An Agent Based Framework to Monitor and Control High Performance Data Transfers

We present a distributed agent based system used to monitor, configure and control complex, large scale data transfers in the wide area network. The localhost information service agent (LISA) is a lightweight dynamic service that provides complete system and applications monitoring, is capable to dynamically configure system parameters and can help in optimizing distributed applications. As part of the MonALISA (monitoring agents in a large integrated services architecture) system, LISA is an end host agent capable to collect any type of monitoring information, to distribute them, and to take actions based on local or global decision units. The system has been used for the bandwidth challenge at supercomputing 2006 to coordinate global large scale data transfers using fast data transfer (FDT) application between hundreds of servers distributed on major grid sites involved in processing high energy physics data for the future large hadron collider experiments.