Eriky.com

My name is Erik-Jan van Baaren. I have a bachelor degree in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I’m currently working full time on my master degree. My master project concerns the creation of a distributed, Wikipedia based benchmarking tool for testing distributed hosting systems. This tool is called WikiBench. It can run on any kind of hardware, but I will be running it mostly on our DAS3 super computer. DAS-3 consists of 272 dual AMD Opteron compute nodes, spread out over five clusters, located at the four universities. These clusters are connected with dedicated 10Gbps fibre lines. The WikiBench tool uses completely anonymized traces (log files) from actual Wikipedia traffic, logged at the front-end cache servers of Wikipedia. So it does not create synthetic traffic but replays the logs to create realistic traffic streams.

At the VU, a lot of reseach is done on distributed hosting systems. There are currently no tools that are able to really stress such systems. TCP-W can be used, but it has many limitations. WikiBench should fill that void. This is an exciting and difficult project about which I’ll be posting regularly.