GENI Meeting with University Campus Chief Information Officers

Educause, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

The purpose of this workshop is to initiate a dialogue between the higher education CIO community and the GENI Project Office. EDUCAUSE, an association of over 2,000 institutions of higher education and their corporate partners, will convene the meeting at the end of August 2008. EDUCAUSE provides leadership on how to build and deploy advanced broadband networks in this country. This dialogue is central to linking US networked university research facilities to a suite of novel network experimental infrastructure, which is currently in the planning stages. Providing the means to link new experimental infrastructure to university campuses will allow network science and engineering researchers to pose interesting research questions and carry out experiments that could never be done before. The particular technologies, operational logistics, policies, management, and financial issues will be hammered out and negotiated at this workshop of approximately twenty to thirty university CIOs. Particular emphasis will be put on exploring how GENI may extend into and through their campuses. EDUCAUSE plans to work with the attendees to identify what is achievable and what the remaining challenges are in terms of national campus deployment. The GENI Project Office will learn what is important to campus IT departments and how to minimize any impacts on them. The longer-term impacts are that students and faculty across the country will benefit from using and experimenting on a suite of advanced experimental network infrastructure that is currently in the planning stages.