Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash
Resurrecting bWatch
Bring It Back
When the world was dominated by dinosaurs, a new beast arose from the depths: one that relied on the Earth's community to grow and thrive. It was Beowulf. No, not the Scandinavian warrior, but an approach to high-performance computing (HPC) that uses common x86 processors, conventional Ethernet networking, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) or a parallel virtual machine (PVM), and Linux.
With Beowulf, everything was new. Previous HPC systems all had proprietary tools to manage and monitor servers (nodes) in the cluster, so the tools for Beowulf clusters had to be developed, including those to monitor clusters. During the first few years of this Clusterian period of HPC, one of the key requirements was a simple tool to monitor nodes – something simple that would give the status of all nodes in the cluster.
A visual presentation of the load on the nodes (with the uptime command), node uptime, and maybe even some memory usage would let you determine the status of a cluster with a quick glance at the screen. At that time, lots of people were experimenting with and developing clusters, so many were homemade and small: A 60-node cluster was considered large, so you would easily be able to see all of the nodes on one screen with a little scrolling.
bWatch
Python was still in early days, but Tcl/Tk was very popular. The high-level, general-purpose, interpreted and dynamic Tool Command Language (Tcl) [1] was created by John Ousterhout in the 1990s. From the name you can probably tell that it was intended to be a language for writing tools for whatever platform you were using. (I will begrudgingly admit there are more platforms than Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.) Because it was interpreted, you didn't have to change code and recompile constantly. You could just change the code and run.
Ousterhout also
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