Hi, this is Sohan and I am working in a computer networking lab at Columbia University this summer.
Over the past few weeks, my daily work has remained very similar. It mostly consists of running our experiment remotely on the Orbit Lab. Slowly I have progressed to running the experiment on all 400 nodes, which is a bigger accomplishment that it seems. More often that not , the nodes are unresponsive, or are unable to upload the requisite operating system for us to run our experiment unto their consoles (we usually run the most basic version of Ubuntu available but other experimenters upload other various operating systems best suited to run their experiments). On a good test run, typically 100 or so are unresponsive and another 25 fail to upload the Ubuntu operating system, but obtaining data for 275 nodes is more than enough.
More recently, Varun has had be deal with other pieces of code besides shell scripts. When running the experiment, we retrieve the data and it is stored as several hundred .pcap files on the computer (.pcap files are typically used to log the traffic passing across a wireless network). In essence, the .pcap files are a collection is millions and millions of 1's and 0's which obviously mean nothing to humans, but which the computer can interpret. In order to process the .pcap files, we use a Python script (python is a programming languages) which ultimately outputs information such as the total number of bytes transmitted or the average speed at which these bytes are traveling in KBPS (kilobytes per second). Working with Python was very new to me since prior to this, I had done most of my coding in languages like Java or in C/C++, but nonetheless, learning a new language like Python can never hurt.
The last new major change in my routine has been the implementation of certain MATLAB scripts (MATLAB is also another programming language). The MATLAB scripts are designed to take the specific numbers and data outputted from the aforementioned Python scripts and create histograms based on that data. Data is usually easier to interpret when presented visually and thus we can usually analyze the histograms and see if there are any changes to be made and if the algorithm is working.
Outside of the work, the lab experience has also been helpful and entertaining. There are 4 other member of our lab in the same work area as me and we frequently have conversations as a group about things besides our research. They all give me ample advice on college and what to do/what not to do freshmen year which typically, you can only learn from someone who has experienced it themselves.
I've really enjoyed my time working here thus far and eagerly await the next few weeks of researching!
Over the past few weeks, my daily work has remained very similar. It mostly consists of running our experiment remotely on the Orbit Lab. Slowly I have progressed to running the experiment on all 400 nodes, which is a bigger accomplishment that it seems. More often that not , the nodes are unresponsive, or are unable to upload the requisite operating system for us to run our experiment unto their consoles (we usually run the most basic version of Ubuntu available but other experimenters upload other various operating systems best suited to run their experiments). On a good test run, typically 100 or so are unresponsive and another 25 fail to upload the Ubuntu operating system, but obtaining data for 275 nodes is more than enough.
More recently, Varun has had be deal with other pieces of code besides shell scripts. When running the experiment, we retrieve the data and it is stored as several hundred .pcap files on the computer (.pcap files are typically used to log the traffic passing across a wireless network). In essence, the .pcap files are a collection is millions and millions of 1's and 0's which obviously mean nothing to humans, but which the computer can interpret. In order to process the .pcap files, we use a Python script (python is a programming languages) which ultimately outputs information such as the total number of bytes transmitted or the average speed at which these bytes are traveling in KBPS (kilobytes per second). Working with Python was very new to me since prior to this, I had done most of my coding in languages like Java or in C/C++, but nonetheless, learning a new language like Python can never hurt.
The last new major change in my routine has been the implementation of certain MATLAB scripts (MATLAB is also another programming language). The MATLAB scripts are designed to take the specific numbers and data outputted from the aforementioned Python scripts and create histograms based on that data. Data is usually easier to interpret when presented visually and thus we can usually analyze the histograms and see if there are any changes to be made and if the algorithm is working.
Outside of the work, the lab experience has also been helpful and entertaining. There are 4 other member of our lab in the same work area as me and we frequently have conversations as a group about things besides our research. They all give me ample advice on college and what to do/what not to do freshmen year which typically, you can only learn from someone who has experienced it themselves.
I've really enjoyed my time working here thus far and eagerly await the next few weeks of researching!
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