Israel's News & Views BlogAt the 10th Annual Israel Internet Society event I met a couple of great guys from Tel Aviv University, Dr. Yuval Shavitt and Eran Shir. They were showing in the main floor area of the show and as soon as I saw them, I liked them. Two guys with there faces buried in laptops, showing people this cool system (people slightly stunned), surrounded by what looks like weather and satellite images of the Internet. In short, my kind of people! I walked over and we started talking geek. It was great.
Turns out they are part of the Dimes project where they laid out a network of sensors (8,000 to date and growing) that provides an Ultrasound or EKG of the internet showing with a variety of visual tools how the web is wired. It’s an amazing thing to see the applications that display the massive amounts of data collected from their sample of volunteers. Oh, and the nice thing is that it has absolutely nothing to do with Google (Yet…).
Even for a layperson with an interest in the Internet, the idea of being able to map, measure and get a real image of the Internet and the IP communication network pulsating and looking very real, is amazing. Continued research will allow to identify in real time, hot spots, shifts in bandwidth or traffic, and maybe even virus attacks like DOS attacks and I hope these projects get the attention they deserve.
Visit the site and look at some of the visual displays and reports they developed. You can see articles that were written about the Dimes project here. Most important, join this experiment. You can download their application and its for a good cause.
The Dimes Project in their own words:
The Internet is one of the largest engineering projects ever built, but due to the distributed manner of its management, there is no central body that governs its growth or structure: each new network that connects to the Internet does it based on its own preferences. There is no central repository that holds the Internet structure.
Many research institutions and universities set up projects to collect the Internet connectivity. Almost all these project are based on up to a few dozens of instrumentation boxes that are placed in various locations, usually within the academic network, that send probes to track the Internet connectivity. The data collected in these projects is partial due to the Internet structure and routing, and also strongly biased due to two reasons: the location of the instrumentation boxes in the academic network, and the small number of these boxes which lead to a bias regardless of there location.
DIMES is a ground breaking project that suggested a novel approach to this problem. Instead of using a few strong reliable instrumentation boxes, DIMES is using a large number of (seemingly unreliable) light weight software agents. Volunteers from around the world are downloading a light weight application that receives measurement instructions from a central coordination center at Tel Aviv University, the measurement results are sent back to Tel Aviv University, where they are placed in a central database and combined into the most detailed Internet map ever created.
In the winter of 2005, after just over a year of operation, the DIMES community is comprised of over 400 users that installed more than 8000 agents in 85 countries around the world. The agents perform over 6 million measurements a day. But we strive to grow this community to tens of thousands.
DIMES is pioneering the integration of Internet measurements and world economic and geographical data to create a unified picture of the Internet growth using ‘external’ stimuli to explain the Internet growth.
The high quality of the DIMES data already brought many researchers from computer science, electrical engineering, and physics to use it in their research. In the near future, DIMES data will become a standard tool in Internet studies.
In addition to provide valuable data and analysis, the DIMES project team develops new application enhancements that are based on the DIMES data. A typical example is a plug-in for the Firefox browser that enables at a click of a button to select the closets mirror site for downloading large files. DIMES was featured in an article in SCIENCE Magazine (6 May 2005, p. 813), and in many articles in websites around the world.
Stay tuned for more on the ISOC 10th Annual, coming soon…
2 Comments
An amazing project. Well done
Amazing and interesting technology, I wish
I could understand all of it.
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