DGMonitor: A Performance Monitoring Tool for Sandbox-Based Desktop Grid Platforms

Accurate, continuous resource monitoring and profiling are critical for enabling performance tuning and scheduling op-timization. In desktop grid systems that employ sandbox-ing, these issues are challenging because (1) subjobs in-side sandboxes are executed in a virtual computing envi-ronment and (2) the state of the virtual computing environ-ment within the sandboxes is reset to empty after each sub-job completes. DGMonitor is a monitoring tool which builds a global, ac-curate, and continuous view of real resource utilization for desktop grids with sandboxing. Our monitoring tool mea-sures performance unobtrusively and reliably, uses a simple performance data model, and is easy to use. Our measure-ments demonstrate that DGMonitor can scale to large desk-top grids (up to 12000 workers) with low monitoring over-head in terms of resource consumption (less than 0.1%) on desktop PCs. Though we developed DGMonitor with the Entropia DC-Grid platform, our tool is easily integrated into other desk-top grid systems. In all of these systems, DGMonitor data can support existing and novel information services, partic-ularly for performance tuning and scheduling