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Resource monitoring for remote applications

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Article from ADMIN 41/2017

By Jeff Layton

Remora combines profiling and system monitoring to help you get to the root of application problems by revealing its use of resources.

Monitoring systems and profiling applications have long been a passion of mine. In the case of monitoring [1], I've taken the point of view that the system administrator should focus on monitoring the system as a whole and on keeping track of system behavior over time by asking questions such as: "Is it performing as it should?" and "Are the resources being utilized as much as possible?"

In the case of profiling [2], I have focused on individual applications, either serial or parallel [3]. Profiling usually means trying to understand application resource usage patterns by answering questions such as: "How does the application use the CPU?" and "How does the application perform I/O?" Answering these questions are some of the goals of application profiling.

Remora

A very useful HPC tool named REMORA (REsource MOnitoring for Remote Applications; hereafter referred to as Remora ) [4] from the University of Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) [5] combines monitoring and profiling to provide information about an application. Unlike pure system monitoring or general profiling, it is focused on the user and the user's application , and the results are intended to help the user understand the resources that were used to run an application.

Remora is not strictly a profiler, and it's not strictly a monitoring tool in the traditional sense of monitoring the entire cluster. Rather, it provides per-node and per-job resource utilization data. This data can be used to understand how the application performs on the system. As a result, changes can be made to certain

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