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The Back Cover: Cichlid Visualization of the vBNS Network
back-cover
C ichlid is a software toolkit, created by undergraduate student Jeff Brown of the NLANR Measurement and Network Analysis team at SDSC, for real-time visualization of remote data sets. In several types of high-quality 3-D visualizations, users can view, explore, and interact with data sets as the information changes with time. This is oneof an animation; moving traffic packets (small cubes) indicate traffic density and flow rate. Cichlid is designed with remote data generation and machine independence in mind; data is transmitted via TCP from any number of sources to the visualization client, which displays the data concurrently. Cichlid is part of the effort by the NLANR team at SDSC to develop and extend a network analysis infrastructure and derive a better understanding of the Internet, with a focus on NSF's high-performance networking community. This includes passive measurements based on analysis of packet header traces to derive workload profiles, active measurements that probe service properties, information from participating servers, and Internet routing information. For more on NLANR at SDSC, see the story on page 11. *