HiperView: real-time monitoring of dynamic behaviors of high-performance computing centers

This paper presents HiperView, a visual analytics framework monitoring and characterizing the health status of high-performance computing systems through a RESTful interface in real time. The primary objectives of this visual analytical system are: (1) to provide a graphical interface for tracking the health status of a large number of data center hosts in real-time statistics, (2) to help users visually analyze unusual behavior of a series of events that may have temporal and spatial correlation, and (3) to assist in performing preliminary troubleshooting and maintenance with a visual layout that reflects the actual physical locations. Two use cases were analyzed in detail to assess the effectiveness of the HiperView on a medium-scale, Redfish-enabled production high-performance computing system with a total of 10 racks and 467 hosts. The visualization apparatus has been proven to offer the necessary support for system automation and control. Our framework’s visual components and interfaces are designed to potentially handle a larger-scale data center of thousands of hosts with hundreds of various health services per host.