GridPP’s Real Time Monitor steps into the 3rd dimension

The Real Time Monitor has been given a makeover, with a 3D upgrade developed by GridPP’s Gidon Moont, based at Imperial College London. The new monitor was launched at last week’s All Hands Meeting in Nottingham, and this week at EGEE’06 in Geneva. It is now available for download from http://gridportal.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/rtm/

The new 3D system gathers information from resource brokers around the world, and using images from NASA’s Blue Marble Project, presents a visualisation of the Grid at work.

The old Real Time Monitor was an applet with no magnification and therefore had little room to accommodate the increasing number of sites and geographical spread of Grid users. Gidon’s new system includes a zoom and so has the advantage of being able to plot sites at accurate locations. “On the old monitor you can’t see all the London sites accurately as they would always be on top of one another,” he says. “This new one allows you to zoom in, so even if they are on top of each other when looking at the whole globe, you can get in close and look at each site individually.”

Another important addition is the use of the Berkely Database Information Index to automatically discover and plot new sites that join the Grid. As before, the view can be requested to show just the activity of a single Virtual Organisation, and has an option to show just the sites of regional infrastructures connected to the EGEE Grid, such as EELA (Extending the EGEE infrastructure to Latin America) or SEE-GRID.

By clicking on each site, users can view lists of resource brokers, computing elements and jobs, which are also fully sortable. “By monitoring this data we can get a general feel of how busy and geographically dispersed the Grid is,” says Gidon. “It is a very useful way of seeing that the Grid already works at a large scale.” The new RTM was a star of the show at both the All Hands Meeting (see GridPP news article https://www.gridpp.ac.uk/news/-1159202663.640248.wlg) and EGEE’06, with several rounds of VIPs expressing their admiration.

The upgrade can be downloaded at http://gridportal.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/rtm/. The existing applet will continue to be supported. For more details, email: lcg-monitor@imperial.ac.uk

Thanks to Helen Thomson for reporting.