[jmmv]

Reminds me of the intern project I worked on at Google back in 2008.

My mentor at the time had a traceroute dataset of the Internet and wanted to render it on top of Google Maps. I implemented a MapReduce algorithm that geolocated the data points and then produced Google Maps tiles at various zoom levels to show how the Internet was connected. It was pretty cool to visualize how the data flowed throughout the world and to be able to "dig deeper" by zooming into the mess of connections. Very similar to what this project does!

The project didn't go anywhere but it was a cool fun experiment and a great learning opportunity for me (S2 geometry is... well, weird, but touching MapReduce and Bigtable were invaluable exercises for my later tenure at the company). Those were very different times. I don't think you would be able to pursue such a "useless" project as an intern at Google these days.

[pmayrgundter]

Howdy sir! Great memory and fun times :)

Dataset was something from CAIDA, like this: https://www.caida.org/catalog/datasets/ipv4_prefix_probing_d...

IIRC we used the LGL algorithm (https://lgl.sourceforge.net/) while pinning any nodes we could get geolocations for, giving a nice hybrid geo/topo layout

I don't remember exactly how we got the geolocations, but often network routers have 3-letter airport codes in their DNS names, so maybe that? We may also have had a lookup table in el googz somewhere

Definitely a project whose time should again come! ;)

[jmmv]

Oh that’s right! We had to use LGL in addition to geolocation to lay out points without data. And yeah, the geolocation came from some internal service.

Thanks for chiming in. Good times!