Monitoring with Ganglia

Preface

In 1999, I packed everything I owned into my car for a cross-country trip to begin my new job as Staff Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley Computer Science Department. It was an optimistic time in my life and the country in general. The economy was well into the dot-com boom and still a few years away from the dot-com bust. Private investors were still happily throwing money at any company whose name started with an “e-” and ended with “.com”.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) was also funding ambitious digital projects like the National Partnership for Advanced Computing Infrastructure (NPACI). The goal of NPACI was to advance science by creating a pervasive national computational infrastructure called, at the time, “the Grid.” Berkeley was one of dozens of universities and affiliated government labs committed to connecting and sharing their computational and storage resources.

When I arrived at Berkeley, the Network of Workstations (NOW) project was just coming to a close. The NOW team had clustered together Sun workstations using Myrinet switches and specialized software to win RSA key-cracking challenges and break a number of sort benchmark records. The success of NOW led to a following project, the Millennium Project, that aimed to support even larger clusters built on x86 hardware and distributed across the Berkeley campus.

Ganglia exists today because of the generous support by the NSF for the NPACI project and the Millennium Project. Long-term investments ...