COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND (CRIBB)

Date	Nov. 2, 2012
Speaker	Matthew Hubbell (MIT-Lincoln Lab.)
Topic	3D Game Monitoring System
Abstract:	Obtaining situational awareness of network activity across an enterprise presents unique visualization challenges. IT analysts are required to quickly gather and correlate large volumes of disparate data to identify the existence of anomalous behavior. This paper will show how the MIT Lincoln Laboratory LLGrid Team has approached obtaining network situational awareness utilizing the Unity 3D video game engine. We have developed a 3D environment of the physical plant in the format of a networked multi player First Person Shooter (FPS) to demonstrate a virtual depiction of the current state of the network and the machines operating on the network. Within the game or virtual world an analyst or player can gather critical information on all network assets as well as perform physical system actions on machines in question. 3D gaming technology provides tools to create an environment that is both visually familiar to the player as well display immense amounts of system data in a meaningful and easy to absorb format. Our prototype system was to able monitor and display 5000 assets in ~10% of the time of our network time window.

Acknowledgements

We thank the generous support of MIT IS&T, CSAIL, and the Department of Mathematics for their support of this series.