NSF awards a three-year seed grant of more than $3.1 million to UC San Diego to establish the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at SDSC.

CAIDA, based at SDSC, was created to promote a more robust, scalable Internet infrastructure. As one of its goal, the organization was envisioned to foster engineering and technical collaborations among Internet providers, vendors, and user groups. The Internet is a global network of networks — mostly private, and often competing among themselves for customers. While the diffuse structure of the Internet is one of its strengths, the competitive environment has made collaboration on operational and engineering improvements difficult, and has made the collection of accurate measurements of Internet message traffic, routing patterns, and throughput virtually impossible. One result of the CAIDA program when launched was the beta release for testing by users. Mapnet, a Java-based visualization tool, enabled researchers for the first time to see a representation of the IP-level topology and bandwidth of the many networks that create the global Internet. The tool also provided information about which networks exchange data (or “peer”) at which hubs.