The contents of this legacy page are no longer maintained nor supported, and are made available only for historical purposes.
Internet Atlas Gallery
NSFNET growth until 1995
Donna Cox and Robert Patterson
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA),
National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Strengths:
(Strength1):
Visualization stresses the hierarchy of connections between backbone systems.
Backbone nodes are prominently displayed above the geographical map,
with all their respective clients below.
(Strength2): High level connectivity is readily perceivable
when separated from the clutter of backbone-client connections.
Issues:
(Issue1): Only aggregated clients are displayed, and specific paths
from backbone nodes to their clients are not known, therefore
distances shown between the backbone and client nodes may be misleading.
(Issue2): Many backbone nodes serve distant clients across
the continental US. This logical connectivity blurs attempts to
correlate traffic with the geographical organization of the
backbone and client nodes. While high connectivity is depicted,
the visualization tends to be extremely busy and at
times difficult to interpret.
