The major objective of GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation), a virtual laboratory for exploring future internets at scale, is to create major new opportunities to understand, innovate and transform global networks and their interactions with society. Dynamic and adaptive, GENI opens up new areas of research at the frontiers of network science and engineering, and increases the opportunity for significant socio-economic impact.
GENI will employ a flexible and adaptable framework that incorporates spiral development, i.e., iterative prototyping, and federation, i.e., connecting heterogeneous networks, substrates and technologies. It is expected that each turn of the spiral will take advantage of what currently exists, what has been learned from the previous spiral, what can fruitfully be federated and what might be achieved through new development and prototyping activities. Spiral 1 will allow academic-industry partners to create end-to-end GENI prototypes with a strong emphasis on the design and implementation of multiple GENI control frameworks. The ultimate goal is to design end-to-end prototypes of a virtual laboratory with a suite of infrastructure that will support future experiments and research challenges articulated by the Network Science and Engineering (NetSE) research community.
Intellectual Merit: This award gives funding to BBN Technologies to provide management and oversight of all GENI-related activities. GENI will 1) support at-scale experimentation on shared, heterogeneous, highly-instrumented infrastructure, 2) enable deep programmability throughout the network, promoting innovations in network science, technologies, services and applications, and 3) provide collaborative and exploratory environments for academia, industry, and the public to catalyze groundbreaking discoveries and innovation.
Broader Impact: Encouraging community engagement is critical to success. A GENI outreach plan will be developed and implemented. Each year, three GENI Engineering Conferences will be held. Open application for travel grants will ensure that researchers and students at underserved academic institutions and regions of the country will be able to participate. Potential partners in industry and international funding agencies will also be encouraged to attend. Students and young faculty will be hired as interns at BBN. As needed, interdisciplinary workshops will be convened that bring together researchers that don?t normally communicate, but from which GENI and the research community can benefit.
There is no pre-ordained outcome for these activities; the resultant GENI infrastructure suite could be an enahanced Internet, enhanced testbeds, federations of enhanced testbeds, something brand new (from small to large), federation of all of the above and/or federation with related international efforts. The goal is to promote innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.
GENI Project Outcome, June 2012 1 Overview GENI - the Global Environment for Network Innovations –is a suite of research infra-structure rapidly taking shape 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 supports two types of experiments: (a) controlled and repeatable experiments, which will greatly help improve our scientific under-standing of complex, large-scale networks; and (b) "in the wild" trials of experimental services that can engage large numbers of human participants within American universities and cities. GENI is a visionary undertaking with very high potential impact. If it succeeds, it will completely transform research in networking and distributed systems. Given the ever-growing importance of the Internet and global computing systems, its success could also create major opportunities for our economy and society. 2 GENI Vision GENI’s vision is to become the world’s first laboratory environment for exploring future internets at scale, promoting innovations in network science, security, technologies, services and applications. GENI is now allowing academic and industrial researchers to perform a new class of experiments that tackle critically important issues in global communications networks: • Science issues – We cannot currently understand or predict the behavior of complex, large-scale networks. • Innovation issues – We currently face substantial barriers to innovation with novel architectures, services, and technologies. • Society issues – We increasingly rely on the Internet but are unsure that can trust its security, privacy, or resilience. Rather than build a separate, parallel set of infrastructure "as big as the Internet," which is clearly infeasible, we are GENI-enabling existing testbeds, campuses, regional and backbone networks, cloud computation services, and commercial equipment. GENI can then incorporate these networks and services by federation, rather than constructing and operating a separate set of infrastructure. "At-scale" experimentation, as currently envisioned, may ultimately grow to involve tens or hundreds of thousands of human participants and computers. Starting in October 2009, the GENI project began to pave the way with a "meso-scale" build-out through more than a dozen US campuses, two national backbones, and several regional networks. Lessons learned from this effort, and the experiments that it is now supporting, will help guide a substantial "at scale" build-out. 3 Accomplishments We are extremely proud at how fast GENI is taking shape. In just over 3 years of community prototyping, we are now running about 40 interesting research experiments from a wide range of research areas, across a "meso-scale" prototype system built from GENI-enabled commercial equipment, that spans 14 US campuses and the two national research backbones (Internet2, NLR). Current GENI campus deployments are as follows: Clemson, Columbia, UCLA, U. Colorado, Georgia Tech, Indiana, U. Kentucky, UMass., NYU Polytechnic, Princeton, Rutgers, Stanford, U. Washington, and U. Wisconsin. 4 Summary GENI is remarkable first for itself, as a fascinating new kind of system, but far more important, for the extraordinary new research that it now has begun to enable. Nothing like GENI existed two years ago. It is now up and running in prototype form through 14 campuses across the United States, and within the two national research backbones. This alone is a remarkable achievement. Far more important, however, are the new classes of research that GENI has begun to enable. As of June 2012, about 40 experiments had begun to investigate the future of global communications. They are currently running across the GENI meso-scale prototype; as GENI gradually expands into its "at scale" form, these experiments will be able to explore an entirely new frontier in research, as they grow to at-scale experiments in future global communication systems that can engage tens or hundreds of thousands of human participants in university campuses across the United States. GA Tech and Williams have already started to incorporate GENI experimentation into their courses, and we are funding more curriculum development in Spiral 4 and beyond. These courses have the potential to totally transform how experimental computer science is taught and learned in the coming years. Perhaps most important to us, the GENI community, is that the newest generation of networking and distributed systems researchers have enthusiastically taken up research leadership roles in an ambitious project of national importance.
