PlanetLab Europe partner UPMC is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2012. UPMC researchers will be guiding gifted student developers as they build code to extend the Internet topology measurement capabilities of Paris Traceroute technology, run over PlanetLab Europe. (Students: if you would like to have an impact on the world of network measurements, please consider tackling one of the projects on the Paris Traceroute GSoC ideas page. Deadline: April 6^th at 19:00 UTC.)

Paris Traceroute is an improved version of the classic traceroute tool that is used to determine the paths that packets follow through the Internet. The new tool takes into account the fact that most major network providers now balance their traffic across multiple parallel paths. The main extension to this tool consists in the development of a highly modular library, libparistraceroute, that provides a convenient framework on which to build packet probes and measurement algorithms. Experimenters can easily implement active measurement tools based on ping or traceroute style network probes using the library.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a programme that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects over a three month-period. Since it began in 2005, the programme has brought together more than 4,500 students with over 200 open source projects, producing millions of lines of code. Aiming to get more open source code created and released for the benefit of all and to identify and inspire young developers, the programme provides invaluable work experience to students in Computer Science and related fields, exposing them to real-world software development scenarios.

UPMC participates in GSoC 2012 through collaboration with Measurement Lab (M- Lab), an open platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. M-Lab was founded by the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google Inc. and academic researchers.

For further information on how to participate in the Google Summer of Code, please contact Paris Traceroute's lead developer Jordan Augé: jordan.auge(at)lip6.fr.

Further information can also be found on the Measurement Lab website.