The networking consortium Internet2 announced today that it will continue to allow the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, a National Science Foundation-backed effort to reinvent the Internet, to use bandwidth on its national backbone through 2012.
Internet2, a not-for-profit consortium of 200 universities, 70 corporations, and 50 government agencies, will continue to provide high-speed connections to its national network at eight different backbone locations across the country. The connections will allow the GENI project, which includes researchers from across the country, to conduct critical Web experiments on isolated networks without interrupting the flow of data on the commercial Internet. “The academic community believes that it’s critical that it maintain its role in evolving the Internet,” said Randy Frank, Internet2′s chief technology officer. And Internet2′s network is “explicitly engineered to allow things like that to happen.”
GENI plans to use the bandwidth, which was first donated in 2008, to support its next-generation Internet prototype, which now spans 14 college campuses. According to Kristin Rauschenbach, a GENI substrate architect, the Internet2 network provides a firm foundation for expanding new Web technology across the hundreds of campuses. “Internet2 is the backbone connection that can connect all the processing technologies that are part of GENI,” she said. “It provides the important long-haul reach.”
In addition to offering bandwidth, Internet2 also works closely with GENI researchers to develop and apply new networking technology. GENI’s work “represents the very possible likelihoods of what our future networks are going to be,” Mr. Frank said. “Beyond simply providing capacity, we’re actually trying to use some of the GENI technology in our own experiments.”
