UPDATE: AMP data collection ceased early September 2006,except for measurements between 16 nodes as part of a demonstration for the PRAGMA project. We expect this measurement to end mid-October 2006. The AMP data collected in approximately the last 3 months of operation of the AMP mesh will be available from this web server (http://amp.nlanr.net/) for the forseeable future.

Starting July 2006, CAIDA, a well established networking research organization based at SDSC, took over operational stewardship for all NLANR machines and data. The National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) Project has officially ended. The funding for the NLANR project expired June 30, 2006 and the National Science Foundation has no plans to continue support.

SDSC believes that a lot of the NLANR data and resources may still offer value to the network research and development community, and might help support other forms of research not envisioned in the original NLANR proposal. Since some of the equipment is too old to maintain, CAIDA will do a careful audit, gracefully decommission obsolete hardware and data, and attempt to apply the remaining resources to projects of similar intent and spirit. As we perform this audit in the next few weeks, we will keep the community informed of any changes planned to operations of the machines at the sites. Hosting sites will have the prerogative at any time to decline participation in the reincarnation of any NLANR equipment at their site, but we hope sites will find our proposed use of sufficient relevance and merit to continue hosting a measurement platform.

If sites have questions or comments on these changes, or input regarding future measurement experiments, the AMP infrastructure or AMP data, please send them to nlanr-info@caida.org.
What follows is the original AMP NLANR webpage.

Active Measurement Project (AMP)

The Active Measurement Project (AMP) has a joint research/engineering focus with site-to-site active measurements and analyses conducted between campuses connected by high performance networks. The data collected by AMP is proving to be a valuable resource for network analysis to study the network and derive performance models for various aspects of Internet traffic.

The AMP monitors measure the "heartbeat" of the high performance connection (HPC) networks, dissecting the networks in over 15,000 ways every minute. Because the performance of AMP monitors is well known, and coverage is so extensive, the monitoring mesh allows engineers to quickly identify the location, extent, and duration of network events. This gives the engineers a head start on the road to a solution. The long term history kept by AMP also allows engineers, designers, and researchers to see the impact of increasing traffic, and improved network design and capacity on the long term behavior of the network.

The first AMP monitor deployment took place in December 1998. Now approximately 150 AMP monitors are deployed and take site-to-site measurements on high-speed research networks throughout the United States, as well as at strategic sites in other countries. The current AMP architecture has two meshes, the HPC mesh (approximately 140 sites) and an international mesh (which includes all international sites and a small subset of the HPC mesh). Each uses a full mesh, with each monitor testing to all the others in the mesh. Across all sites, round trip time (RTT), packet loss, topology, and throughput (user/event driven) are currently measured. Recent expansion and development of AMP has included monitor deployments at GigaPop and backbone sites and development of a GigE interface for AMP.

Stars represent sites in the AMP mesh; currently about 150 active measurement monitors are deployed.

AMP has led the way to a new approach to network measurement (dense coverage with simple monitors). Consequently, there are a growing number of organizations that realize they would benefit from a performance measurement system like AMP. The current goals for AMP include moving it into new domains, such as other national meshes, deeper into campuses, more international sites, and developing a meta measurement system. To facilitate these needs of the community, the major exercise of reimplementing the original AMP software into a package easily installed on a variety of hardware and software bases is underway. Significant progress has been made.

The AMP package will be made freely available; however, we do not intend the various users of AMP to be totally independent from one another. We will encourage and promote a meta-measurement system, formed from select cross-project measurements, thus creating measurement linkages between projects. We will also manage the host to host testing (locating AMP software only monitors on an HPC machine).

IPMP

Currently, there is no good way to make an Internet measurement that divides the delay into components related to different parts of the network and its users. NLANR researchers are proposing a new measurement protocol (the IP Measurement Protocol or just IPMP) which allows Internet devices to insert time stamps into data as it moves through the network, creating an "audit trail" for Internet data. This trail is measured in thousandths of a second and must be created at speeds that allow hundreds of millions of Internet data packets to be processed each second. In addition to designing the protocol, researchers are utilizing it in the AMP network measurement mesh and on wireless networks. They are also offering the protocol for standardisation by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

It is hoped that this protocol will give users, network operators and Internet based service providers a common language with which to communicate performance issues, validate their claims and compete with one another.

IPv6

The NLANR AMP is collecting IPv6 performance data between a mesh of twelve active monitors [SURFnet will be added shortly]. Nine of these monitors are located in the U.S.; The front cover image shows their locations, and the widespread coverage included. Three additional monitors are placed internationally, one in Australia (AARnet), one in Japan (APAN), and the third in the Netherlands (SURFnet).

This IPv6 graph shows the path change between amp-gatech and amp-wisc. Specifically, it displays which components of the path changed over the course of the day.

The aim of the AMP IPv6 project is to perform measurements which enable systems administrators and engineers to monitor infrastructure improvements to the IPv6 component of HPC networks, relative to the performance seen by IPv4 paths, as they occur. This project was initiated at the request of two site administrators where we already had AMP monitors as part of the AMP mesh (~150 active measurement monitors). We have been collecting IPv6 performance data since October 2002.

see link to more info... more info...