Merit links four Michigan universities with a packet-switching computer network. This network provides several interactive and batch services to the students, faculty, and researchers of these schools. While the network and its services are reviewed, this paper focuses on the statistical performance of Merit during its first ten operational years. Numerous graphs and tables present data including time-series showing the growth of usage, transmission-rate related measures, normalized measures on a per-connection basis, and the distribution of activity among the hosts. The data reveal that on an aggregated basis the current average packet size is nearly 50 bytes with a corresponding transmission rate of 1350 packets per hour for each virtual connection. While these are the aggregate averages, there is considerable variation of these values among the different services Merit offers. The paper concludes with explanations for these differences and general observations about Merit's usage patterns.

Three Michigan universities are currently working on a project to evolve a network that will link their educational and research computing centers. This project requires the concurrent development of several interrelated technical activities, the most important of which are the network's specialized hardware, software for the network's communications computers, and support software for each of the host computers. The specific topic of this paper is the network's unique hardware configuration, its general design, and the rationale behind its particular specifications. Also included are descriptions of special interfaces developed for the system's synchronous data sets, and the IBM system 360 and Control Data 6000 series computers.