The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in running novel network experiments at scale and under realistic conditions with the designers and developers of the current suite of infrastructure available through GENI, which is rapidly taking shape in prototype form across the US. GENI has the goal of becoming the first laboratory for exploring networks of the future through innovatations in network science, security, technology, services and applications.
The workshop attendees will consist of 20 to 30 two-person teams, typically, a researcher and his or her graduate student, selected through a white paper competition. They will be given technical tutorials on the various GENI components and resources and how to launch experiments that span more than one part of the infrastructure (e.g., bridging PlanetLab, Proto-GENI and OpenFlow.) The researchers will also have opportunities to propose experiments and describe the associated operational, workflow, instrumentation, measurement, and security requirements for that experiment.
This workshop will develop a common understanding of the GENI network infrastructure and build a community of researchers using GENI for their experiments. It is expected that some of these teams will propose their experiments to NSF, which will result in the demonstration of new research ideas and experiments not possible on any other network testbed.
The grant for "Workshop for GENI Experimenters" funded a two-day workshop at Princeton University to educate researchers interested in using the new GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations, www.geni.net/) facility to conduct experiments. GENI is a wide-area network that allows multiple researchers to conduct experiments at the same time by "virtualizing" each of the components in the system. These components range from high-end routers and backbone links to low-end sensors and wireless devices. The workshop attendees consisted of 27 two-person teams, each consisting of a faculty member and a graduate student, interested in running experiments on GENI. The teams, selected by a review committee, received travel and lodging support to attend the two-day event, where they heard tutorials on all the major components of GENI and received feedback on their proposed experiments. The feedback, by representatives of NSF and the GENI Project Office, helped the attendees to refine their planned experiments and put together proposals for small seed grants to conduct these experiments. The outcome of the workshop was a significant broadening of the set of researchers equipped to do experiments on GENI, going far beyond the universities directly involved in the design and implementation of the facility. In addition, the people building GENI gained valuable feedback on their presentations, to enable them to lower the barrier for even more researchers to quickly "come up to speed" on GENI. The agenda for the workshop, and the list of attendees, is posted oneline at: www.cs.princeton.edu/~jrex/gew.html
