CAMBRIDGE, MASS.—New funding was announced this week for the RENCI and Duke University project to develop a dark fiber network where researchers can create and manage network experiments.

RENCI and Duke will receive Spiral 2 funding of $150,000 from the National Science Foundation’s  Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project. That money and a previous award will be used to continue developing the Breakable Experimental Network (BEN), a project of RENCI, Duke and Infinera, and to further refine the Open Resource Control Architecture (ORCA).  Originally developed by Duke computer scientist Jeff Chase, ORCA serves as the resource control system for BEN.

According to Ilia Baldine, manager of RENCI’s Network Research and Innovation Group, the new and previous NSF funding will be used to further develop the ORCA software framework so that it is easy to use and provides the stability, flexibility and assortment of tools needed to open up BEN to the network research community within the next year.

“Our goal will be to make ORCA a production system for creating and managing networking experiments on BEN by the summer of 2010,” Baldine said. “As part of this effort, we will enhance the architecture, develop user tools and new capabilities that will allow users to select appropriate resources and measurement capabilities within the network to include in their experiments.”

The GENI Spiral 2 awards were announced Oct. 12 by BBN Technolgies, the firm that manages the GENI initiative for the NSF.

For more on BEN, ORCA and GENI, see the RENCI feature story, Break this network.