[CAnet - news] Will GENI be a Magic Lamp or a Dim Bulb -- IEEE Internet Computing

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[Some excerpts from IEEE Computing article. From posting on Dave Farber's
IPer list -- BSA]




http://csdl2.computer.org/comp/mags/ic/2005/06/w6007.pdf


Without much fanfare, a sweeping new networking research initiative was
announced at the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM)
conference at the end of August. Presented as part of the works-in progress
session, the US National Science Foundation's (NSF) Global Environment for
Networking Investigations (GENI; www.nsf.gov/cise/geni/) was so unheralded
beforehand that even conference coordinator Joe Touch, director of the
Postel Center at the University of Southern California's Information
Sciences Institute and inventor of the X-Bone overlay technology, didn't
know about the initiative.

How revolutionary might GENI be?
Its stated goals are to research the development of nothing less than a
"clean slate" Internet. According to the NSF, the GENI initiative will
support the research, design, and development of new networking and
distributed systems capabilities by . creating new core functionality -going
beyond the existing paradigms of datagram, packet, and circuit switching and
designing new network-management paradigms and naming, addressing, and
identity architectures; . developing enhanced capabilities - building
security into the architecture; designing for high availability; balancing
privacy and accountability; and designing for regional differences and local
values; . deploying and validating new architectures - incorporating
emerging technologies (wireless sand optical, for example) and new computing
paradigms enabled by pervasive devices; . building higher-level service
abstractions - using, for example, information objects, location-based
services, and identity frameworks; . building new services and applications
- developing principles and patterns for distributed applications as well as
making large-scale distributed applications secure, robust,and manageable;
and . developing new network architecture theories - investigating network
complexity, scalability, and economic incentives.

New Era for Funding?

Over the long term, GENI might succeed in some or all of its goals. But in
the near term, the initiative signals a potential tectonic shift in the way
the US research community proposes funding projects. Computer science
researchers and US Congressional science experts have been concerned about
several trends under Darpa, which has funded and overseen the bulk of
large-scale Internet architecture research since the network's incubation
days. For example, the proposed fiscal year 2006 budget for the US
Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD)
program is US$2.15 billion, down slightly from last year's $2.2 billion
(www.aaas.org/spp/ rd/06pch23.htm

Every university Web site I visited advertised that they had created centers
for multidisciplinary research and professed that these centers were the
harbinger of the future. What must be happening is that, while computer
science is always part of the multidisciplinary efforts, its past dominance
and, hence, respective share [of funding] must be decreasing in relationship
to the other disciplines involved in the effort." Jennifer Rexford,
professor of computer science at Princeton University and one of the movers
behind GENI, says the universal dependence on the Internet might be a factor
in bringing more people to believe major improvements - up to and including
a "clean slate" initiative - need to happen, no matter who funds such a
program.

"In the last couple of years, the security and network management problems
have become so serious there's an erosion of trust in the Internet itself,"
Rexford says. "There's also a growing sense we're at risk of losing our edge
in IT competitiveness globally. In talking to deans and administrators,
there's a lot of talk that other countries are making a bigger push and our
own funding situation is grimmer. There's a feeling that it's ripe for some
big agenda to help drive us to do something more efficient."



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[email protected]
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skype: pocketpro
SkypeIn: +1 614 441-9603


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