Mozilla Ignite is an open innovation project hosted by Mozilla and the National Science Foundation. The heart of the project is an apps challenge that invites developers to build “Apps from the Future” using the GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) sandbox. We are looking for a technical writer to help developers use this new and exciting technology by creating resources that support the use of the GENI sandbox.

In order to open up the frontiers of network science and engineering we will be using GENI, a virtual laboratory to explore the future internet at scale. GENI creates major opportunities to understand, innovate and transform global networks and their interactions with society. In order to make this opportunity accessible to as many developers as possible, we need a technical writer to document how to access GENI network resources, get started on GENI starter racks, and how to setup simple experiments. This will include pulling together previously created materials, writing missing materials and harness the support of the GPO (GENI Project Office) to build comprehensive and easy to use resources for developers that are new to GENI and would like to participate in the Ignite challenge, building apps on the network of the future.

If you’re a technical writer, familiar with application development, excited by civic innovation (and totally geek out about futuristic, applied innovation), you’re exactly who we’re looking for to join the team!

The Job:

To create clear and concise documentation that will be used to assist developers who are unfamiliar with GENI in order to be able to construct experimentation and use GENI resources and capabilities with ease.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Evaluate existing documentation and tutorial material for completeness and correctness. Recommend and implement improvements to create a high-quality on-boarding package for new GENI application developers.
• Creation and maintenance of a document for developers not familiar with GENI to have an easy time learning how to use the GENI network sandbox as part of the Ignite Challenge
• Create an outline of materials and tools needed from developer perspectives to engage successfully in the Ignite challenge
• Gather, create and request necessary information to build a comprehensive and easy to understand guide to using GENI in the Ignite Challenge
• Create tutorials that walk developers new to GENI through getting access to GENI, setting up an experiment with allocated resources and case studies on how to build basic apps
• Translate and edit documents into clear and easy to understand format

Requirements:

• Comfortable at a linux command line, and familiar with key networking concepts.
• Proficient in networking and network engineering
• Excellent oral and written English communication skills with peers, management, and cross-functional teams
• Deep analytical skills and ability to analyze data and research to create strategic visions
• Undergraduate of Computer Science, Informatics or Information Science preferred
• Experience in technical writing and ability to communicate clearly

Position available immediately, runs until September 2012.
Preferred location Boston.

For questions or sending your resume, please contact Katrin Lepik, Mozilla.

The 14th GENI Engineering Conference (GEC14) will be held July 9 – 11, 2012 in Boston, Massachusetts. Details to be announced shortly.

If you are interested in hosting a future conference, visit the GEC Hosting Requirements page for more information.

At this open event, experimenters will have the opportunity to join a design jam facilitated by the Mozilla Foundation. We will strategize and prototype apps that make the power of next-gen networks real and visible for more people.

Through the Ignite Apps Challenge, NSF and Mozilla want to help people build things that show off the cool opportunities that GENI presents, especially in national priority areas like health IT, distance education, clean energy and public safety. Over the course of the year, NSF and Mozilla are offering $500k in funding and valuable mentorship to help get these apps off the ground.

Compelling designs from this session could evolve into submissions to the challenge, with seed money and mentorship available to help get them off the ground. If you’re more interested in architectural, design, and documentation issues around GENI, drop in and meet with GPO staff and GENI developers. This session provides an opportunity for both developers and experimenters to work on the things that matter to them.

All GEC attendees are welcome to participate in the combined event. LA-area web developers, designers and civic leaders are also invited to register for free. Invite your developer friends to this open event!

GEC13 participants interested in participating in the Hackfest should choose the Coding Sprint / Hackfest session when registering.

Looking forward to seeing you @ 1-9 pm Thursday, March 15th. Nourishment will be served.

For more information, contact ignite@mozillafoundation.org

THIS EVENT IS CLOSED.

The 13th GENI Engineering Conference (GEC13) was held on March 13-15 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles. Thanks to local hosts, Prof. Giovanni Pau, Prof. Mario Gerla and the University of California, Los Angeles.

