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http://shum.huji.ac.il/~sorin/ccs/Dimes2003-AISB.pdf

THE IDEA

The idea is having the Net measure itself, simulate itself and foretell its own future. Instead of using a single machine to study the Internet one will use (potentially) all the machines on the Internet. The study of the Internet gives us a first opportunity to use the object of study itself, as the simulation platform.

THE METHOD

We proposed to use the Internet as the main infrastructure that will simulate itself and its future generations: r ecruit millions of nodes spread over the entire Net that:

• Perform local measurements of their Internet neighborhood
• Participate as message routing/processing elements in collective Internet experiments

One can hope to harness into the task hundreds of thousands and even millions of users and nodes in all hierarchy levels, that will contribute some of their CPU power, Internet bandwidth, and most importantly, their topological/ geographical whereabouts on the net, to the effort of monitoring and studying current days Internet on the one hand, and simulate and study its future on the other.

This can lead to the largest computer simulator ever, one that will be many scales larger than the second largest one. But this simulator will not merely be a very large one. It will also be extra-ordinary since each of its elements will be unique:

each of the elements will bring not only generic resources such as cycles, memory or bandwidth, it will be also a true representative of its local net neighborhood. For that matter, it will create a strong connection between the simulator and its object of simulation, i.e. reality.

The Tool: DIMES (Distributed Internet MEasurement and Simulation)

DIMES proposed the creation a distributed platform that enable:

• Global scale measurement of Internet graph structure, packet traffic statistics, demography
• Simulation of Internet behavior under different conditions.
• Simulation of the Internet future.

DIMES proposed creating a uniform research infrastructure to which programmable experiment nodes could be added spontaneously. Using this layer, large scale statistics aggregation efforts will be conducted. We will conduct simulations that will study both:

• the reaction of the current Internet to various irregular situations and
• the usability of concrete new ideas, algorithms and even net physical growth schemes.

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