LCMON network traffic analysis

The Swinburne supercomputer (as of May 2007) consists of 145 x Dell Power Edge 1950 nodes, each containing 2 x quad core Clovertown processors @ 2.33 GHz 16 GB of RAM and 2 x 500 GB hard disks. LCMON 1.0 is a utility based on L3DGEWorld 2.1 which allows for real-time visualisation of the supercomputer cluster. In this report we describe several experiments conducted to model the incoming and outgoing traffic at a LCMON 1.0 server as a function of the number of clients connected. We also compare the LCMON traffic when the clients move around the LCMON world as opposed to when they are stationary. Some latter experiments revealed we can reduce the time required to update all 145 avatars in the LCMON world from 63 seconds to 16 seconds by sending metrics to the LCMON (L3DGEWorld) server at a faster rate. We also demonstrate that changes in avatar’s metrics are responsible for increases in the LCMON server to client data rate however after the clients have been informed of the changes the data rate reduces.