GEC13 promised something for everyone in the GENI community, including newcomers who want to learn how to apply GENI in their work. Planned sessions included:

- the ever-popular evening demo session
- a full slate of introductory and advanced hands-on tutorials
- presentation of the GENI architecture design
- design and deployment plans for GENI racks

Two additional events were planned in coordination with GEC13.

* Professor Kaiqi Xiong of RIT organized the First GENI Research and Educational Experiment Workshop, March 15-16. Participation in this workshop was via paper submission, with a deadline of 15 Feb.

* The GENI coding sprint will return to GEC after a successful debut last November. This spring’s coding sprint was in conjunction with a GENI / US Ignite Hackfest facilitated by the Mozilla Foundation. All GEC attendees were welcome to participate in the combined event, where they had the chance to work on implementation of a key GENI component, received help in starting or troubleshooting their experiments, and brainstorm their US Ignite applications.

Conference Agenda – CLOSED

Register online now! - CLOSED

Calendar of upcoming GECs -  CLOSED

Travel Grants
Travel grants to attend GEC13 were available for those who qualified. For information on how to apply for a grant, please see the Travel Grant Application for GEC13. For information on how to request reimbursement under a travel grant, please view the Travel Reimbursement Guidelines.

Leading researchers presented live demonstrations of their experiments to two hundred ninety five attendees.  Experiments built on the unique capabilities of the GENI mesoscale deployment, a prototype distributed virtual laboratory for exploring future internets, currently spanning over a dozen university campuses and backbone points of presence across the US. Using GENI’s capabilities of slicing and deep programmability, experimenters were able to deploy and validate novel services and applications, many of which are not realizable in today’s internet.

One group of experiments focused on taking advantage of server and cloud resources to provide new and more efficient capabilities to end users of home networks and mobile devices. Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology demonstrated uCap, a tool that works with a specialized home router to permit home users to manage network usage allocations across family members, applications (browsing, e-mail, video streaming), and devices. The University of Wisconsin used a suite of chess-playing smart phones to show how computationally intensive tasks can be offloaded to heterogeneous cloud resources while meeting users’ goals for security and power efficiency. The Infinity project at the University of Michigan integrates energy-efficient wireless communication techniques and predictive caching to optimize performance of smart phone applications such as Facebook photo sharing.

In a collaborative effort with the SC11 SCInet Research Sandbox (SRS), another group of experiment teams highlighted novel in-network capabilities that build upon GENI’s deeply programmable network resources. Researchers from Northwestern University showed how advanced programmable networks can shortcut years of custom engineering to bring ad hoc specialized networks to individuals and organizations. Indiana University gave attendees a live view of their FlowScale system, which balances multi-gigabit network loads across the campus’ multiple intrusion detection system (IDS) servers, an integral part of the University’s network operations. A combined team from Indiana University and the University of Delaware used their eXtensible Session Protocol (XSP) to boost performance by seamlessly connecting GENI-enabled resources at the network edge to core routers running a high-performance transfer protocol. Clemson University researchers showed off their Steroid OpenFlow Service, transparently tuning network performance to increase end-to-end TCP transfer rates by two orders of magnitude.

Finally, a team led by Rutgers WINLAB showed how they are using the GENI mesoscale deployment to deploy, test, and validate their MobilityFirst architecture. MobilityFirst is sponsored by the National Science Foundation under its Future Internet Architecture program. Using new protocols and design paradigms, MobilityFirst is developing a novel architecture for a future internet where mobility is the norm, with dynamic host and network mobility at scale. Two key MobilityFirst capabilities, Storage Aware Routing and the Global Name Resolution Service, were demonstrated with wired and two different wireless connectivity modalities across a nationwide GENI slice covering eight campuses, two national network backbones, and nine backbone points of presence.

Watch GEC12 Demonstration Videos

Calendar of upcoming GECs

Advanced Programmable Networks: Demonstration of Software Defined Networks, !OpenFlow, and Current GENI Capabilities
Presented by Joe Mambretti, Jim Chen, Northwestern University, ICAIR, November 3, 2011 at the GEC12 conference during the Plenary Experimenters session.

BISmark: Software Defined Network Management
Presented by Nick Feamster, Georgia Tech, at GEC12 conference on 11/3/11 during the Plenary Experimenter session.

