Hosted by the The University of Minnesota Digital Technology Center

Minneapolis, USA

Organized by the GENI Project Office

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The Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) is an experimental facility intended to support research in a wide variety of areas including communications, networking, distributed systems, cyber-security, networked services and networked applications. The goal of GENI is to enable researchers to experiment with radical network designs in a way that is far more realistic than any alternative available today. Researchers have been working with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) on the GENI concept for several years.

Work is now starting on a preliminary design for GENI and there are funds available for early prototyping efforts that will provide insights into various design alternatives. The GENI Project Office (GPO) is overseeing these design efforts and setting up open working groups to do much of the detailed design. The GPO will not be doing the prototyping itself; rather, it will solicit bids from the community. The first GPO solicitation is expected to appear in late 2007. The GPO will award roughly $7.5M for the first year.

The GENI Engineering Conference will be 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 describing particular research proposals in detail. The conference is open to all.

The inaugural GENI Engineering Conference will be held October 9-11 at the Radisson Hotel at the University of Minnesota. Our host is the University of Minnesota’s Digital Technology Center (www.dtc.umn.edu). 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 use the results to improve the plans and infrastructure; and
• communicate the GPO’s priorities for funding prototyping efforts and explain the GPO’s open bidding process.

The conference will also include a reception for all attendees at the Digital Technology Center.

Agenda:
Download the latest agenda.(.pdf | 28KB)

Conference Registration:
Conference registration is $150 through September 10th and $175 thereafter. Please register using the on-line conference website at https://www.regonline.com/geniconfoct2007.

Hotel Registration:
Please contact the Radisson Hotel at (612) 379-8888 and ask for the “GENI Conference” rate of $119 per night. The deadline for the discount rate is September 17th.

Travel Grants:
The GENI Project Office expects to have funding to support travel grants for about 10% of conference attendees. Priority for these grants will go to individuals who improve participant diversity (by geographic region, gender, ethnicity, stage of career, or technical expertise). Information on applying for a travel grant is posted on the conference website. Applications are due by 4 September, but may be considered after that date if funding is still available. For information on applying for a travel grant, see the Travel Grants page here .

About GENI Working Groups:
The specification and design of the GENI facility will take place collaboratively within several working groups. This intense activity will be 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 will be 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. The first GENI Engineering Conference will be the first face-to-face meeting of all the working group participants, who will be collaborating in areas such as the following: network substrate; resource control framework; experiment workflow and services; end-user opt-in; and operations, management, security and integration. New working groups may be created or old ones dissolved as the GENI design advances. The GPO is actively seeking working group participants and chairs and some financial support will be available for these positions. You can read more about current technical topics on the GENI website.