M-Lab is a Google Summer of Code 2012 Mentoring Organization

n the spirit of collaboration that defines M-Lab, we are acting as an umbrella organization for projects mentored by three groups:

• The M-Lab core team(our ideas here)
  M-Lab is a collaborative effort aimed at empowering users, researchers, and regulators with good data on scientific performance. M-Lab was founded by Vint Cerf, Stephen Stuart, and a large consortium of academic and industry partners. It operates as a consortium, with many organizations contributing work that furthers M-Lab’s goals. In this spirit we are submitting a single M-Lab application that includes work by a number of contributing organizations. All organizations here have made clear commitments to mentorship, and all projects here have been deemed essential and doable by the M-Lab core team. We’ve listed the individual contributing institutions below.
• Princeton University's DONAR project (their ideas here; scroll down)
  With the advent of cloud computing and the growth of popular Web services, many networked applications are replicated at multiple geographic locations. Such distributed services face the challenge of server selection — that is, directing an incoming client request to the appropriate server or data center, in the hope of reducing network latency or carefully tuning server loads. M-Lab runs on a federated network of world-wide machines. Thus, optimal server selection is critical to ensure the accuracy and performance of the tools and diagnostics which are built on the M-Lab platform.
  
  
  DONAR is a distributed system that provides name resolution and server selection for M-Lab experiments. It provides replica registration through a service API and offers client routing to replicas via DNS. DONAR explores many research issues surrounding mutli-replica services, including API design and optimal client-server assignment.
  
  
• UPMC Sorbonne Université's Paris Traceroute project (their ideas here)
  
  UPMC Sorbonne Universites is France’s leading technical university in science, engineering, and medicine, with over 30,000 students at its campuses in central Paris. It can be thought of as the Sorbonne’s “technical wing.” Its networking group is working on Paris Traceroute, a fundamental upgrade to the Traceroute tool that currently exists in all major operating systems. This technology that could help M-Lab gather and analyze network topology data and that would allow it to document the efficacy of its server placement and data selection process. Documenting this will be crucial as M-Lab encourages bigger and more cautious organizations and governments to rely on its data. M-Lab has had multiple in-person meetings with Paris Traceroute team members, and explicitly trusts them to deliver.
  
  
  The UPMC team has developed Paris Traceroute and released it as free, open source software. Its impact in the network measurement research community has been felt broadly, as evidenced by well over 100 scientific papers that a casual search for “Paris Traceroute” will reveal. There is a “paris-traceroute” package available at all of the official Debian repositories.
  
  
  

All organizations here have made clear commitments to mentorship, and all projects here have been deemed essential and doable by the M-Lab core team.