ECOS: Enterprise Centric Offload System
Presented by Aaron Gember, University of Wisconsin, at GEC12 conference on 11/3/11 during the Plenary Experimenter session.

FlowScale: A Load Balancing As A Service Tool
Presented by Chris Small, Indiana University, November 3, 2011 at the GEC12 conference during the Plenary Experimenters session.

Infinity: In-Network Storage for Mobile Devices
Presented by Yudong Gao, University of Michigan, at GEC12 conference on 11/3/11 during the Plenary Experimenter session.

Ignite
Presented by: Suzi Iacono, Nick Maynard, Bill Wallace, Glenn Ricart, Geoff Daily, Christian Heilmann at the GEC12 conference Plenary session on 11/3/11.

Improving WAN Performance with the eXtensible Session Protocol
Presented by Martin Swany, Indiana University and Ezra Kissel, University of Deleware November 3, 2011 at the GEC12 conference during the Plenary Experimenters session.

Mobility First: Prototype Demonstration of Key Protocols using GENI
Speaker: Kiran Nagaraja.
Presented by Dipankar Raychaudhuri, Kiran Nagaraja, Ivan Seskar -
Rutgers WINLAB Clemson University, November 3, 2011 at the GEC12
conference during the Plenary Experimenters session.


Steroid OpenFlow Service (SOS)
Presented by Kuang-Ching Wang, Aaron Rosen – Clemson University, November 3, 2011 at the GEC12 conference during the Plenary Experimenters session.

Watch Videos

Conference Agenda

Registration Information

Travel Grants Information

Calendar of upcoming GECs

Scalable Monitoring Team

The Scalable, Extensible, and Safe Monitoring (S3MONITOR) GENI project is developing a prototype measurement service that is scalable, extensible, and manageable. The service is scalable to hundreds of cooperating measurement hosts; extensible in that it may be extended to use a growing set of GENI network measurement tools; and manageable in that it can honor administratively-specified bounds on network and host resources consumed by measurements. PI Sonia Fahmy of Purdue University and co-PI Puneet Sharma of HP Labs are leading the effort to develop this service for the ProtoGENI control framework.

S3MONITOR is based on the HP Labs successful S^3 measurement service deployed on PlanetLab. The service consists of three components: (1) sensor pods that are lightweight measurement and monitoring sensors used to collect information; (2) a programmable sensing information management backplane that allows application services to subscribe to existing aggregated measurement feeds or to create new feeds in an efficient manner; and (3) scalable inference engines that estimate network metrics based on partial information measured by the sensor pods.

S3MONITOR may be deployed within a GENI experiment to make experiment-specific host and network measurements. It may also be deployed as a single service used by any experiments with experiment-specific measurements being inferred from global measurements.

An initial version of the S3MONITOR service was demonstrated at GEC8. This demonstration software runs continuously on ProtoGENI at http://illusion.hpl.hp.com/genis3monitor.

The S3MONITOR project team, along with other GENI instrumentation and measurement projects, is working to define a common GENI instrumentation and measurement architecture. When completed, the S3MONITOR project will be an important component of the GENI Instrumentation and Measurement Architecture that will enhance privacy and security while facilitating more accurate on-demand and periodic network measurements with improved data archiving.

The 10th GENI Engineering Conference featured significant progress achieving community agreement on several open engineering issues and a new multi-track format, highlighting GENI’s experimenter, operator, and developer communities.  As Erwin Gianchandani described in the CCC blog:

The structure of this week’s conference illustrated the tremendous progress the GPO and countless research teams working side by side have made in just the past year, let alone in the three years since the NSF first launched the GENI Project.  No longer were the Working Groups that have been the focal point of the past several GECs necessary.  Instead, there were three new concurrent tracks, focused on the experimenter (helping researchers learn how to use GENI for experimentation), campus/infrastructure operator (exploring issues of deployment and operations of GENI infrastructure), and software developer/system integrator (exploring key aspects of building/integrating software to support GENI experimentation within the next 12-18 months).

