New and easy ways to view the Grid
Wed 24 Oct 2007
Keen eyed watchers of the GridPP website will have noticed links to two new resources on the front page. The first of these is GridMap (http://gridmap.cern.ch), developed in partnership between CERN Openlab and EDS. GridMap shows information on the sites in each EGEE region, indicating both the size of resources at a site and its status. The second link is to a new GridPP status page (http://hepwww.ph.qmul.ac.uk/~lloyd/gridpp/ukgrid.html), developed by Steve Lloyd at QMUL, that shows in detail on one page what's up and what's down at each site. As well as a summary table of GStat information for each of GridPP's sites, it gives Site Availability Monitoring (SAM) test results and data specific to experiments.
GridMap was launched at the recent EGEE'07 conference by its developers, Max Bohm and Rolf Kubli. It provides an easy-to-understand top level view of EGEE's infrastructure using 'treemaps'. A 'treemap' displays data as groups of rectangles that can be arranged, sized and coloured to graphically represent the data. In the case of GridMap, a large rectangle is filled with smaller rectangles representing, for example, each EGEE region, which in turn are filled with rectangles representing each of the sites.
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The size of the rectangles tells you about the number of CPUs or running jobs at a site, with
details shown when you hover over the site. And each rectangle is coloured, red, orange or
green, to indicate, say, SAM test results or site availability. Options include showing SAM
results for the LHC VOs, the availability of services such as CEs or SEs, sites grouped as
Tier-1s and Tier-2s, and data from GStat or the BDII. As the region supplying the largest amount CPU to EGEE, UKI's position is currently secure in the top left of the default GridMap - but the bigger sites are exposed as large red rectangles when their service is down. Jeremy Coles, GridPP's Production Manager, finds it a useful tool, "It is a very useful visualization that at a glance allows us to see the availability of our resources and the priority with which problems need to be addressed. I look forward to future evolutions of this display which will provide even more information and display options." . |
For more detail on the status of GridPP's sites, users can then look at the other new link, the GridPP status page. Also in vivid technicolour, this aims to show the status of the whole UK Grid on one page, pulling data from sources such as GStat, SAM tests results and current sites excluded under Freedom of Choice for Resources. It also tells you which of the UK's 5 RBs and two BDIIs are up or down, and displays a summary of Steve Lloyd's ATLAS tests (see news item http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/news/-1182165930.719161.wlg 'Grid usability on the up'.)
The new page was developed from Steve's original summary page of the ATLAS tests. Steve explains, "I thought there was a need for a page that pulled together the results of all these tests in one place, so that people using and responsible for the sites can easily see what's working and what's not. As the page develops, I plan to add the SAM test results for the LHCb and CMS VOs. It also includes some information pop-ups, that tell you what each of the tests does and where the information comes from."
For those looking for the two links previously on the GridPP front page, to the storage accounting site and the LCG map, these are now found on the deployment page
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