System and Performance Monitoring on Diskless PC Clusters

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the experiments of monitoring on SLIM and DRBL diskless PC clusters. We constructed the performance experimentations by using 16 computing nodes and only one hard disk. We used LAM/MPI and PVM to run the matrix multiplication program in order to evaluate their performance. We also used spm2 and ntop to monitoring the system status during performance evaluation. As the result, we can find that the network loading of SLIM is less than DRBL even though the performance result of DRBL is better than SLIM. Maybe this is because the DRBL use NFS to mount everything which the nodes needed. We can realize that if we want to construct a high-performance diskless Linux cluster. We should take care of the free space of main memory and the mounting method of file systems.