My friend and coworker Jesse Becker has penned (err, typed) an article for Linux Magazine on using open source tools to monitor a High Performance Computing cluster from collecting data, parsing it, displaying it, and using it. Here's a brief excerpt, but check out the whole article.

The amount of data collected in even a small cluster can quickly become unwieldy, and making sense of it is the other half of "monitoring" (and indeed, the whole point!). As the saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words."

The article is useful for more than just monitoring HPC clusters. If you're looking to collect and present any sort of data, there are useful tips and tricks for doing so.