W3bmon: a real-world application of W3bworld

Overview

W3bmon with no input data

W3bmon was made as a prototype application of W3bworld. It aims to emulate the functionality of LCMon - a visualisation of Swinburne's supercomputer cluster.

W3bworld is being developed as an in-browser application, allowing for increasing cross-platform support as HTML5 is built in to more and more browsers. Support for WebGL is slowly creeping in to mobile devices, with two third party browsers for Android supporting it.

In W3bmon, the user can fly around the map and view the state of each node in the supercomputer cluster. Each node in the supercomputer is represented by a single object floating in space with varying visual characteristics. Rotation signifies CPU load, size signifies memory usage and bounce height signifies network traffic.

Demonstration

There is an operational live demonstration of W3bmon . W3bworld, and subsequently W3bmon, is a drop-in replacement for L3DGEWorld. In Figure 3 of LCMon's overview, W3bworld takes the place of both the L3DGEWorld Engine and the L3DGEWorld clients.

Downloads

W3bmon is included with the release of W3bworld. W3bworld can be downloaded from the W3bworld downloads page.

Installing W3bmon

W3bmon has identical system requirements to W3bworld.

First, install W3bworld. Then, set the `elementsFilename` variable in w3bworld.js to the filename of the W3bmon position file - "elements-lcmon.txt" is included and contains the position information for each of the elements. The "elements-lcmon.txt" file can be customised by editing and running "genLcMon.py". The code to add in the Swinburne logo is left commented out in the gfx.pde file of the W3bworld release.

The original LCMon included the GPoll tool, which polled the GreenMachine supercomputer for data. GPoll is included in the W3bmon package. It has been compiled successfully under FreeBSD 8.2 (using gmake) and Windows (using Cygwin and make). The source is included.

Using GPoll:
./gpoll -c greenmachineIPs.conf -a 127.0.0.1 -p 27960

A python implementation of GPoll is also included. It's usage is as follows:
python gpoll.py -a 127.0.0.1 -p 27960

Note that GPoll fetches the data from an internal Swinburne data source, and will only successfully update from the 136.186.0.0/16 network. The included greenmachine.XML file provides an example copy of the data sourced from the supercomputer, and this can be used in the Python GPoll by swapping commenting out the network initiation code and uncommenting the file open lines.

A top-down view of W3bmon

Program Leader

Grenville Armitage

Program Members

Chris Holman