GENI, the Global Environment for Network Innovations, is a suite of research infrastructure 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 social-technical systems, by providing a suite of infrastructure for "at scale" experiments in future internets. Nationwide experiments began in Summer 2010. In the intervening three years, GENI has shown rapid growth in adoption by experimental researchers and is now expanding to over 50 GENI-enabled campuses.
This project will implement four coordinated thrusts that consolidate important GENI gains and advance the maturity of GENI as it progresses through its "at scale" deployment phase. This work positions GENI to be maintainable, expandable, and broadly usable for research and energizes the GENI community to sustain the powerful growth momentum that is carrying GENI forward.
* Build and deploy experimenter tools that make GENI easier to use for a growing community. * Create processes and institutions to carry GENI into the future. * Stretch and test GENI's experimental capabilities. * Introduce GENI to industry, research leaders, and students through direct engagements that make GENI relevant in their work by partnering with product developers and service providers and by bringing GENI-based curriculum into college and university classrooms.
GENI allows academic and industrial researchers to perform a new class of experiments that tackle critically important issues in global communications networks, issues such as our ability to understand or predict the behavior of complex, large-scale networks, issues associated with the barriers to innovation in the current Internet, and issues related to the resilience and trust needed of our critical infrastructures. GENI is emerging as the prototype of a system for deploying and managing custom combinations of computation and communication. As such it is potentially a model for the next generation of commercial network infrastructure.
