GRW Talks

Talk 8:40-9:35am:

GENI and the Changing Face of Cyberinfrastructure

Mark Berman

The National Science Foundation’s Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project is a national-scale virtual laboratory for networking and distributed systems research and education. Building on the two fundamental concepts of deep programmability and slicing, GENI enables researchers and educators to conduct multiple simultaneous experiments using distributed, shared, and federated infrastructure components.

The GENI design, development, and deployment community, which includes hundreds of researchers, students, and IT professionals, is participating in a profound change in the way we think about research cyberinfrastructure. A growing cyberinfrastructure coalition is developing, building on GENI, related NSF infrastructure projects, peer projects worldwide, and interoperable commercial cloud infrastructure. This coalition is forging a path to the distributed, shared, agile, and heterogeneous research infrastructure of the next 15 years.

Biography:

Mark Berman is GENI Project Director. As Project Director, he has overall responsibility for GENI’s technical direction and successful implementation. Mark works with the GENI community, which spans dozens of universities, government and industry partners, to ensure that GENI is well designed, technically feasible, and satisfies its research requirements.

Mark joined the GPO in 2009 as Experimentation Director. Through outreach to GENI experimentalists and advocacy for their requirements, he worked to facilitate the successful integration and execution of a rich variety of experiments that make meaningful use of GENI capabilities. He helped to catalyze the rapid growth of the GENI experimenter community from a handful of experimenters to hundreds.

As Vice President for Technology Development at BBN Technologies, Mark works to bring technical innovations into practical use. He has pursued this goal for more than a quarter century at BBN, beginning in the 1980s when he participated in a successful effort to bring new user interface technology and AI-based pattern recognition and rule-based systems to bear on a major sensor and processing system for the US Navy.

Mark has served as Principal Investigator or Project Manager for several research efforts, with emphases in the areas of user interfaces and distributed computing. As manager of BBN’s Intelligent Computing business, he exercised management oversight over numerous research and technology transition efforts, across a diverse set of disciplines. These include distributed computing tools (e.g., Cougaar agent infrastructure), learning systems, and game-based lightweight immersive training. In previous assignments, leading BBN’s Distributed Systems Technology Development and Distributed Mapping groups, Mark was responsible for oversight of research projects related to the development of distributed systems middleware. These projects include BBN’s QuO (Quality Objects) research area, and distributed geospatial data storage, retrieval, and display mechanisms, based on open distributed system standards, including the OpenMap™ toolkit.

Mark holds A.B. and S.M. degrees in computer science from Harvard. He has twice (1966, 2006) been named Time’s Person of the Year (shared).

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Talk 9:35-10:30am:

Networking Research using GENI – Network Access Control to Software Defined Exchanges

Russ Clark

Our work with GENI has grown from the laboratory, to the campus, to the regional network and now the international exchange. The theme for much of our work is to find ways to support more agile and fine-grained network policies. In this talk we will present our work helping to create GENI and our ongoing research that leverages the unique capabilities of GENI for large scale, distributed experimentation.

Biography:

Russ Clark is a Senior Research Scientist in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science, who engages hundreds of students each semester in mobile development, networking and the Internet of Things. He emphasizes innovation, entrepreneurship and industry involvement in student projects and application development. He is the co-director of the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center (GT-RNOC), which supports research efforts across campus, and principal leader of the Convergence Innovation Competition, which pairs students and industry sponsors on novel projects. He has played a leadership role in the NSF GENI project, leading both the GT campus trials efforts as well as the GENI@SoX regional deployment and the Software Defined Exchange (SDX). He is active in the startup community, including roles with the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps program and as a principle with Empire Technologies during its acquisition by Concord Communications.

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Talk 11:10-12:00:

ChoiceNet: Prototyping an Economy Plane for the Internet

Tilman Wolf

Deployment of innovative networking functionality requires economic incentives for providers. In this talk, I describe our work on developing an Internet “economy plane” that enables customers and providers to buy and sell network services dynamically and at short time scales. I discuss how our ChoiceNet project enables interactions between entities and how innovative new services can be deployed without requiring the ownership of complex infrastructure. I also present results from our economy plane prototype that we have implemented on GENI. Finally, I argue that an economy plane can be added to many current and future network architectures providing a basis for continued innovation in networking.

Biography:

Tilman Wolf is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Associate Dean of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is engaged in research and teaching in the areas of computer networks, computer architecture, and embedded systems. He was lead principle investigator on the ChoiceNet project, one of five large NSF Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects. He is a senior member of the IEEE and the ACM.