Global Environment for Network Innovation by NSF

       GENI is an experimental facility that will revolutionize research in global communication networks. It is open, large-scale and realistic in nature. One of the main goals of GENI is to change the nature of networked and distributed systems design, to integrate precise theoretical understanding with compelling and thorough experimental validation³. In other words, GENI is designed to allow experiments on a wide variety of problems in communications, networking, distributed systems, cyber-security, and networked services and applications.

       The importance is given on enabling researchers to experiment with essential network designs in a way that is far more realistic than they can today. It is a revolution in network based systems. NSF is the immediate funding for community prototyping and experiments. Through this system researchers will be able to build their own new versions of the "net" or to study the "net" in ways that are probably impossible in the present day. It is also important to note that compatibility, with the Internet is not necessary. The principle of GENI is to give researchers the opportunity to experiment freely by assumptions or requirements and to support those experiments at a large scale with real user populations².

       The GENI concept is being explored by the US computing community with support from the National Science Foundation. The GENI will aid in networking and distributed systems, and to speed up the application of research into products and services that will in turn enhance the economic competitiveness and secure the Nation's future. It is expected that research performed on GENI will lead to capabilities beyond the Internet as we know it today. Or in other words it can be said that it will be the future of post internet. In fact GENI planning efforts are presently organized around multidusiblinary area, basically linked with architecture, the backbone network, distributed services, wireless/mobile/sensor subnetworks, and research coordination amongst these&sup4;.

       In recent decades, the focus of interest in computer science and computing systems has shifted to very large distributed systems. This is mainly because of the realization that this area has much stored income potential and can generate various opportunities. For instance, these systems may include web services, Grid services, content distribution systems, overlay multicast trees, wide area storage systems, and distributed hash tables. These society-scale systems provide exceptional challenges and opportunities for the present world, and rise fascinating new research questions.

       Network systems are primarily communication systems, and therefore their emergent behaviors often emerge in human interactions. The scale of a network system where behaviors emerge is not only a scale in terms of number of nodes, but also a scale in terms of number of people utilizing the system. To take a simple example, spam is a phenomenon that only emerges when a large number of people use a networked system. In the same way, peer-to-peer file transfer or an online classified system such as eBay or any other online networking systems only demonstrate interesting properties when a large number of users become attached to the system. In order to study large-scale systems with large numbers of users, an experimental field station where long-running services can be deployed and used by real-world users is required. This is the sole reason for the emergence of GENI.

       GENI is intended to play three principal roles for the networking and distributed systems research community in the United States, as a laboratory, as an observatory and as a field experiential station. GENI as a lab is a facility for controlled, repeatable, reproducible experiments under safe conditions which should provide specific, precise, guaranteed conditions for the conduct of experiments, and mutual protective guarantees for facility users and third parties. On the other hand GENI as an observatory is a facility for precise, non-invasive observations of the behavior of existing networks and distributed systems under current network conditions. As a field experimental GENI station, new systems can be tested under actual network conditions.

       The difficulty with such a laboratory based, observatory, and field experimental station is that only a few applications or experiments can justify the immense expense incurred from such a platform, and therefore a shared platform is essential. Currently this platform of GENI is being designed by a team of 70 industrial and academic researchers.

       There are three systems namely the Emulab/Netbed, PlanetLab, and Tycoon on whose experiences we draw, as representatives of the GENI frameworks: Emulab is part of the University of Utah, is the premiere distributed systems and networking laboratory facility which offers a controlled testing environment constituting bare machines, with images loadable from a centralized resource, and private links with a maximum bandwidth of 100 Mb/sec and controllable impairments.

       PlanetLab which is based at Princeton is the leading distributed systems and networking observatory and field experimentation station. The main purpose here is to cover network of bare virtualizable IA-32 Linux machines, with virtualization at the syscall level using Vservers, a Linux equivalent of BSD jails. Connectivity is over the open Internet, using physical links and bare IPv4 addresses. Bandwidth is capped to control expenses at the hosting sites. Here only Linux executables are loadable.

       Tycoon basically from HP Labs, is the only market-based cluster management system. Tycoon allocates virtual machines based on the Xen virtual computing base, with memory, CPU, and bandwidth set by the end-user/developer. It is important to note that all three environments offer the developer/user bare machines and the choice of bare machines is not accidental rather conflicts in software environments are a major deployment barrier, and use of bare machines as a prerequisite for rapid deployment.

       The purpose of GENI is to extend and deepen its specific experience, PlanetLab and Emulab, both broadening the scope of the testbed and providing more advanced services. Especially, PlanetLab's ability to maintain a worldwide network of machines with a small staff, and the ability to provide users with the illusion of a bare virtual machine will still continue with GENI. Emulab's ability to create a virtual network and rapidly populate it, sharing a common file system, will be retained and extended over the wide area. Several deficiencies of the PlanetLab infrastructure will be addressed in GENI.

       GENI is motivated by a variety of social needs. For instance, as we know that today's computer network systems lack security and institutions and individuals are in search of secure mode. GENI is a strong driver especially in the field of emergence of networking in the developing world. For instance, Intel Research Berkeley and UC Berkeley, led by Prof. Eric Brewer, have led numerous infrastructure projects in the developing world, featuring long-range wireless communication and delay-tolerant networking. Besides in collaboration with UC San Diego's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, Prof. Brewer has been deeply involved in Mission 2007, which is a project to connect 100,000 Indian villages¹. This and several other projects of GENI by NSF is a stepping stone for new innovations in the world of computer networks and other fields linked with it. It can be said that GENI is the future of post internet.

References

1. Brassil, J. and McGeer, R. "The Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) " IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing visit this site.

2. gpogeni.net "Global Environment for Network Innovation" (2007) visit this site.

3. Peterson, L. "GENI: Global Environment for Network Innovations" (July 13, 2006) Princeton University visit this site.

4. Wikipedia "GENI - Global Environment for Network Innovations" (2007) Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., visit this site.

 

Done By: Eng. Saleh Alajji

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