Will GENI be a magic lamp or a dim bulb?

According to the NSF, the GENI initiative will support the research, design, and development of new networking and distributed systems capabilities by: creating new core functionality, going beyond the existing paradigms of datagram, packet, and circuit switching and designing new network-management paradigms and naming, addressing, and identity architectures; developing enhanced capabilities- building security into the architecture; designing for high availability; balancing privacy and accountability; and designing for regional differences and local values; deploying and validating new architectures incorporating emerging technologies (wireless and optical, for example) and new computing paradigms enabled by pervasive devices; building higher-level service abstractions using, for example, information objects, location-based services, and identity frameworks; building new services and applications - developing principles and patterns for distributed applications as well as making large scale distributed applications secure, robust, and manageable; and developing new network architecture theories investigating network complexity, scalability, and economic incentives.