[Swift-devel] plotting using gkrellm

[Ioan Raicu]

Hi all,
I have been thinking about how to plot performance data from Falkon at 
runtime while experiments are running.  Initially, I tried ploticus and 
a simple web server, which would regenerate plots every 60 seconds, but 
it was a fragile solution, which didn't always work well. I have always 
liked how the gkrellm monitor looked and performed, and started thinking 
about what API it might have. After 5 min of searching through google, I 
found a plug-in for it that allows you to read an arbitrary text file 
and plot numerical values by gkrellm :)  After a few hours with fiddling 
with the format of the log files to be read by gkrellm, and the 
appearance of gkrellm, here is what I have:
http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~iraicu/projects/Falkon/plots/Falkon-1M-gkrellm.jpg
where running 1M tasks, of 60 seconds each, on an emulated BG/P with 
160K CPUs. The graph represents about 8 minutes of real time, in which 
the experiment started from scratch, and completed.

Since it was relatively little effort, and the results are quite nice 
(especially for demos, I am thinking of SC), I think it would be nice if 
Swift tried to export some of its log info in the right format to be 
able to view the data in gkrellm in real time as the experiment progresses.

Here is an example of the log format, which takes the first value of the 
last line in the falkon-log.txt file, and creates a new file 
gkrellm-log.txt with the right formated log, ready for gkrellm to read 
with the fchart plugin (http://lasr.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/gkrellm-fchart.html):
        tail -n 1 falkon-log.txt | awk '
        {
        printf($1 "\n");
        printf($1 "\n");
        printf("NORMAL\n");
        printf($1 "\n");
        printf("!!TOOLTIP!!\n");
        printf("!!EOF!!\n");
        }' > gkrellm-log.tmp
        cp gkrellm-log.tmp gkrellm-log.txt

I simply have this code in a while loop that goes on forever, and sleeps 
1 second between iterations.

Cheers,
Ioan

-- 
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Ioan Raicu
Ph.D. Candidate
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Distributed Systems Laboratory
Computer Science Department
University of Chicago
1100 E. 58th Street, Ryerson Hall
Chicago, IL 60637
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Email: iraicu at cs.uchicago.edu
Web:   http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/~iraicu
http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Incubator/Falkon
http://dsl-wiki.cs.uchicago.edu/index.php/Main_Page
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