University network facilities, both those dedicated to research and those that support core institutional activities, play a very important role in the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project. Campus networks pose interesting and unique challenges. GENI expects networked university research facilities to exploit existing university networks using linkage mechanisms that permit the use of experimental protocols down to the lowest layers in the stack and nodes that are programmable by experimenters, all without disrupting production use of the same networks. Deploying such infrastructure in a campus environment requires close coordination with university IT departments.
This award funds a workshop with researchers, campus network leaders, and GENI and NSF staff to address concrete campus implementation options. Meeting invitees will be among the top experts in higher-education networking and information technology, representing universities across the country. The purpose of the proposed meeting and other activities is to promote effective, efficient communication between the GENI staff and higher education CIO community. The report from this meeting will assist GENI in determining the most effective means for connecting the higher education research community to any future, experimental network infrastructure.
The meeting will have broader impacts of at least three types. First, it will lay the foundation for much more capable networking than the current Internet protocols can support. Second, it will enhance the ability of researchers to interact with network operators in ways that balance robustness and flexibility. Third, it will enable EDUCAUSE to disseminate information and conclusions from the meeting to a broader constituency, thus, helping them to contemplate future networking opportunities more efficiently.
This half-day workshop for campus IT leaders was to discuss the status of and gain support for OpenFlow/SDN implementation. Campus IT organizations provided leadership for the expansion and development of the current Internet and their participation will be integral to the development of the future internet. GENI seeks to enable the partnerships between campus IT organizations and researchers that will make this so. The meeting was held on July 7, 2011, in Boston, Mass. and was attended by CIOs and other IT executives from 25 universities as well as representatives of EDUCAUSE, Internet2, GENI, and NSF (CISE and OCI). Discussion ranged widely across many topics that are likely to arise as campuses experiment with and then implement the flexible, sophisticated networking technologies emerging from GENI. This had the desired impacts: it helped CIOs understand what participation in GENI would entail, and it helped researchers and GENI staff understand what campus CIOs would need to know in order to participate. That this project helped GENI and campuses agree on expanded experiments will lead to better, more flexible networking on the campuses that participate. Their experience, in turn, will enable broader improvement in networking across other campuses and then beyond them. The principal goal of the meeting was to enable direct interactions among researchers, campus CIOs, and GENI staff, and it was very successful in this respect. Since the goal was to promote broad thinking rather than drive consensus, the product of of the meeting somewhat defies summary. Rather than a summary, therefore, the best way to understand the project's outcome is to review the comprehensive report on the proceedings written by Jerry Grochow for EDUCAUSE. That report is publicly available online at the URL http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/GENIreport_july2011.pdf. The report also includes a full list of the participants, and a list of additional reports and documents.
