The first building blocks of the network that could replace
the internet were laid this week.
The first prototype GENI (Global Environment for Network
Innovations) core network nodes were installed in two
Internet2 backbone
sites, and are starting shakedown and trial operations, says the
GENI organisation.
GENI is a virtual laboratory funded by the US National Science
Foundation for exploring future internets. The aim is to support
large-scale experiments on shared, heterogeneous, highly
instrumented infrastructure.
The nodes were deployed in McLean, Virginia, and Salt Lake City,
Utah, and provide sliceable, programmable network elements for
working end-to-end GENI prototypes.
Funders hope GENI will prompt and promote innovations in network
science, security, technologies, services and applications.
The new GENI nodes enable
OSI Layer 2
(physical addressing) network experiments.
The
Mid-Atlantic
Crossroads (MAX) consortium was the first outside organisation
to connect to the new core nodes to support programmable
connections up to 10Gbps for GENI researchers in Washington DC.
Photo courtesy of Chris Tracy,
MAX
The nodes were created by the ProtoGENI team at the University
of Utah and the Internet Scale Overlay Hosting team at Washington
University in St Louis.