This project, involving a two-pronged approach to the measurement of distributed Internet applications, instruments applications and then uses these applications to collect data. Researchers investigating applications, such as multiplayer games and peer-to-peer systems, have been hampered by the lack of trace workloads. Although web server traces are extensively available, traces of these applications are not. To address these limitations, this project aims at deploying some popular applications, gather detailed traces of their behavior, and disseminate these traces to the research community. The effort involves two synergistic components: Trace collection, where modern Internet applications will be instrumented to gather application-, network-, and OS-level traces of their behavior, and Trace dissemination, where a web-based repository will be designed to disseminate the traces broadly to the research community. Trace dissemination involves repository management, and additional considerations such as privacy. The work, concentrating on instrumenting and measuring the behavior of distributed applications, focuses on: Measuring and Characterizing Networked Multiplayer Games Measuring and Characterizing Peer-to-Peers (P2P) Applications Measuring Low-Level Application Resource Usage
Broader impact:
This trace repository will serve as a resource to researchers nationwide and will enable or aid a variety of research areas such as workload modeling of Internet applications, design and performance tuning of current Internet applications, protocol design, and the design of server operating systems and Internet hosting platforms. Moreover, the trace workload will also be used in a distributed system course to help students learn about the use of measurement data in experimental computer science research.
