The PerSyst Monitoring Tool

This paper presents a systemwide monitoring and analysis tool for high performance computers with several features aimed at minimizing the transport of performance data along a network of agents. The aim of the tool is to do a preliminary detection of performance bottlenecks on user applications running in HPC systems with a negligible impact on production runs. Continuous systemwide monitoring can lead to large volumes of data, if the data is required to be stored permanently to be available for queries. For system monitoring level we require to store the monitoring data synchronously. We retain the descriptive qualities by using quantiles; an aggregation with respect to the number of cores used by the application at every measuring interval. The optimization of the transport route for the performance data enables us to precisely calculate quantiles as opposed to quantile estimation.