I made the (obvious in retrospect) strategic mistake of
including too many of you on the proposal, excluding almost
all potential NSF review panel members. That definitely
slowed everything way down.
Although all the details haven't been completely worked out,
I'm glad to announce that in all likelihood we will receive a
small planning grant ($200K for one year) from NSF out of year-end
funds to build and use a small demonstration system, across six sites.
(Special thanks to Steve Mahaney, Darlene Fisher and Karen Sollins for
arranging this.) The goal will be to of produce a plan/proposal to NSF for
constructing a much larger system. Constructing a small
scale system first is a good idea and something I should
have included in the proposal to begin with.
We've developed a module for the prototype (which we've assembled
here at UW) consisting of four PC's, a console, external disk,
ethernet switch, and programmable power supply on a small mobile cart.
If you are interested in hosting one of these in your machine
room, let me know. Also I need to know your connectivity --
all things being equal, I'd like to put these at places with
high bandwidth to the Internet and/or Internet2.
I would also welcome pointers to any software you know of
which we might use in constructing the prototype; we're definitely
operating on a shoestring, so we want to reuse whatever is out
there as much as possible. Although it may be a stretch, I hope to
get something up and running in time that we can run experiments for
the Sigcomm/OSDI deadlines next February.
In addition, Allison Mankin and I are planning a workshop
to discuss how to move Access and CAIRN forward, and to plan
the next round of proposals. CAIRN is evolving into a virtual network
on Internet2, and thus will offer complementary benefits to Access
for the networking research community. Allison will be announcing
details about this shortly.
See most of you at Sigcomm!
tom