After more than a decade we finally got around to redesigning the HPC dashboard. Initially created as a way for sysadmins to monitor MPI software the dashboard used simplistic images strung together in html. This worked fine while there were relatively few nodes, but as the cluster increased in size the html became massive and slow. The new interface uses ImageMagick to stitch png files together presenting only single large images, and while these may still look like explosions in a pixel factory, they are cleaner in appearance and load faster.
The image file creation is separate from the dashboard functionality, and hence the frequency of updates can be increased without placing load on the head node. This is in anticipation of our new cluster which we hope to roll out in 2023.
Dashboard in 2011
Dashboard in 2022