Accelerated Real-time Network Monitoring and Profiling at Scale using OSU INAM

Designing a scalable real-time monitoring and profiling tool with low overhead for network analysis and introspection capable of capturing all relevant network events is a challenging task. Newer set of challenges come out as HPC systems are becoming larger and users are expecting to have better capabilities like real-time profiling at fine granularity. We take up this challenge by redesigning OSU INAM and making it capable to gather, store, retrieve, visualize, and analyze network metrics for large and complex HPC clusters. The enhanced OSU INAM tool provides scalability, low overhead and fined-granularity InfiniBand port counter inquiry and fabric discovery for HPC users, system administrators, and HPC developers. Our experiments show that, for a cluster of 1,428 nodes and 114 switches, the proposed design can gather fabric metrics at very fine (sub-second) granularity and discovers the complete network topology in approximately 5 minutes. The proposed design has been released publicly as a part of OSU INAM Tool and is available for free download and use from the project website.