Question about DIMES

[Bauer]

Hi people, I have been running this client on my main desktop computer for about half year or so, dont even remember. I was mostly AFK at the university while its running at home.

Now I noticed I am running it, and I tried to find out if that half year of searchign and mapping of the network was succesful and we got any interesting results, since I agreed to run it, since it was stated that the results will be open and public free of charge to anyone, yet I am unable to find any mention of results, let alone for free in the DIMES site...

Would someone clarify whats up for me please? I dont like to do work for others for free, and you will see under my username statistics I did contribute a lot of Ace and other network findings.

Thanks.

[Yoav]

Hi there

First of all let's make one thing clear, DIMES is an academic project and has no plans what so ever to charge money for the data we are collecting and producing.

Now, our current results are not being published on-line because of a few reasons:
1. The size of the database does not allow us to fetch information upon request - our database will not be able to handle the load, we are talking about selecting and joining from tables of a few billion entries.
2. Our raw data is really large, and sending this data over the web will have a significant effect on our network load.
3. We still have to implement some results exporter for the public, so that we can provide processed data (which is some sort of summary of the raw results we get) instead of raw data.

Our future solutions include:
1. DIMES planner - An online system that allows users to plan their own experiments, and get the results for those experiments. We are in the Alpha testing stage of this system.
2. A few more surprises that include a number of topologies and other cool stuff that use the DIMES data. We are in the design stage of this system.

The solution I can offer you in the meantime is to send me a private message and I'll get you the data you need.

[jcw122]

Neat Yoav! Good to hear!

[Bauer]

Thanks for the explanatory reply Yoav, it ansered all my doubts and qeustions

I am student for CS in Technion (Information Systems), so the raw information might be relevant for me in later semesters, thats why I am interested in the raw data, although right now its too early for me to make a good use of it anyway.

But in the future I will know then whom to contact, in case the processed data isnt good enough

Thanks again Yoav.

[shavitt]

Just to add to Yoav's remarks.

First we are commited to share DIMES data with the research community and the public in general.

As Yoav said, we are working on a web interface that will allow other people to directly access our databases. It is used at the moment by a group in Hungary, successfuly. It is not fully open now because we need to solve load sharing problems and prioritization of the access.

In the meanwhile, we have supplied data to a few groups worldwide: in the US, Italy, Hungary, Egypt, and Israel. We do have a few additional requests for data from the US and Switzerland which require us to do some more work in data cleaning before they can be answered.

There are already a few scientific papers and technical report, some of them by our group, that were published with DIMES data. We intend to post them in the DIMES website, soon. One example is a short paper in the ACM Comp. Comm. Rev.: http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/~shavitt/pub/CCR05.pdf

Yuval