Ever wonder what the Internet looks like? Israeli researchers have released a new map of the Internet that offers a detailed look at the network – and it’s a bit like a jellyfish. The map will appear in the July 3 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and has been created by researchers at Bar-Ilan University. Unlike previous maps, which utilized supercomputers, this employed a technique called “distributed computing,” which brought in some 10,000 volunteers around the world. Using special software, the volunteers sent pings around the Internet. The routes they took were mapped. The experiment has run for over two years, with between three and six million pings collected daily. “The problem was that previous attempts to measure the Internet have used only a few observation points and therefore could not discover all the existing links," said physicist Shai Carmi, one of those behind the new map “Our research used a different approach and helped to discover many new links unknown before.” The Internet contains around 20,000 nodes, and the university analysis of the connections between them discovered three main components, which researchers compared to a diagram of a jellyfish. An “Internet nucleus” of about 100 nodes lies at the center, while the next level consists of 15,000 peer-connected nodes, which are able to communicate without the use of the nucleus. Finally, there’s an outer layer of 5,000 nodes, which become disconnected if the nucleus isn’t working. It’s predicated that the new map will help develop more efficient routing practices.
