Internet Mapping Status

Internet Mapping

The main project I worked on in summary 1998 at Bell Labs was mapping and visualizing the Internet. Bill Cheswick was my mentor for the project there, and I've taken a more permanent job with Lumeta, where I continue to work on this and other projects. An `article' (which is to say two pages, most of it a picture) appeared in the Dec 1998 issue of Wired magazine. Bill Cheswick has a pretty good description up on his own web page of the Internet Mapping Project.

My current toying is adding the third dimension to the picture, which is both coming along well and very broken. The main problem I'm running into is that you really can't use all of the space, since the inside is hidden by the things around it, and I haven't yet fixed that problem. However, I do have some nice VRML files of what things are beginning to look like. Bear in mind that these are not even the entired mapped network, but a relatively small portion of the 73,363 nodes the data set I'm using has.

All of the following files are written in VRML, so you'll need a VRML viewer to look at them. I'll also add the caveat that I am just learning to use VRML, so I don't always do things the simplest way.

Note for Cosmo Player 2.1 users: Path.wrl does not seem to work. Looking at the specifications, my VRML seems to be correct, so I think it's the viewer. It apparently can't keep up with the ViewPoint changes.

For more information on this or other Internet mapping efforts, please consult the Internet Mapping Project's home page.

The above picture is a `Depth 4' representation, with balls added at nodes for clarity.