The Internet is transforming our society, necessitating a quantitative
understanding of Internet traffic. Our team collects and curates the largest
publicly available Internet traffic data containing 50 billion packets.
Utilizing a novel hypersparse neural network analysis of "video" streams of
this traffic using 10,000 processors in the MIT SuperCloud reveals a new
phenomena: the importance of otherwise unseen leaf nodes and isolated links in
Internet traffic. Our neural network approach further shows that a
two-parameter modified Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution accurately describes a wide
variety of source/destination statistics on moving sample windows ranging from
100,000 to 100,000,000 packets over collections that span years and continents.
The inferred model parameters distinguish different network streams and the
model leaf parameter strongly correlates with the fraction of the traffic in
different underlying network topologies. The hypersparse neural network
pipeline is highly adaptable and different network statistics and training
models can be incorporated with simple changes to the image filter functions.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables, 60 citations; to appear in IEEE High
Performance Extreme Computing (HPEC) 201