"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
This award funds three collaborating sets of academic / industrial teams to integrate, operate, and host experiments on a suite of end-to-end prototype GENI infrastructure built from GENI-enabled commercial hardware across 13 university campuses, linked by compatible build-outs through two US national research backbones (Internet2 and National Lambda Rail) across an aggregate national footprint of 40 gigabits per second.
Prototying this meso-scale infrastructure will: 1. Create a compelling infrastructure for entirely new forms of research experimentation at a much larger scale than has previously been available, which will then provide early forms of meso-scale experimentation that can drive GENI's spiral development; 2. Stimulate broad community participation and "opt-in" by early users across 13 major campuses, which can then grow by a further 21 campuses as the build-out progresses, with a strong partnership between campus researchers and infrastructure operators; and 3. Forge a strong academic /industrial base by GENI-enabling commercial equipment from Arista, Cisco, HP, Juniper and NEC, with software from AT&T and Nicira.
The scientific, social and economic benefits are many. Meso-scale experiments can begin within the next 12 months. These experiments will operate at an unprecedented scale and can draw on campus student populations as early, opt-in users. Such experimental capabilities will enable whole new classes of network science and engineering research and provide invaluable early feedback that will guide future spiral development. Researchers will work with national infrastructure providers and commercial equipment providers in a collaborative effort in which timely results and progress matter. It is expected that the community will grow in capability and maturity as it strives to create and integrate this highly novel, medium-scale experimental infrastructure. If successful, this could result in GENI-enabled commercial equipment becoming widely available and deployed over the next spirals in GENI's development and prototyping.
