What’s smarter than the Internet?
It just might be the network demonstrated at the SAVI testbed workshop and annual general meeting, held Thursday and Friday in the Bahen Centre at U of T.
“Keep in mind, the Internet itself was a testbed 50 years ago,” said Hadi Bannazadeh, SAVI’s testbed platform architect. “In 20 to 30 years, one of these testbeds could become the next Internet—that’s what we’re competing for.”
Smart Applications on Virtual Infrastructure, or SAVI, is an NSERC Strategic Network that includes nine universities, more than 20 industry partners, research and education (R&E) networks, and high-performance computing (HPC) centres.
SAVI’s distinguishing feature is the breadth of its scope. The national network is pioneering an infrastructure for connecting things and services that haven’t even been invented yet — everything from SmartGrids for more efficient power distribution and consumption, to e-health information, to telecommunications applications.
“We’re not trying to do this in isolation, but as part of the community,” said SAVI’s Scientific Director Professor Alberto Leon-Garcia (ECE). “We’re focused on the future — on developing infrastructure technologies so as to create what we call an open marketplace.”
Now completing its second year, SAVI is deploying the first phase of its testbed network and teaching all its partners how to use it. It has converged clusters of heterogenous resources, or ‘nodes’, at University of Toronto, York, Waterloo, McGill and University of Victoria. Carleton is expected to join soon.
At the annual general meeting, researchers and students from 10 universities across Canada presented more than 45 posters and demonstrations on SAVI’s key themes: smart applications, extended cloud computing, integrated wireless/optical access and smart edges. The term ‘smart edge’ refers to aggregated data centres closer to where end users need their processing power, providing a local boost to massive remote cloud servers.
Program highlights included keynote addresses from Dr. Dongmyun Lee, executive vice president of Korea Telecom’s Infrastructure Research Lab; Dr. Chip Elliott, PI and project director of the United States’s national testbed, GENI; Professor Tho Le-Ngoc of McGill; as well as Leon-Garcia, SAVI Scientific Advisor David Mann and Zouheir Mansourati, vice president of technology strategy at TELUS.
Learn more on the SAVI website: http://www.savinetwork.ca/
