Real Time Monitor of Grid job executions

In this paper we describe the architecture and operation of the Real Time Monitor (RTM), developed by the Grid team in the HEP group at Imperial College London. This is arguably the most popular dissemination tool within the EGEE [1] Grid. Having been used, on many occasions including GridFest and LHC inauguration events held at CERN in October 2008. The RTM gathers information from EGEE sites hosting Logging and Bookkeeping (LB) services. Information is cached locally at a dedicated server at Imperial College London and made available for clients to use in near real time. The system consists of three main components: the RTM server, enquirer and an apache Web Server which is queried by clients. The RTM server queries the LB servers at fixed time intervals, collecting job related information and storing this in a local database. Job related data includes not only job state (i.e. Scheduled, Waiting, Running or Done) along with timing information but also other attributes such as Virtual Organization and Computing Element (CE) queue – if known. The job data stored in the RTM database is read by the enquirer every minute and converted to an XML format which is stored on a Web Server. This decouples the RTM server database from the client removing the bottleneck problem caused by many clients simultaneously accessing the database. This information can be visualized through either a 2D or 3D Java based client with live job data either being overlaid on to a 2 dimensional map of the world or rendered in 3 dimensions over a globe map using OpenGL.