BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER SESSIONS (BOFS)

Lead or attend a BoF! Meet with your peers! Present new work! Don't miss these special activities designed to maximize the value of your time at the conference. The always popular evening Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are very informal gatherings of persons interested in a particular topic.

To schedule a BoF, simply write the BoF title as well as your name and affiliation on one of the BoF Boards located in the registration area. If you have a description of our BoF you'd like posted on this Web page, please schedule your BoF on the BoF board, then send its title, the organizer's name and affiliation, and the date, time, and location of the BoF to bofs@usenix.org with "NSDI '08 BoF" in the subject line.

BoF Schedule (Current as of April 15, 2008)

BoF Descriptions

GENI: Overview & Plans
Wednesday, April 16, 2008, 8:00 p.m.–9:30 p.m., Washington/California

The Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) is a US national-scale facility for conducting networking and computer science research, now in its design and planning phase. It will support a future, experimental network infrastructure that will allow researchers from diverse disciplines across computer and information science and engineering, as well as from economics and the social sciences, to escape today's Internet-circumscribed research environment. This infrastructure will allow researchers to program their own unique networks (i.e., multiple end-to-end "slices") that run on federated, heterogeneous backbones and edge networks to try out new protocols (that may or may not be TCP/IP-based), global-scale "clean slate" architectures, and/or new cross-layer research whereby mechanisms that incorporate human values, such as information privacy or security, for example, become integral parts of the network architecture as opposed to an afterthought. The intention is for this infrastructure to be deeply instrumented so that researchers will be able to monitor their ongoing experiments, collect data on the use of novel protocols, designs and architectures, and analyze the emergent behaviors of traffic. Please see www.geni.net for further details.

In this BoF, 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. The BoF will be led by Aaron Falk, the interim Engineering Architect and Lead System Engineer for the GENI Project Office at BBN Technologies.

Security Experimentation: DETER Testbed Case
Organizer: Ted Faber, USC Information Sciences Institute
Thursday, April 17, 2008, 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Oregon/Nevada

We discuss DETER testbed for security experimentation. Testbed is funded jointly by NSF and DHS and consists of ~350 machines located at USC ISI and Berkeley. The BOF will start with a brief presentation of testbed hardware and software, which facilitate versatile experimentation. We will also present experimental tools that lower the learning curve and speed up large-scale experimentation. Tools consist of traffic generators, routing generators, measurement tools, several scripting languages for experiment control and two visualization tools. We will then open for discussion with the audience about DETER and security experimentation in general.