Ganglia Introduction

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
--Jeremy S. Anderson

Ganglia provides a complete real-time monitoring and execution environment that is in use by hundreds of universities, private and government laboratories and commercial cluster implementors around the world. Ganglia is as simple to install and use on a 16-node cluster as it is to use on a 512-node cluster as has been proven by its use on multiple 500+ node clusters.

Ganglia was initially developed at the University of California, Berkeley Computer Science Division as way to link clusters across the Berkeley campus together in a logical way. Since it was developed at a university, it is completely open-source and has no proprietary components. All data is exchanged in well-defined XML and XDR to ensure maximum extensibility and portability.

The monitoring core allows you to monitor any number of host metrics in real-time. At present, the monitoring core runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, Tru64 and IRIX. There is a Windows port as well which is in beta.

Ganglia is not just a way to link nodes in a cluster together in a logical way but also a way to link clusters to other clusters. Ganglia blurs the line between clustering and distributed computing by providing for Cluster to Cluster (C2C) data exchanges which link disparate cluster resources together into a single logical framework.

More details see http://www.msg.ucsf.edu/local/ganglia/ganglia_docs/introduction.html.