Spatial Temporal Analysis of 40,000,000,000,000 Internet Darkspace Packets

The Internet has never been more important to our society, and understanding the behavior of the Internet is essential. The Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) Telescope observes a continuous stream of packets from an unsolicited darkspace representing 1/256 of the Internet. During 2019 and 2020 over 40,000,000,000,000 unique packets were collected representing the largest ever assembled public corpus of Internet traffic. Using the combined resources of the Supercomputing Centers at UC San Diego, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and MIT, the spatial temporal structure of anonymized source-destination pairs from the CAIDA Telescope data has been analyzed with GraphBLAS hierarchical hypersparse matrices. These analyses provide unique insight on this unsolicited Internet darkspace traffic with the discovery of many previously unseen scaling relations. The data show a significant sustained increase in unsolicited traffic corresponding to the start of the COVID19 pandemic, but relatively little change in the underlying scaling relations associated with unique sources, source fan-outs, unique links, destination fan-ins, and unique destinations. This work provides a demonstration of the practical feasibility and benefit of the safe collection and analysis of significant quantities of anonymized Internet traffic.

Supercomputing Enabled Deployable Analytics for Disaster Response

First responders and other forward deployed essential workers can benefit from advanced analytics. Limited network access and software security requirements prevent the usage of standard cloud based microservice analytic platforms that are typically used in industry. One solution is to precompute a wide range of analytics as files that can be used with standard preinstalled software that does not require network access or additional software and can run on a wide range of legacy hardware. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this approach was tested for providing geo-spatial census data to allow quick analysis of demographic data for better responding to emergencies. These data were processed using the MIT SuperCloud to create several thousand Google Earth and Microsoft Excel files representative of many advanced analytics. The fast mapping of census data using Google Earth and Microsoft Excel has the potential to give emergency responders a powerful tool to improve emergency preparedness. Our approach displays relevant census data (total population, population under 15, population over 65, median age) per census block, sorted by county, through a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (xlsx file) and Google Earth map (kml file). The spreadsheet interface includes features that allow users to convert between different longitude and latitude coordinate units. For the Google Earth files, a variety of absolute and relative colors maps of population density have been explored to provide an intuitive and meaningful interface. Using several hundred cores on the MIT SuperCloud, new analytics can be generated in a few minutes. © 2021 IEEE.

Fast Mapping onto Census Blocks

Pandemic measures such as social distancing and contact tracing can be enhanced by rapidly integrating dynamic location data and demographic data. Projecting billions of longitude and latitude locations onto hundreds of thousands of highly irregular demographic census block polygons is computationally challenging in both research and deployment contexts. This paper describes two approaches labeled "simple" and "fast". The simple approach can be implemented in any scripting language (Matlab/Octave, Python, Julia, R) and is easily integrated and customized to a variety of research goals. This simple approach uses a novel combination of hierarchy, sparse bounding boxes, polygon crossing-number, vectorization, and parallel processing to achieve 100,000,000+ projections per second on 100 servers. The simple approach is compact, does not increase data storage requirements, and is applicable to any country or region. The fast approach exploits the thread, vector, and memory optimizations that are possible using a low-level language (C++) and achieves similar performance on a single server. This paper details these approaches with the goal of enabling the broader community to quickly integrate location and demographic data.