Beowulf/Cluster Programs

xmlsysd

xmlsysd is a daemon that provides systems statistics to remote clients for monitoring purposes.

wulfstat

wulfstat is a simple ncurses/tty client for xmlsysd that presents a variety of useful views of a cluster in scrollable tty windows.

wulflogger

wulflogger is another xmlsysd client that presents the same views of a cluster a pure tty/stdout display. This is easy to log or parse in e.g. a perl script for web or other display.

wulfweb

wulfweb is a perl script based on wulflogger that builds a simple html table of a cluster that automatically refreshes after a selected delay. It is alpha to early beta -- only the load average view works -- but this view works quite well. With wulfweb anybody with a browser can monitor cluster status and load.

yum

Seth Vidal's yum (yellow dog updater, modified) is a crucially important tool permitting the near complete automation of package management on RPM based installations. This tool is valuable in the context of managing any LAN, very much including NOW/COW type clusters (clusters built from a custom workstation configuration).

cpu_rate

cpu_rate is a microbenchmark shell that encapsulates a number of useful and interesting benchmarks including (for example) a variant of stream, the savage benchmark, and some "raw" memory speed benchmarks.

rshbench

rshbench is a trivial benchmark of remote shell programs. For most people this will be pretty useless, as using ssh is (in my opinion) a no-brainer, given its sub-second overhead.

memtest

This is a short paper on memtest, crosslisted with Talks. I wrote memtest to play with benchmarking memory bandwidth, specifically to be able to see for myself the "cost" of random access versus streaming access for memory on various architectures. memtest is being swallowed whole by cpu_rate above, though, with its superior timing harness. The graphs on this page, however, are worth preserving so I'm leaving the page active for the time being.