UPDATE: By November 2006 we expect to have contacted all PMA hosting sites and have a report ready on the future plans for use of the PMA infrastructure.

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, please send them to nlanr-info@caida.org.
What follows is the original NLANR PMA webpage.

Passive Measurement and Analysis (PMA)

The Passive Measurement and Analysis (PMA) Project is one of two research projects that form the core of the NLANR Measurement and Network Analysis Group's Network Analysis Infrastructure (NAI). The other is the Active Measurement Project (AMP). NLANR PMA is located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

The goal of the PMA project is to deliver new insights into the operation, behavior, and health of the Internet, for the benefit of network users and operations. Passive header trace data provides the means to study workload profiles for a number of strategically located measurement points in high speed environments. We currently take daily measurements from OC3 through OC48 speeds. In addition, we have recently taken a contiguous OC192mon/10GigE trace.

The PMA data collection infrastructure consists of a growing number of monitors located at aggregation points within HPC networks, the vBNS, and Internet2 / Abilene.

Map of PMA sites/speeds
PMA site map, as of February 2004.

We are working on complementing the current infrastructure and welcome suggestions and invitations for new measurement points and strategies. To facilitate an exchange of ideas, we have created the NLANR Trace Users Community, which is an email forum for Internet researchers, engineers, and students to discuss the next generation of passive network measurements to be carried out in the High Performance (HPC) backbone networks. We invite you to join.

Please see the links below and the navbar (to the right) for links to a detailed list of sites, site information and status, available tools, the Trace Users Community, and other information which will assist in understanding and using our data. We make all data, that we reasonably can, publicly available on a regular basis, via Web and ftp servers, typically resulting in gigabytes of data per day.

Go directly to Traces Search for Traces PMA Sites

Old Topology of PMA sites Keep in Touch - For Trace Users