Thinking back to the first paper we read when studying applications, a paper entitled "End-to-End Internet Packet Dynamics," it seemed like it had nothing to do with the application layer at all. Measuring the internet sounds more like a transport problem, but I have discovered it is actually an application problem, and an important one at that. Measuring the internet is essential to understanding the shifting dynamics of its usage, not to mention that similar techniques can be used in mapping the internet.
Our lab in class has also been focused on the idea of Internet Measurement, and it has been interesting to see how such a small program, when applied to a huge simulation (in this case PlanetLab) can create so much data. We're collecting almost a million data points by pinging 100 computers from 100 different computers 10 times, still small compared to the 500 odd million collected by Microsoft Research to test Htrae, but bigger than anything I've ever done (especially since I've never left code running for more than 20 minutes, let alone 2 days straight).
On a side note, it was fun to see a few game related papers come up during the discussion (mainly discussing P2P gaming). Mine, on Halo, and another paper discussing how to get more players (other than the regular 16 or 32) into a single game. They discussed things such as putting more attention to those within a certain area of vision, either by proximity or through a scope, and they even factored in details such as more people focusing on a flag carrier, etc. They were apparently able to simulate 900 players in a single game with this technology, which kind of reminded me of the game MAG, which allows for 256 players in a single game, but the focus of the research was to improve performance for small areas and I'm not sure how well MAG performs when lots of players are grouped into one area (and I know that the graphical level of MAG isn't all that great).
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