Peermon: A peer-to-peer network monitoring tool

Peermon: A peer-to-peer network monitoring tool

Stephen Dini and Tia Newhall

This summer I worked on Peermon, a peer-to-peer network monitoring tool. I was extending the work started by Janis Libeks and Ross Greenwood and making it into a releasable product. Peermon is a resource monitoring system for general purpose Unix local area networks. It is primarily designed to monitor system resources on a single LAN but could also be deployed on several LANs where some inter-LAN resource sharing is supported. Compared with the traditional client-server approach to monitoring systems, Peermon's peer-to-peer design makes it easily scalable and fault tolerant as the bottle-neck imposed by the server in the other approach is by-passed.

My work this summer was focused on creating a release version of peermon. I worked on rewriting most of the code and introducing optimizations wherever possible. I also created an extensible interface on top of peermon that makes it easier to write and removes duplications in programs that use peermon data. Following up on the creation of this interface, I rewrote the two client applications we currently have: smarterSSH and autoMPIgen. These client applications use Peermon data and are explained in detail on the peermon page.