This talk introduces the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), a suite of experimental network research infrastructure now being planned and prototyped. GENI prototyping is sponsored by the National Science Foundation to support experimental research in network science and engineering.

As envisioned by the community, this suite will support a wide range of network science and engineering experiments such as new protocols and data dissemination techniques running over a substantial fiber optic infrastructure with next-generation optical switches, novel high-speed routers, city-wide experimental urban radio networks, high-end computational clusters, and sensor grids. All infrastructures are envisioned to be shared among a large number of individual, simultaneous experiments with extensive instrumentation that makes it easy to collect, analyze, and share real measurements.

Core concepts for the suite of GENI infrastructure feature:

• Programmability — researchers may download software into GENI-compatible nodes to control how those nodes behave;

• Virtualization and Other Forms of Resource Sharing — whenever feasible, nodes implement virtual machines, which allow multiple researchers to simultaneously share the infrastructure; and each experiment runs within its own, isolated slice created end-to-end across the experiment's GENI resources;

• Federation — different parts of the GENI suite are owned and/or operated by different organizations, and the NSF portion of the GENI suite forms only a part of the overall "ecosystem"; and

• Slice-based Experimentation — GENI experiments will be an interconnected set of reserved resources on platforms in diverse locations. Researchers will remotely discover, reserve, configure, program, debug, operate, manage, and teardown distributed systems established across parts of the GENI suite.

There is no pre-ordained outcome for these activities:the resultant GENI infrastructure suite could be the existing Internet, existing testbeds, federations of testbeds, something brand new (from small to large), federation of all of the above, and perhaps a federation with related international efforts.

In this talk, we will present an overview of the GENI development effort, an introduction to the GENI architecture, and a discussion of how interested researchers can get involved in shaping the facility.

About the Speaker: Chip Elliott is Project Director for GENI, a national-scale experimental facility being created by the National Science Foundation for "clean slate" research in global networking. He is Chief Engineer at BBN Technologies and an AAAS Fellow and IEEE Fellow with over 85 patents issued and pending. Mr. Elliott has served on many national panels and has held visiting faculty positions at Dartmouth College, Tunghai University in Taiwan, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Peer-to-peer technology has impacted a wide range of distributed systems beyond simple file- sharing. Distributed XML databases, distributed computing, server-less web publishing and networked resource/service sharing are only a few to name. Despite the diversity in applications, these systems share a common problem regarding searching and discovery of information. This commonality stems from transitory peer population and volatile peer content. As an effect users do not have the exact information about what they are looking for. Rather queries are based on partial information, which requires the search mechanism to be flexible. On the other hand to scale with network size the search mechanism is also required to be bandwidth efficient.

Since the advent of P2P technology experts from industry and academia have proposed a number of search techniques - none of which is able to provide satisfactory solution to the conflicting requirements of search efficiency and flexibility. Structured search techniques, mostly DHT-based, are bandwidth efficient while semi(un)- structured techniques are flexible. But, neither achieves both ends.

This talk will introduce a generic framework called Distributed Pattern Matching to address the search problem in distributed environments while achieving both search flexibility and efficiency.

About the Speaker: Raouf Boutaba is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and a David R. Cheriton faculty fellow. Before that he was the Director of the Telecommunications and Distributed Systems Division of the Computer Science Research Institute of Montreal. He held Visiting Professor Positions at the University of Toronto (Canada), the University of Pierre et Marie Curie, the University of Versailles, ENST- Paris, Paris 13 and Paris 5 (France), and POSTECH (Korea). He is currently a distinguished speaker of the IEEE Communications Society and served in the past as a distinguished speaker of the IEEE Computer Society. He is the Chairman of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Information Infrastructure, the Technical Committee on Autonomic Communications, and the Director of the Conference Publications Board. He is a Past Chair of the IFIP Working Group on Networks and Distributed Systems, Past Director of the Related Societies board, and Past Director of the standards board of the IEEE Communications Society. He is the founder and Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, on the advisory editorial board of the Journal of Network and Systems Management, and on the editorial board of other journals including the KIKS/IEEE Journal of Communications and Networks, the Elsevier Journal of Computer Networks and others. He acted as the general or program chair for several IEEE and IFIP conferences. His research interests include network, resource and service management in wired and wireless networks. He has published more than 300 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings and received several journal and conference Best Paper Awards such as the 2008 Fred W. Ellersick Prize Paper Award as well as other recognitions such as the Premier's Research Excellence Award, two NORTEL research excellence Awards, a fellowship of the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and the IEEE Communications Society Hal Sobol Award.