GAMING

BBN Technologies announced today a $10.5M National Science Foundation grant to fund further prototyping for GENI, a virtual laboratory for exploring future internets at scale. The funding will enable three sets of collaborating academic/industrial research teams to replicate those GENI prototype systems that have gained significant traction, based on GENI-enabled commercial hardware, across 14 U.S. campuses and two national research backbones. These prototypes will serve as a foundation for creating major opportunities for early experiments on an end-to-end suite of GENI infrastructure at a scale significantly larger than has been possible until now.

GENI, a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is a unique virtual laboratory for at-scale networking experimentation where the brightest minds unite to envision and create new possibilities of future internets. Open and broadly accessible, GENI encourages collaboration among academia, industry and the public to catalyze groundbreaking discoveries and innovation in network science and engineering.

GENI researchers employ a "spiral development" approach, with simultaneous development and trials giving rapid feedback to help guide the evolving designs. Spiral 1 focused on ways to discover, schedule, and control resources for large-scale research experiments and to measure GENI capabilities.

"GENI is now ramping up very quickly," said Chip Elliott, GENI Project Director. “This new effort creates a compelling infrastructure for entirely new forms of network science and engineering experimentation at a much larger scale than has previously been available, and helps forge a strong academic / industrial base by GENI-enabling commercial equipment from Arista, Cisco Systems, HP Labs, Juniper Networks, and NEC Corp. and NEC Laboratories America, Inc., with software from AT&T Labs and Nicira, Inc.”

The Principal Investigators and campuses funded under this grant are:

• Tom Anderson of University of Washington
• Suman Banerjee and Aditya Akella of University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Mark Corner of University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• Nick Feamster of Georgia Institute of Technology
• Michael Freedman of Princeton University
• Mario Gerla of University of California, Los Angeles
• James Griffioen of University of Kentucky
• Dirk Grunwald of University of Colorado, Boulder
• Thanasis Korakis of Polytechnic Institute of NYU
• Nick McKeown, Guru Parulkar, and Guido Appenzeller of Stanford University
• Dipankar Raychaudhuri and Ivan Seskar of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
• Henning Schulzrinne of Columbia University
• Christopher Small of Indiana University
• Kuang-Ching Wang of Clemson University
• Martin Casado of Nicira, Inc.
• Jen Leasure of The Quilt
• Eric Boyd and Matthew Zekauskas of Internet2
• Tom West of National LambdaRail (NLR)