Supercomputing news and information focused on emerging HPC applications in science, engineering, financial modeling, virtual reality, databases and other compute intensive tasks

What is wrong with the Internet today? SCION is a clean-slate internet architecture, with up-to-date security and scalability properties, meant to overcome the limitations of the current IP- and BGP-based internet, namely security, availability, and performance.

Dr. Guru Parulkar joined Stanford University in August 2007 and served as the Executive Director of its Clean Slate Internet Design Program. He has been in the field of networking for over 25 years and cherishes the opportunities he has had to work with great people. He has worked in academia (Washington University in St. […]

Nobody’s going to tear down the Internet and rebuild it from scratch, but academics at Stanford University are imagining what the new blueprint would look like if they did and they hope their work will lead to an Internet that works better in 20 years than it does today.

The paper discusses a research program for a clean slate design of a “Future Internet” undertaken by Bell Labs in cooperation with a consortium of major European operators, manufacturers, and academia. The research cooperation explores innovative solutions in architectural design, virtualization, and generic connectivity in order to create a future “network of information.” We describe high-level goals and identify technical requirements and the expected business opportunities of this initiative. A basic idea for a new networking concept—the “generic path”—is outlined as an example of how to realize this in the future.

We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet’s shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and “backward-compatible” style of academic and industrial networking research. The proposed program will focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network’s ossification. To this end, the research program can be characterized by two research questions: “With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?”, and “How should the Internet look in 15 years?” We will measure our success in the long-term: We intend to look back in 15 years time and see significant impact from our program.

Many believe that it is impossible to resolve the challenges facing today's Internet without rethinking the fundamental assumptions and design decisions underlying its current architecture. Therefo...

Scientists throughout the world are looking at a large-scale overhaul of some basic Internet elements to eliminate the need to constantly create workarounds to meet the challenges of coping with technology changes.

Scientists worried about intruders and military threats, but they didn’t anticipate that the network’s users would attack one another.