Monday, September 29, 2008

BBN shares $12M grant for global network infrastructure

By Mass High Tech Staff

BBN Technologies Corp. reports it plans to spread a $12 million National Science Foundation grant to academic and corporate researchers — including two local colleges — to work on a network infrastructure project called the Global Environment for Network Innovations.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst and UMass Lowell are among the awardees. Under the grants, research teams will build, integrate and begin to operate the first prototypes of the GENI suite of network research infrastructure. The GENI project is sponsored by the NSF to support experimental research in network science and engineering.

GENI prototyping will be conducted using a “spiral development” approach, BBN officials said, with simultaneous development and trials giving rapid feedback to help guide evolving designs. The first spiral will focus on ways to discover, schedule and control resources for large-scale research experiments and to measure GENI capabilities, including optical backbones, disk farms and sensor networks. Later spirals will refine and extend the GENI suite in response to the research community’s evolving interests in network science and engineering, the company said. BBN said it expects the first prototypes to be up and running in six to twelve months.

In July, the NSF awarded BBN’s GENI office the $12 million grant to design and construct prototypes of IT infrastructure that support network sciences and engineering experiments.

BBN said the GENI network infrastructure would enable researchers from multiple disciplines to avoid the limitations of Internet-circumscribed research environments. The firm plans to have conferences three times per year to show its progress in the endeavor.

Known widely for developing part of the forerunner network to the Internet, BBN is a 60 year-old firm with 700 employees in Cambridge, Middletown, R.I., and five U.S. facilities outside New England.