Organizational Workshop for the Future Cyberinfrastructure Consortium

Internet2, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

This project supports a two half-day workshop on October 6-7 in Washington, DC, in which the GENI Project Office (GPO) can lead multiple sessions of focused planning for the creation of the Future Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (FCIC). The initial purpose of the FCIC is to provide for the operation, administration, research vision, and governance of the GENI project after the current cooperative agreement between NSF and Raytheon/BBN for the GPO expires in 2017. The intellectual merit of this project is in its goal to coordinate and house a workshop that is the culmination of a GPO-led, ten month long, community-wide inquiry into the future administration and governance of GENI. The workshop will bring together the community of scholars who have committed to participate in continuing the evolution of GENI past the era of the BBN GPO. The broader impact of this project is in its activities laying the groundwork not just for the continuation of the GENI project, but also for the continued evolution of the ecosystem of consortium, project/administrative office, and physical infrastructure - including network, storage, and computational assets - to a persistent and sustainable national cyberinfrastructure for the support of experimental research in distributed systems, as reflected in the workshop's title: Future Cyberinfrastructure Consortium. In addition to its research mission, the Consortium intends to expand the already wide use of GENI as a teaching tool in secondary schools, colleges, and universities, where it makes the art, science, and technology of distributed systems more accessible to all students, including under-represented ethnic groups, women, and the disabled.