Contact Information
| Name: |
Nevil Brownlee |
| Email: |
nevil @ caida.org |
| Office: |
SDSC 361 |
| Phone: |
(858) 534-8338 |
Background
Nevil is the creator of NeTraMet, an open-source implementation of the Realtime Traffic Flow Measurement (Internet Standard) architecture. The University of Auckland has used NeTraMet to collect all its Internet usage data since late 1992. NeTraMet is used by at least 200 sites around the world, including large and small Internet Service Providers and many universities.
Nevil visited CAIDA and NLANR at the San Diego Supercomputer Centre fairly often during the '90s. He worked with CAIDA and MCI in developing a version of NeTraMet which worked with the DOS-based OC3MON system; during this development he contributed the DOS TCP stack used by OC3MON. He spent the first half of 2000 on sabbatical leave at CAIDA, and now works 50% of his time for them. The other 50% of his time he continues to work for the University of Auckland.
Nevil was co-ordinator of the CAIDA Metrics Working Group, which operated between February 2000 - 2003. This group's goal was to provide educational material explaining network measurement to Enterprise IT managers, to define a minimal set of metrics for characterising network performance (including best-current-practice methods of measuring them), and to produce a requirements document for network hardware vendors so that such measurements become widely and easily accessible.
Nevil continues to develop NeTraMet at CAIDA. He has produced versions of NeTraMet which
- Use CoralReef to work with trace files and high-speed network interface cards (Dag, Point, etc.) at OC3 and OC12 speeds
- Work directly with Dag network interfaces cards
- Monitor streams within IP flows, so as to collect response-time distributions for various IP applications
- Run on Microsoft Windows
Using these high-speed versions of NeTraMet, Nevil has been observing response times for the global DNS root and gTLD servers. Such measurements provide considerable insight into the behaviour of the servers, and also of the Internet paths between those servers and UC San Diego.
Relevant Links
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)