Campus Participation in National Scale GENI-enabled Infrastructure

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This EAGER supports a process that will lead to the development of a national-scale infrastructure that will enable research on future internets, distributed clouds, and novel, large-scale applications. It has two parts. First, technical and administrative personnel from GENI-enabled campuses will serve as mentors for other campuses wishing to GENI-enable their own networks. This will be accomplished via site visits and then routine advising as the new campuses deploy the technologies necessary to become GENI-enabled. The second part of the project consists of a workshop for all the network engineers working at GENI-enabled campuses as well as those at campuses still wishing to become GENI-enabled. The workshop will be hosted at the next GENI Engineering Conference in November in Kansas City. This project is high-risk high reward; it proposes a strategy for exploratory work to increase the number of GENI-enabled campuses across the country to thirty by the end of 2012. When combined with Internet2's commitment and forthcoming regional network commitments to GENI-enable parts of their backbones, the result could well be a national-scale GENI-enabled experimental network. This work is at a very early stage and the ideas are untested, but if successful, it will have an impact on society that is potentially as significant as that of the Internet. The broader impacts of this project are considerable. Campuses across the country will become part of the GENI network infrastructure, allowing for their researchers to carry out experiments not possible anywhere else on the globe. There is great potential for new technologies of significant scientific and societal importance to be developed. The students on these campuses will be able to 'live in the future' taking computer science and engineering courses that require use of the GENI infrastructure to build prototype distributed cloud systems, new security architectures, or large-scale applications, for example.