| dc.description.abstract | Grid computing enables the selection and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically
distributed resources as a single unified computing resource, for solving large scale compute
and data intensive computing applications.
As with any computer system an important task within a grid is monitoring. The ability
to monitor distributed resources is crucial to high performance computation. Amongst
other things, it allows one to evaluate behaviour, optimize behaviour, discover and diagnose
problems or faults.
The objective of this research was to design a framework that would provide a generic
template to allow for ad-hoc monitoring experiments with external instruments in a grid
environment. The template allows for the information captured by external instruments,
either hardware or software, to be accessed through a grid information system. Monitoring
instruments, in general, create a huge amount of monitoring data that is often stored in raw
log files. The sheer size of the data generated makes it unsuitable for direct insertion into an
information system. The idea of the framework is to make this data accessible through an
information system, whilst allowing the data to remain in-situ.
A demonstrator of the framework was also to be implemented as part of this research.
To accomplish this, first the central component of the framework, the interface to the grid
information system, in this case R-GMA, which is a relational implementation of the Global
Grid Forum’s Grid Monitoring Architecture, developed within the EU DataGrid project, had
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to be designed and implemented. This resulted in the development of a new type of R-GMA
producer, the Canonical Producer.
The proposed framework demonstrator was a network tracer, NetTracer, that would allow
access to monitoring data obtained from a set of example network monitoring instruments
through R-GMA. The instruments chosen support the tracing of two network interconnect
technologies, Ethernet using Tcpdump, a software network packet capture application, and
SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface), using a (hardware) SCI trace instrument.
An additional, and valuable, contribution was the initial design and implementation of
a Grid-wide Intrusion Detection System, the design of which evolved from the extension
of NetTracer to support a third network monitoring tool, Snort, a network-based intrusion
detection system.
The research was successful in its objectives. The framework, SANTA-G, was designed,
and NetTracer, the framework demonstrator, shows that is a viable concept. The research has
contributed to three major grid projects. The Canonical Producer, the enabling technology
for the framework, is now part of the R-GMA system. The initial implementation of NetTracer
was developed within the EU CrossGrid project, and forms part of its grid monitoring
system. NetTracer, and a prototype of the Grid-wide Intrusion Detection System, are also
being used by Grid-Ireland, the national computational grid of Ireland, in order to monitor
network activity on, and the state of security of, its sites. | en |
