Big Brother monitors system and network services for availability. Your current network status is displayed on a color-coded web page in near-real time. When problems are detected, you're immediately notified by e-mail, pager, or text messaging.

Big Sister is a clone of Sean MacGuire's Big Brother. Big Sister can monitor networked systems, provide a simple view of the current network status, generate alarms on status changes, generate a history of status changes, and interoperate with other Big Sister or Big Brother instances or foreign network monitors (such as HP Openview).

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.

PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software package that permits a heterogeneous collection of Unix and/or Windows computers hooked together by a network to be used as a single large parallel computer. Thus large computational problems can be solved more cost effectively by using the aggregate power and memory of many computers. The software is very portable. The source, which is available free thru netlib, has been compiled on everything from laptops to CRAYs.

PVM enables users to exploit their existing computer hardware to solve much larger problems at minimal additional cost. Hundreds of sites around the world are using PVM to solve important scientific, industrial, and medical problems in addition to PVM's use as an educational tool to teach parallel programming. With tens of thousands of users, PVM has become the de facto standard for distributed computing world-wide.

MPI is a library specification for message-passing, proposed as a standard by a broadly based committee of vendors, implementors, and users.

HPL is a software package that solves a (random) dense linear system in double precision (64 bits) arithmetic on distributed-memory computers. It can thus be regarded as a portable as well as freely available implementation of the High Performance Computing Linpack Benchmark.

The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is a tool to monitor the traffic load on network-links. MRTG generates HTML pages containing graphical images which provide a LIVE visual representation of this traffic. MRTG is based on Perl and C and works under UNIX and Windows NT.

If you know MRTG, you can think of RRDtool as a reimplementation of MRTGs graphing and logging features. Magnitudes faster and more flexible than you ever thought possible. RRD is a system to store and display time-series data (i.e. network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, server load average). It stores the data in a very compact way that will not expand over time, and it presents useful graphs by processing the data to enforce a certain data density. It can be used either via simple wrapper scripts (from shell or Perl) or via frontends that poll network devices and put a friendly user interface on it.