This EAGER supports a process that will lead to the development of a national-scale infrastructure that will enable research on future internets, distributed clouds, and novel, large-scale applications. It has two parts. First, technical and administrative personnel from GENI-enabled campuses will serve as mentors for other campuses wishing to GENI-enable their own networks. This will be accomplished via site visits and then routine advising as the new campuses deploy the technologies necessary to become GENI-enabled. The second part of the project consists of a workshop for all the network engineers working at GENI-enabled campuses as well as those at campuses still wishing to become GENI-enabled. The workshop will be hosted at the next GENI Engineering Conference in November in Kansas City.
This project is high-risk high reward; it proposes a strategy for exploratory work to increase the number of GENI-enabled campuses across the country to thirty by the end of 2012. When combined with Internet2's commitment and forthcoming regional network commitments to GENI-enable parts of their backbones, the result could well be a national-scale GENI-enabled experimental network. This work is at a very early stage and the ideas are untested, but if successful, it will have an impact on society that is potentially as significant as that of the Internet.
The broader impacts of this project are considerable. Campuses across the country will become part of the GENI network infrastructure, allowing for their researchers to carry out experiments not possible anywhere else on the globe. There is great potential for new technologies of significant scientific and societal importance to be developed. The students on these campuses will be able to 'live in the future' taking computer science and engineering courses that require use of the GENI infrastructure to build prototype distributed cloud systems, new security architectures, or large-scale applications, for example.
GENI, The Global Environment of Network Innovations is an NSF-funded project whose goal has been the specification, development and deployment of infrastructure to support research on networking/distributed systems and on applications that are thereby enabled. The principal Outcomes of this Grant have been the building of bridges between GENI developers/researchers and other communities that are key to GENI’s success. 1) Enabling GENI collaboration with campus IT organizations: This was achieved via workshops/training with campus CIOs and senior campus technical staff. This Outcome was critical because GENI infrastructure requires cooperation by campus IT organizations. 2) Enhancing resources available to GENI researchers by infrastructure federation: This involved Internet2 in the U.S. and international projects such as the EU’s Fed4Fire and FLARE in Japan. This Outcome was important because it provided additional resources and functionality to U.S. GENI researchers. 3) Supporting greater functionality of GENI resources by collaborating with researchers on the development of new technologies such as SDN and SDX: This Outcome was important to identifying and including new capabilities in the GENI infrastructure. The first Outcome was achieved via the following: a) Mentoring Visits during 2011-2012 by network engineers and network administrators to university IT organizations. b) A Technical Training Workshop on SDN/OpenFlow for campus IT network engineers in July 2011. c.) A Workshop in July 2012 for CIOs and their senior staff on GENI-technologies and the GENI project. d) A Workshop for CC-NIE awardees (CIOs, senior IT Staff and PIs) on GENI and GENI technologies in January 2012. The second Outcome was achieved via the following: a) An International Federation Workshop held in July 2013 in Madison, WI. The attendees represented GENI and peer national/regional projects in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America as well as national and international R&E networks. b) A GENI/FIRE Workshop held in May 2014 in Cambridge MA. The Workshop identified areas of collaboration between GENI researchers and their European colleagues. The third Outcome was achieved via the following: a) A Workshop on Prototyping and Deploying Experimental was held in Washington DC in June 2014.
