Bonn 2020 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 10: Instrumentation II

HK 10.2: Talk

Monday, March 30, 2020, 16:45–17:00, J-HS D

Debugging as addition to Monitoring of Compute Clusters — •Alexander Adler and Udo Kebschull — Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Monitoring is an indispensible tool for the operation of any large installment of grid or cluster computing. Usually, monitoring is configured to collect a small amount of data, just enough to enable detection of abnormal conditions. Once detected, the abnormal condition is handled by gathering all information from the affected components. This data is processed by querying it in a manner similar to a database. This contribution shows how the metaphor of a debugger (for software applications) can be transferred to a compute cluster. The concepts of variables, assertions and breakpoints known from software debugging can be applied to monitoring by defining variables as the quantities recorded by monitoring and breakpoints as invariants formulated through these variables. It is found that embedding fragments of a data extracting and reporting tool such as the UNIX tool awk facilitates very concise notations for commonly used variables since tools like AWK are designed to process large event streams (in textual representations) with bounded memory. Additionally, it is found that a functional notation similar to both the pipe notation used in the UNIX shell and the pointfree style used in functional programming facilitates concise combinations of variables that commonly occur when formulating breakpoints.