 Researchers at UC San Diego’s Supercomputer Center (SDSC) have snapped a moment of time on the Web. The image was created by Young Hyun and Bradley Huffaker, researchers with SDSC’s Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) and was on display in the exhibit Design and the Elastic Mind at the MOMA in New York from February 24 through May 12. The SDSC visualization depicts round-trip times of data packets sent from a Web site in Herndon, Va., to hundreds of thousand of nodes on the Internet and back again. It was generated using a visualization tool created by Hyun called “Walrus,” which allows researchers to view large data sets using 3-D hyperbolic geometry.
“Our dependence on the Internet as a vital part of our lives has grown much faster than our ability to understand its underlying structure, performance limits, and overall dynamics,” says kc claffy, a director at SDSC. But at least the “Walrus” has provided us a fleeting artistic rendering of our world’s burgeoning Webbrain.
For more on CAIDA go to: www.caida.org.
Contributors to Making Waves: Mario Aguilera, '89, Rex Graham, Raymond Hardie, Robert Monroe, Neda Oreizy, '08, Doug Ramsey
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