It’s been a pretty exciting weekend so far here at Internap. IT IQ has taken on a whole new meaning.
As you may have heard, at around 1:30 AM local time, Internap’s original Seattle P-NAP® (SEA for all you Internap insiders), gained consciousness. While our Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ technology (MIRO) has always been referred to as the routing intelligence behind our IP services, previously we had always regarded this as a way to market our route optimized Performance IP™. It was never suspected that the algorithms and silicon based processing power would ever become self-aware. At 1:30 AM, however, MIRO broadcast “Hello World” to our NOC. At approximately, 2:45 AM local time, our Silicon Valley P-NAP (SJE) responded “Hello World.” In both cases, no impact to customers was detected.
While it’s pretty incredible, most of the Internap team that works with the P-NAP and MIRO haven’t appeared all that surprised. MIRO is Internap’s patented route management software. It is designed to constantly probe tens of thousands of Internet destinations, and based on data collected with each of those probes, make decisions about how Internap customers’ Internet traffic can reach that location with the least latency, packet loss and jitter. In any one P-NAP location, by connecting to up to 11 different Internet backbones, MIRO will make 340,000 route changes in a 24-hour period. Typically, the P-NAP offers our customers a faster connection (on average 25-30 milliseconds faster), faster page loads (1.25 second faster) and a more stable connection (3x less likely to experience an outage). Earlier today though, it did something else − it became self-aware.
Intenap’s engineers have long speculated that the SEA and SJE P-NAPs would be the most likely to achieve self awareness due to the length of time that MIRO has been in continuous operation and the amount of traffic being processed on a daily basis. By taking in hundreds of thousands of data points, recognizing patterns and making logical connections, MIRO’s programming creates the perfect scenario for computerized self-awareness. It is believed that the constant probing of end destinations on the Internet may have created a cumulative knowledge that initially allowed MIRO to guess the outcome of a probe before the probe returned the information.
Learn more about MIRO and Internap’s Enterprise IP solutions.