Moreover, a key goal of this particular GEC was to make a series of important engineering decisions in order to prepare for “at scale” GENI.  As Chip Elliott — who has worked tirelessly as head of the GPO over the past several years in an effort to bring the GENI vision to reality — acknowledged during his opening remarks Wednesday morning, these decisions are merely “rev. 1.0 decisions.  None of us believes these will be the end-all, be-all.  We don’t have to be perfect at the beginning, but we have to make [these decisions]” in order to ensure timely forward progress.  Among the topics discussed at the meeting:  software identity and attributes, authorization, resource descriptions (rspecs), and inter-aggregate stitching, as well as basic operations agreements on GENI participation.

The GEC10 engineering meetings resulted in several valuable agreements which will drive work over the coming months: GENI will support external identity providers in GENI, starting with the InCommon federation; GENI now has a single over-the-wire format for resource description; a common architecture for stitching functions has been established; and a trial of Attribute-Based Access Control in the ProtoGENI control framework was initiated.

Additionally, the conference included nine experimenter tutorials, invited talks from two NSF Future Internet Architecture projects, coordination meetings for GENI meso-scale campus deployments, and forty-five very dynamic project demonstrations.

GEC10 was hosted by the University of Puerto Rico and the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico over March 15 – 17, 2011 at the Sheraton Puerto Rico Convention Center Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The GEC is the GENI Project Office’s regular open working meeting where researchers, developers, industrial & international partners and the GPO meet to advance infrastructure planning and prototyping for the GENI project. Further, the GEC focuses on how to design and build a suite of infrastructure that can best inspire and support creative research. Conference registration is open to all.  For more information about GEC 10, as well as past and future GENI Engineering Conferences, visit the GENI Wiki.

Left to Right: Meilong Jiang (NEC Laboratories USA); Shridatt Sugrim (WINLAB, Rutgers University); Jaskaran Singh (WINLAB, Rutgers University); Ivan Seskar (WINLAB, Rutgers University); Sampath Rangarajan (NEC Laboratories USA); Rajesh Mahindra (NEC Laboratories USA); Gautam Bhanage (WINLAB, Rutgers University)

The GENI WiMAX projects are creating open, programmable, GENI-enabled “cellular-like” infrastructure at eight major research university campuses.  PI Prof. Dipankar Raychaudhuri (Rutgers WINLAB) has championed the inclusion of wireless infrastructure into GENI for many years, recognizing that it will be essential in building the next-generation Internet.  Raychaudhuri, Sampath Rangarajan  (NEC Laboratories America) and Ivan Seskar (Rutgers WINLAB) are responsible for the GENI WiMAX projects that will make this deployment possible.

Open and programmable WiMAX base stations are being installed at Rutgers University, Columbia University, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, UCLA, the University of Colorado at Boulder, UMass Amherst, the University of Wisconsin, Stanford University, and at the Raytheon BBN Technologies campus in Cambridge, MA.  The WiMAX systems use software developed at Rutgers that allows researchers to try out new ideas in capacity allocation, quality of service, handover, and other wireless networking functions.

Each WiMAX base station provides network researchers with wide-area coverage and the ability to support both mobile and fixed end users.  Campus-wide WiMAX coverage makes it possible to quickly extend GENI services for “opt-in” by many end users with a relatively low capital investment. The base stations operate in the Educational Broadband Services band using experimental licenses obtained from the FCC.

Each base station can be virtualized to simultaneously support multiple concurrent experiments, e.g., a mobility research experiment and a social networking experiment.  Furthermore, a base station can simultaneously support experiments by local researchers and by GENI researchers from across the United States.

Researchers access the base station via the GENI-supported ORBIT Management Framework (OMF) portal and use available ORBIT scripting, experiment control, management, and measurement tools to run their experiments using compatible WiMAX mobile stations within the WiMAX coverage area.  Several types of WiMAX mobile stations are being evaluated for use by experimenters, including Linux laptops with integral WiMAX modem cards, mobile vehicular Linux PCs with USB-connected WiMAX modems and WiMAX-compatible Android handsets.

Each campus is provided a WiMAX base station kit that includes commercial WiMAX 802.16e radio hardware and interface software provided by NEC, plus a server containing data-path and control software developed at Rutgers WINLAB.  The NEC WiMAX radio hardware is tuned to operate in the 2.5 GHz Educational Broadband Services band, and can be configured for a 5, 7 or 10 MHz channel.