Passive, domain-independent, end-to-end message passing performance monitoring to support adaptive applications in MSHN

The Management System for Heterogeneous Networks (MSHN) is a system for managing a set of distributed resources. Integral to MSHN is the maintenance of status information concerning the resources available on those systems. The paper focuses on monitoring the end-to-end performance of message passing. The method used to gather this information is subject to three constraints: (1) the implementation must not require any changes to the operating system; (2) modifications to the application code must be minimized; and (3) the overhead imposed by the information gathering mechanism should not be excessive. We examined eight tools and application components, both commercial and research, that attempt to measure end-to-end message passing performance (W. Hayes-Roth and L. Erman, 1994; J. Kresho, 1997; C. Lee et al., 1998; N. Spring, 1997; R. Wolski et al., 1997).