A hierarchical and distributed monitoring system in interprocess communications

A hierarchical and distributed performance monitoring tool for a rapid prot otyping system for distributed algorithms is presented. The monitoring syst em consists of a hierarchy of monitoring units distributed over the process or nodes. The units are partitioned into several conditionally independent groups, each of which has a group leader unit. Monitoring data are recorded by each individual unit and are collected and processed by the group leade rs. The global picture of program behaviour is formed by the top-level unit of the hierarchy, resulting from a sequence of integrations of lower-level , partially processed data. This distributed, hierarchical nature of the mo nitoring system architecture offers substantial improvements in the efficie ncy of processing monitoring data. Furthermore, the architecture lends itse lf to a parallel implementation. Extensive experiments have been undertaken to make a comparison in performance between the proposed monitoring system architecture on different network topologies and a conventional, centralis ed monitoring system. Results show that the distributed monitoring system i s scalable and that there is a significant performance improvement compared with a centralised system.