GENI I Workshop Handout
From GPNWiki
First Great Plains Network GENI Workshop
Kansas State University
November 30, 2006
About GENI
The Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) is an advanced experimental infrastructure and accompanying research program being planned by the Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate to explore new capabilities that will advance innovations in many areas.
GENI responds to an urgent and important challenge of the 21st century to ensure that the future Internet will be
- worthy of our trust,
- able to continue to grow robustly, and
- capable of supporting even more innovation in all areas of activity than the current Internet has enabled.
Ultimately, achieving this goal will depend on a large number of factors—including legal, regulatory, policy, commercial and technical—but it begins with exploring new networking and distributed system architectures that can respond to the demands of the future. What is GENI?
The goal of GENI is to increase the quality and quantity of experimental research outcomes in networking and distributed systems, and to accelerate the transition of these outcomes into products and services that will enhance economic competitiveness and secure the Nation's future. Ultimately, research performed on GENI is expected to lead to a transition of the Internet as we know it today.
Facility Concept
The GENI facility will be unique among experimental platforms in that it will be designed to support both research and deployment, effectively filling the gap between small-scale experiments in the lab, and mature technology that is ready for commercial deployment. We envision researchers using GENI to evaluate new network systems on large-scale (global) system, learning from real workloads as users begin to exercise those systems, and hardening the successful systems as user adoption grows.
At the physical level, GENI will consist of a collection of physical networking components, including links, forwarders, storage, processor clusters, and wireless subnets. These resources are collectively called the GENI substrate. On top of this substrate, a software management framework will overlay network experiments on the substrate, where each experiment is said to run in a slice of the substrate.
Four key ideas make this possible. First, the substrate components will be programmable. This will make it possible to embed any network experiment in GENI, including clean-slate designs that are radically different from today's Internet architecture and protocols. Second, the substrate will be virtualizable. This will make it possible to embed multiple slices in the substrate at the same time. This is important because it will allow experimental services and architectures to run continuously, rather only in a reserved time slot. Third, GENI will include mechanisms that allow end-users to seamlessly opt-in to experimental services. This will make it possible to attract real users, which is critical to evaluating new services under real-world conditions. It also enables incremental adoption, which is key to encouraging wide-spread deployment. Finally, GENI will be modular, with a well-defined architecture and set of interfaces. This will make it possible to extend GENI with new networking technologies as they become available. That is, GENI will not be a static artifact, but rather a dynamic infrastructure that is continually renewed.
About FIND
FIND (Future Internet Network Design) is a major new long-term initiative of the NSF NETS research program. FIND asks two broad questions:
- What are the requirements for the global network of 15 years from now - what should that network look like and do? and
- How would we re-conceive tomorrow's global network today, if we could design it from scratch?
The FIND program solicits "clean slate process" research proposals in the broad area of network architecture, principles, and design, aimed at answering these questions. The philosophy of the program is to help conceive the future by momentarily letting go of the present - freeing our collective minds from the constraints of the current.
The intellectual scope of the FIND program is wide. FIND research might address questions such as:
- What will the edge of the network look like in 15 years? How might the network architecture of 15 years hence best accommodate sensors, embedded systems, and the like?
- How might the network of 15 years from now support what users really do (and care about)? How might such functions as information access, location management or identity management best fit into a new overall network architecture?
- What will the core of the network look like in 15 years? How might the changing economics of optical systems affect the overall design of the larger network?
Thanks to our corporate partner, Ciena Corporation
