FAULT-TOLERANT MONITORING APPARATUS, METHOD AND SYSTEM

• US 20150032877A1
• Filed: 04/16/2014
• Published: 01/29/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 07/23/2013
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Fujitsu Limited
• Original Assignee: Fujitsu Limited
• Inventors: LI, Michael
• Granted Patent: US 10,069,698 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/224
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3006 where the computing system is distributed, e.g. networked systems, clusters, multiprocessor systems multiprogramming arrangements G06F9/46; allocation of resources G06F9/50
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3058 Monitoring arrangements for monitoring environmental properties or parameters of the computing system or of the computing system component, e.g. monitoring of power, currents, temperature, humidity, position, vibrations thermal management in cooling arrangements of a computing system G06F1/206
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3096 wherein the means or processing minimize the use of computing system or of computing system component resources, e.g. non-intrusive monitoring which minimizes the probe effect: sniffing, intercepting, indirectly deriving the monitored data from other directly available data
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/08 Monitoring or testing based on specific metrics, e.g. QoS, energy consumption or environmental parameters

Abstract

A fault-tolerant monitoring apparatus is arranged to monitor physical performance properties of a plurality of networked computing elements, each element including a processing unit and individual memory. The monitoring apparatus comprises a plurality of measurer apparatuses, each arranged to measure the physical performance properties of a single computing element, the physical performance properties being stored as local information in the individual memory of the computing element in which the measurement is made; and one or more collector apparatuses arranged to control collection of remote information representing physical performance properties from individual memory in a plurality of the computing elements; and storage of the remote physical performance information as replicate information in the individual memory of another computing element; wherein the remote physical performance information is collected using third party access.

Claims

1. A fault-tolerant monitoring apparatus arranged to monitor physical performance properties of a plurality of networked computing elements, each element comprising a processing unit and individual memory, the monitoring apparatus comprising

a plurality of measurer apparatuses, each arranged to measure the physical performance properties of a single computing element, the physical performance properties being stored as local information in the individual memory of the single computing element in which the measurement is made;

and

one or more collector apparatuses arranged to control collection of remote information representing physical performance properties from the individual memory in a plurality of the computing elements; and

storage of the remote information as replicate information in the individual memory of another computing element;

wherein the remote information is collected using third party access.

2. A monitoring apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the one or more collector apparatuses are arranged to control collection of remote data information representing data performance properties from the individual memory in the plurality of computing elements and storage of the remote data information as replicate data information in the individual memory of the other computing element;

and wherein the remote data information is collected using third party access.

3. A monitoring apparatus according to claim 1, wherein each measurer apparatus includes resistors to estimate one or more of:

voltage;

current;

power; and

energy supplied to one or more components of the computing element.

4. A monitoring apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the individual memory is volatile memory, comprising pinned RAM, RAM and a cache memory.

5. A monitoring apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the third party access is by one of remote direct memory access, RDMA, put and remote direct memory access, RDMA, get.

6. A monitoring apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the monitoring apparatus is controlled to switch on one of a collector apparatus and a measurer apparatus, in accordance with the computing elements currently used in an application.

7. A monitoring apparatus according to claim 1, wherein there is more than one collector apparatus and wherein the monitoring apparatus is controlled to activate collection by a subset of the collector apparatuses, the replicate information being thus stored in a subset of the computing elements.

8. A monitoring apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the plurality of networked computing elements forms a single computer system, the computing elements acting as nodes, each node comprising a processing unit in a form of at least one CPU, individual memory as RAM memory and a network interface controller to link to the network.

9. A monitoring apparatus according to claim 8, wherein the monitoring apparatus comprises a measurer apparatus for each node and a plurality of collector apparatuses, each collector apparatus shared between a group of nodes, and arranged to collect the remote information within the group of nodes and from nodes of other groups.

10. A monitoring apparatus according to claim 9, wherein each collector apparatus shared between a plurality of nodes is linked to each of the plurality of nodes via the network interface controller, and wherein each measurer apparatus monitors one or more of the network interface controller, individual memory and CPU in its node and is directly linked to a collector apparatus.

11. A monitoring apparatus according to claim 10, wherein the monitoring apparatus is controlled to activate measurement by a subset of the measurer apparatuses, and wherein the measurer apparatuses activated are directly linked to activated collector apparatus.

12. A monitoring apparatus according to claim 10, wherein the collector apparatus includes a controller and storage and the controller is operable to update the storage with data performance information from measurer apparatuses with which the collector apparatus is directly linked and to write information from the storage to the individual memories as location information using third party access.

13. A fault-tolerant monitoring method for monitoring physical performance properties of a plurality of networked computing elements, each element including a processing unit and an individual memory, the monitoring method comprising

measuring the physical performance properties of computing elements using measurer apparatuses and storing local information representing the physical performance properties in the individual memory of the corresponding computing elements;

and

collecting remote information representing physical performance properties from the individual memory in a particular computing element using a collector apparatus and storing the remote physical performance information as replicate information in the individual memory of another computing element;

wherein the remote physical performance information is collected using third party access.

14. A method according to claim 13, wherein the particular computing element one of fails and is deselected during execution of an application and the application one of restarts from a checkpoint and continues, omitting the particular computing element, physical performance data for the particular computing element before failure being provided by the other computing element in which the data was stored as replicate information.

15. A non-transitory computer-readable medium tangibly embodying a computer program, which when loaded onto a distributed memory computer system with a plurality of networked computing elements configures the distributed memory computer system to

measure physical performance properties of the computing elements using measurer apparatuses and to store local information representing the physical performance properties in individual memory of those computing elements;

each computing element including a processing unit and the individual memory and

to collect remote information representing the physical performance properties from the individual memory in a particular computing element using a collector apparatus and to store the remote information as replicate information in the individual memory of another computing element;

wherein the remote information is collected using third party access.

16. A computer system comprising a plurality of networked computing elements, each element including a processing unit and individual memory, the computer system including a fault-tolerant monitoring apparatus arranged to monitor physical performance properties of the networked computing elements, the monitoring apparatus comprising

a plurality of measurer apparatuses each arranged to measure the physical performance properties of a single computing element, for storage as local information in the individual memory of the particular single computing element;

and

collector apparatus arranged to collect remote information representing physical performance properties from individual memory in a plurality of the computing elements and to store the remote information as replicate information in the individual memory of another computing element;

wherein the remote information is collected using third party access.