GENI Initiative Townhall Workshops

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The Computing Research Association (CRA) will coordinate a series of public, town hall meetings for the National Science Foundation (NSF) to engage the broader research community in the GENI Initiative. This proposal seeks support for expenses related to the planning, advertising, registration, and reporting activities associated with these meetings. CRA is in a unique position to provide support to the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE): its organizational mission is to strengthen research and advanced education in computing. CRA has a proven record of managing successful meetings for NSF on behalf of the computing community. The GENI initiative envisions the creation of new networking and distributed system architectures that, for example: Build in security and robustness; Enable the vision of pervasive computing and bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds by including mobile, wireless and sensor networks; Enable control and management of other critical infrastructures; Include ease of operation and usability; and Enable new classes of societal-level services and applications.The GENI initiative includes a research program and a global experimental facility designed to explore new architectures at scale.CISE is encouraging broad community input and aims to engage other agencies, other countries, as well as corporate entities in the planning and execution of this new Initiative. To broaden community participation, CISE will hold, with the assistance of CRA, a series of three (3) town hall meetings in spring and summer 2006. The agenda for each meeting includes smaller group breakout sessions to provide input to CISE on specific topics regarding the facility such as: requirements for the experimental facility for networking and distributed systems research; implementation of the facility and its parts; and, the management of the process of defining and construction of a facility. A report will be generated at the end of each meeting to record the comments and suggestions. This proposal requests funds to pay for all meeting-related expenses, travel-related costs and staff time for organizing the meetings and for necessary follow-up activities. Participant support is also requested to provide for meals for the attendees as well as travel-related costs for the session chairs.Intellectual Merit:The reports generated from each meeting will provide CISE with valuable input from a wide range of researchers from the computing community in the deployment of the state-of-the-art, global experimental GENI Facility.Broader Impacts:Special effort will be made to attract participants from a diverse population through the advertisement of the town hall meetings via established networks and communication tools of two of the CRA committees, the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) and the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC).