DGMonitor: a Performance Monitoring Tool for Sandbox-based Desktop Grid Platforms

Accurate and continuous monitoring and profiling are important issues of performance tuning and scheduling optimization. In desktop grid systems based on sandboxing techniques these issues are particularly challenging because (1) subjobs inside sandboxes are executed in a virtual environment and (2) sandboxes are usually reset to an initial (empty) state at each subjob termination. To address this problem, we present in this paper DGMonitor, a monitoring tool to build a global, accurate and continuous view of real resource utilization for desktop grids based on sandboxing techniques. Our monitoring tool provides unobtrusive and reliable performance measures, uses a simple performance data model and is easy to use. Our work demonstrates that DGMonitor can easily take over the monitoring of large desktop grids (up to 12000 workers) maintaining low load in terms of resource consumption due to the monitoring process (less than 0.1%) on desktop PCs. Although we use DGMonitor with the Entropia DGrid platform, it can be easily integrated in other desktop grids and its data can be used as an information source for existing information services for performance tuning and scheduling optimization. Keywords: Performance monitoring and profiling, desktop grids, sandboxing techniques, distributed computing.Pre-2018 CSE ID: CS2003-077