One of our design goals was to make BRITE easy to learn and use. To this end, we built a cross platform GUI front-end to the BRITE generation engine. Although the graphical interface is written in Java, it can be used as a front-end to the C++ version without any performance loss. This is achieved by divorcing the GUI from the topology generation engine. All interaction between the GUI and the generation engine takes place through a configuration file. Once a user specifies desired parameters, the GUI generates a corresponding configuration file, GUI_GEN.conf. It then spawns a new C++ or Java process and runs the generation engine with this configuration file as input. Figure 7 illustrates this interaction between the GUI and the generation engine.
