GENI Collaboration on Open Cobalt

The GENI Collaborative Interactive Infrastructure (GCii) is a prototype network operations center (NOC) being developed by RENCI Senior Research Scientist Chris Heermann and others at both RENCI and at Duke University. Based on Open Cobalt technology, GCii visually presents a research network and all of its components in a collaborative, real-time virtual space. This allows researchers, engineers, infrastructure providers and system administrators to come together in a virtual environment containing shared views of various resources so that they may manage and monitor both networking and distributed system resources. GCii is designed to make it easier for GENI experimenters to more easily and efficiently share network resource information across administrative domains using a set of common communication tools. This application is an excellent example of how the flexible Open Cobalt system can be used to support serious scientific research and collaboration.