US Ignite Next Generation Developers Workshop

Us Ignite, Inc., Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

The US Ignite effort is a joint public/private initiative with the primary goal of breaking a fundamental deadlock: there is insufficient investment in gigabit applications that can take advantage of advanced network infrastructure because such infrastructure is rare and dispersed. And conversely, there is a lack of broad availability of advanced broadband infrastructure for open experimentation and innovation because there are few advanced applications and services to justify it. US Ignite intends to break this deadlock by providing incentives for imagining, prototyping, and developing public sector gigabit applications and by leveraging and extending this network testbed across US campuses and cities. Applications for US Ignite should support national priority areas of advanced manufacturing, clean energy and transportation, cyber learning, health IT, and public safety/emergency preparedness. This project will support participation of up to 17 academics and students in a workshop, the "Next-Generation Developers Workshop," to be held February 1-2, 2013 in San Leandro, CA. The workshop purpose is to catalyze a long-term, high-level developer community to advance the creation of next generation Internet applications, especially those that make use of SDN technology. There is significant SDN and network virtualization progress being made by private industry and the NSF Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI)project. GENI further extends virtualization capabilities by allowing the construction of custom combinations of virtualized computation and communication. However, the process of using these advances to conceptualize next generation network applications and their capabilities is lagging. The workshop will identify existing and emerging standards, APIs, tools, educational materials, and examples that will help enlarge the US Ignite development community and engage existing members in capabilities they may not have realized were available. The workshop will develop sharable lists of issues, barriers, educational materials, missing APIs, and other impediments to creating next generation applications. In addition, the workshop will engage faculty and students in the process of understanding the technology issues associated with US Ignite and in the process of developing transformative applications.