The U.S. president is not elected by popular vote, but rather through the Electoral College, which assigns votes to each of the 50 states according to population. Journalists and campaign strategists have been closely tracking state-level polls, which suggest that the contest between President George W. Bush and challenger John Kerry remains tight.

The electoral-vote.com site was also mentioned in a Slashdot posting Monday noting the unveiling of Tanenbaum as the site’s Votemaster, which piled more traffic on top of the DDoS and heavy pre-election site usage.

“We survived an unprecedented triple flash crowd and logged it all,” writes Tanenbaum. “As it turns out, two of the faculty members in my department, Maarten van Steen and Guillaume Pierre, are doing research on coping with flash crowds. The research issues include how many replicas to set up, where to place them, how fast to deploy them, and how to do it automatically, in real time, and at minimum cost. To simulate proposed algorithms, you need data about real flash crowds and real attacks, preferably at the same time. And boy oh boy do we have data now.”