2009

The GENI Project Office at BBN Technologies Announces $10.5M in NSF Funding to Kick Off New, Larger-Scale Prototyping Efforts for the GENI Virtual Laboratory

The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) brings together leading researchers across 14 U.S. campuses and two national backbones

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., October 19, 2009 — BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, 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)

About GENI and the GENI Project Office

GENI, a virtual laboratory for exploring future internets at scale, creates major opportunities to understand, innovate, and transform global networks and their interactions with society. Dynamic and adaptive, GENI opens up new areas of research at the frontiers of network science and engineering, and increases the opportunity for significant socio-economic impact. GENI will:

  • support at-scale experimentation on shared, heterogeneous, highly instrumented infrastructure;
  • enable deep programmability throughout the network, promoting innovations in network science, security, technologies, services and applications; and
  • provide collaborative and exploratory environments for academia, industry and the public to catalyze groundbreaking discoveries and innovation.

The GENI Project Office provides system engineering and project management expertise to guide the planning and prototyping efforts of the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI). GPO systems engineers engage in system design, identify and track technical risks, capture and manage system requirements, provide oversight and support to GENI working groups, and monitor and coordinate prototyping subcontracts. The GPO leads periodic GENI Engineering Conferences for collaboration in the developer community and issues solicitations to fund prototype development that addresses technical risks. The GPO also performs project management, contracting, technical liaison, and meeting coordination in close coordination with the National Science Foundation. See www.geni.net for more information.

About BBN Technologies
BBN Technologies is a legendary R&D organization that leverages its substantial intellectual property portfolio to produce advanced, repeatable solutions such as the Boomerang shooter detection system. With expertise spanning information security, speech and language processing, networking, distributed systems, and sensing and control systems, BBN scientists and engineers have amassed a substantial collection of innovations and patented solutions. BBN now employs over 700 people in seven locations in the US: Cambridge, Massachusetts (headquarters); Arlington, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; Middletown, Rhode Island; San Diego, California; St. Louis Park, Minnesota; and O’Fallon, Illinois. For more information, visit www.bbn.com.