This project supports hosting the three day seventeenth edition of the GENI Engineering conference, including organizing and hosting the demo session, to be held July 21-23, 2013 in Madison, Wisconsin. The GEC location will be held at a Madison hotel within walking distance of the university campus and the demonstration session will be held in a university facility. The GENI Project Office organizes three major GENI Engineering conferences (GECs) per year, in which the entire GENI community meets to review current status, and to decide on subsequent steps in GENI's evolution. These GECs include community-based working groups leading GENI's design and planning, and demonstrating progress with live experiments. About 250 leading researchers and Ph.D. students from diverse US institutions will gather in Madison to showcase their ideas and results. In the demo session each demo will be provided with a wired connection to the GENI infrastructure. Additionally, wireless connectivity will be available for demonstrations and participants.
The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a virtual instrument that is rapidly emerging in prototype form across the United States. GENI aims to transform experimental research in networking and distributed systems, as well as emerging research into very large socio-technical systems, by providing a suite of infrastructure for 'at scale' experiments in future internets. GENI is designed to address three issues: - Science Issues: We cannot currently understand or predict the behavior of complex, large-scale networks. - Society Issues: We increasingly rely on the Internet but are unsure we can trust its security, privacy or resilience. - Innovation Issues: Substantial barriers to at-scale experimentation with new architectures, services, and technologies. GENI addresses these issues via scale (from federation) and support for two kinds of experiments: 1) controlled and repeatable experiments, which will greatly help improve our scientific understanding of complex, large-scale networks; and 2) in-the- wild trials of experimental services that ride atop or connect to today?s Internet and that engage large numbers of human participants. The GEC conference and associated demo sessions are a key component of the integrated development process for GENI. The GECs provide integration points for GENI development, provide time for face-to-face technical discussions about engineering, and ensure that the GENI development community is fully aware of evolving system feature sets.
The GEC meeting and Demo sessions provide graduate students with both an opportunity to demonstrate and explain their work to the GENI community prior to formal publication. It is a key part of helping new graduate students understand what is being done with GENI and who amongst their peers at other institutions might be valuable resources. It also supports outreach to new community members, including the emerging US Ignite community. GENI is already being used as an instrument for research. This proposal supports the development and use of the research instrument.
Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) Engineering is a network testbed that enables researchers to conduct at-scale experiments of their new protocols and applications. These protocols and applications are typically designed to push the current Internet framework and thereby engineer a new Internet. The proposal funded a three day conference held in Madison, Wisconsin to showcase progress, demonstrate potential, and identify new challenges in engineering this testbed. The conference was attended by approximately 225 researchers and practitioners in the field of networing. The conference program was organized into several sessions to meet the needs of different types of participants. For those we are just beginning with their work on GENI, there were several tutorials sessions that covered various aspects of GENI. These were tutorials provided participants with hands-on experinece on using GENI related tools. At the other end of spectrum, the conference had several sessions for GENI developers. In these sessions, the participants discussed open issues in further building out the tools of GENI. Finally, there were project progress and demonstrations sessions where current GENI users showcased the results from their projects. For instance, on the first day of the conference, over 35 project teams demonstrated their work using GENI infrastructure. In addition, there were two major project demonstrations during the plenary session of the conference. A large numer of conference attendes where undergraduate and graduate students. A travel grant (funded through another means) was used to encourage these students to attend the conference. In addition to meeting leading researchers from their field, these students got exposed to new ways validating their research. The educational benefits of such an exposure is considerable.
