New research net gets $12 million funding

Posted on 31 Jul 2008 at 11:25

The US government has provided a $12 million grant to fund development of a next-generation net for science and engineering research.

The Global Environment for Network Innovations (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 aim is on enable researchers to experiment with new network designs - effectively build their own versions of the net - that are not constrained by existing internet technologies. Crucially, GENI functions without reliance on, or conflict with, the standard internet.

The Internet2 project has already dedicated 10Gbits/sec of bandwidth from its own high-speed international network to ensure that GENI researchers won't have to worry about day-to-day internet traffic interfering with their experiments.

The three-year grant, from the government-funded US National Science Foundation, will be used to contract with 29 university and industry teams, with the first year's funding used to construct GENI Spiral 1, a set of early, functional prototypes of key elements of the GENI system.

"We have received many novel and exciting proposals and are eager to see GENI prototyping get underway," said Chip Elliott, GENI project director. "The GPO will be working intensely to establish contracts with the project teams as quickly as possible."

[photo: The worlds network by saschaaa]

Author: Simon Aughton

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