The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and the CISE research community are planning an initiative called Global Environment for Networking Innovations or GENI to explore new networking capabilities that will advance science and stimulate innovation and economic growth. The GENI Initiative responds to an urgent and important challenge of the 21st Century to advance significantly the capabilities provided by networking and distributed system architectures. To have significant impact, innovative research and design ideas must be implemented, deployed, and tested in realistic environments involving significant numbers of users and hosts. The initiative includes the deployment of a state-of-the-art, global experimental GENI Facility that will permit exploration and evaluation under realistic conditions. The GENI Facility will permit a range of researchers, including network engineers, policy analysts, protocol designers, system architects, and economic modelers to contribute to and study innovative new capabilities for the global network of the future. Assuming the concept proves to be as promising as currently anticipated, GENI construction will be considered for funding from NSF's MREFC account.
In support of making the case for GENI as a MREFC project, the PIs propose to undertake a set of tasks to advance the GENI project definition from the Conceptual Design, through the MREFC Readiness Stage, to Preliminary Design. This will involve addressing a set of design issues; taking the definition of various components of the facility to the next level of specificity; creating a detailed work breakdown structure (WBS), bottom up budget, schedule, contingency, and critical path analysis for each component and the facility as a whole; and taking the project management definition for construction and operation to the next level of specificity with due considerations to special requirements of GENI.
