GENI in Research & Teaching

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GENI for Research

GENI is used for research in Future Internet Architectures, software defined networking, novel protocol suites that may or may not be based on the IP, 4G wireless networks and cloud computing.GENI is well suited for experiments that require:

A large-scale experiment infrastructure. GENI gives you access to hundreds of widely distributed resources including compute resources such as virtual machines and “bare-machines”, and network resources such as links, programmable switches and 4G wireless base stations.
Non-IP connectivity across resources. GENI allows you to set up Layer 2 connections between computer resources and run your own Layer 3 and above protocols.
Deep programmability. With GENI you can program not only the end hosts of your experimental network but also the switches in the core of your network. This allows you to experiment with novel network layer protocols or with novel IP-routing algorithms.
Instrumentation and measurement tools. GENI instrumentation and measurement systems allow you to instrument your experiments, visualize measurements, and archive them.

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GENI in Education

Instructors of undergraduate and undergraduate networking, distributed systems and cloud computing classes use GENI to provide students with hands-on learning experiences on a real, large-scale network. Benefits of using GENI include:

Ease of use. GENI experimenter tools have been designed with the philosophy of making it easy to run simple experiments and possible to run complex experiments.
Accessibility. Students from institutions belonging to identity federations such as InCommon and CAFe log into GENI using their institutional login without the need for a separate GENI account. If you are from a US educational institution, there is a very good chance your institution is an InCommon participant.
Community support. The community of GENI researchers and educators has developed ready-to-use courseware and exercises for use in classes. There is also a community mailing list for educators using GENI to ask questions and share experiences.
Support for collaboration. GENI can be used for group assignments since multiple experimenters can belong to the same slice and operate on resources in the slice. Additionally, instructors and teaching assistants can access student slices to run and grade experiments. They can log into students’ resources to help debug or to grade.
Explorative learning. If students make mistakes while programming or configuring a GENI resource, they can simply delete it and start over without help from an instructor or systems administrator. This encourages students to try different approaches to problem solving, without worrying about causing damage or inconveniencing others.