of applications and virtual organisations generates multiple different abstract views of the grid environments. A Grid visualization tool must be opened and flexible to represent all corresponding virtual views needed. The Grid visualisation tool MapCenter has been designed to cope with these new challenges. Our approach is to decompose the architecture into three main layers: – a visualization layer, based on a new presentation model, – a monitoring layer, implemented by an efficient multi-threaded polling framework, – an independent resource discovery and modelling layer,based on various back-ends. This architecture and the open and flexible presentation model has been fully described in [3]. This model can match any logical approach of the Grid computed from monitoring layers underneath. Logical and graphical views to visualize all dashboards needed by end users (scientist, industrial, system administrator, organization manager ...) can be created.