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The PingER Project: “Active Internet Performance Monitoring for the HENP Community" was started in 1995 to provide end-to-end network performance measurements for the High Energy Physics (HEP) community (http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/; IEEE Communications Magazine, May 2000)). More recently it has been extended at the request of the International Committee of Future Accelerators (ICFA) and The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP - http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/icfa/icfa-net-paper-dec02/) to gather information related to quantifying the Digital Divide (http://www.ejds.org/meeting2003/ictp/papers/Cottrell-Logg.pdf), how the Internet performance differs between developed and developing nations (e.g., http://www.ejds.org/), and what are the baselines, trends etc. Currently there are over 60 active monitoring hosts in 23 countries and over 800 monitored hosts in 164 countries. There is also an invited article on PingER entitled “Pinging Africa”, by R. Les Cottrell, in IEEE Spectrum February 2013.
Objective
Our goal is to ensure we have representative network performance between the various regions and countries of the world. This requires that we have several reliable remote hosts monitored in each country preferably in diverse locations. We need the diversity to identify performance in different regions of the country and different service providers (e.g. commercial vs Research & Educational) and to help identify anomalous sites. The reliability is so we can provide a long-term view of the internet going back for more than a decade.
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