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                      | shematic information flow of sinfo |  The sinfo-system is split into two parts. A demon and a user program. 1.) The demon (sinfod) distributes system information using UDP
      broadcasts on the local network. Each demon will also receive UDP
      broadcasts of all other demons and manage a list of the most
      recent informations. 2.) The user program (sinfo) connects to the demon via the local
      loop-back interface and displays the up to date informations
      using the ncurses library. 
	This scheme has the advantage that it produces minimal network
	load.
	If each node broadcasts it's information in a cooperative
	manner, the network load is O(N), where N is the number of nodes in
	your network.
	 
	Other systems to monitor your cluster load (e.g. rup(1) ) are
	using a polling scheme where every node has to ask every other node
	for the system information: In that case the network load is
	O(N**2).
	 
	The Informations broadcasted include: 
	 
                  The number of CPUs and their speed.The network node hostname, the hardware type, the host
      processor type, the operating system name, the operating system
      release, the operating system version. - Everything uname
      provides.The uptime of the system.The load average.The current load - split by user, nice, system and idle
      times.The memory usage of the RAM and the swap space.The network traffic send and received by the network
      card.Informations of the TOP-5 processes. |