2nd GENI Engineering Conference

3-4 March 2008

Washington, DC, USA

Organized by the GENI Project Office

Hosted by the The National Science Foundation

Agenda

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The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is an ambitious effort to create a future, experimental network infrastructure that will allow researchers from diverse disciplines across computer and information science and engineering, as well as from economics and the social sciences, to escape today's Internet-circumscribed research environment. GENI will be a national-scale research facility for network science and engineering, which may then grow and federate worldwide to support millions or perhaps billions of devices. It will allow controlled end-to-end experimentation, at large scale, of new global computing and communications architectures which may or may not be compatible with the Internet. The intention is for this infrastructure to be deeply instrumented so that researchers will be able to monitor their ongoing experiments, collect data on the use of novel protocols, designs and architectures, and analyze the emergent behaviors of traffic.

Work has started on a preliminary design for GENI. The GENI Project Office (GPO) is overseeing these design efforts and has set up open working groups to do much of the detailed design. Through a recently issued solicitation, the GPO is also funding the computer science community to build and evaluate GENI prototypes based on the preliminary design.

The GENI Engineering Conference is the GPO's regular open working meeting to support design, planning, construction and operation of the GENI facility. It is the place where researchers, developers, industrial and international partners and the GENI Project Office regularly meet to advance GENI facility planning and prototyping. Although research is a primary driver for creating the GENI facility, the GENI Engineering Conference will focus primarily on how to build an infrastructure that can best inspire and support creative research, rather than describe particular research proposals in detail. The conference is open to all.

The 2nd GENI Engineering Conference will be held 3-4 March at the National Science Foundation. Conference check-in, reception, and a newcomer's session will be held on the evening of 2 March at the Westin Arlington Gateway Hotel. Check here for the latest agenda.

The conference will use a mix of plenary and breakout sessions to achieve the following goals.

• provide an open assessment of the current state of the GENI facility planning and development
• encourage active involvement by academic and industrial participants in all aspects of GENI design
• coordinate the work of the open working groups planning the architecture and design of the GENI infrastructure
• report on the results of work done to validate the architecture and design and determine how validation results can improve GENI plans and infrastructure
• provide an update on the GPO's solicitation process

Conference Registration:
Conference registration is $150 through 15 February and $175 thereafter. Please register using the on-line conference website at https://www.regonline.com/gec2. On-line registration ends 28 February. If you must register on site, please stop at the NSF security desk (located at 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22230) and ask them to contact the CISE Office of the AD. Be sure to mention you are there for the GENI Engineering Conference. A valid photo ID will be required.

Hotel Reservations:
Please contact the Westin Arlington Gateway Hotel at (703) 717-6200 and ask for the “GENI Conference” rate of $201 per night. The deadline for the discount rate is 15 February.

Travel Grants:
The GENI Project Office expects to have funding to support travel grants. Priority for these grants will go to individuals who improve participant diversity based on geographic region, gender, ethnicity, stage of career, or technical expertise. Please note the extension to the application deadline. Travel Grant Applications are due by 8 February, but late applications will be considered if funding remains. For more information on how to apply, please see the Travel Grant Application guidelines.

About the GENI Working Groups:
The specification and design of the GENI facility takes place collaboratively within several working groups. This activity is an opportunity for anyone interested in developing or using the technologies or services provided by the GENI experimental platform. The GPO is committed to an open design and evaluation process, where working group recommendations are made by the rough consensus that develops over the course of on-line and in-person discussions. The GENI Engineering Conference is where some of the key working group meetings take place and is a place for lively technical debate and idea exchange that will help sharpen the eventual GENI designs and plans. It is a chance to meet and work with some of the most creative and influential engineers and researchers working on networks today. Given the early stage of the GENI design, it is important that all participants understand the stable points of the GENI architecture and the most pressing open issues. Therefore, the 2nd GENI Engineering Conference will have a single track of working meetings focusing on cross-cutting topics relevant to all working groups. This will enable discussion representing the various working groups' points-of-view and development of coordinated action plans.