Exploring those new frontiers requires speed, dedicated resources and isolation between daily applications and experiments, Boyd said. "The reason we exist is because we're doing things different from what the commodity service providers are doing."

SDN, including the emerging OpenFlow standard, will be a key underlying technology to power both scientific and network advances, according to Boyd. SDN separates the control of networks from the equipment that moves that traffic around. Internet2 devoted a day at its meeting to a discussion of the emerging technology, which Internet2 participants and other presenters said could open up many more possibilities for changing what networks can do. It lets engineers program networks in an open-ended way rather than just configuring dedicated network devices, they said.

Internet2 is building SDN capability into its 100Gbps network. That could help to make it a testbed for new types of networks while also providing for new types of services that Internet2 can offer its member institutions, according to Boyd.

An early use of SDN that Internet2 is developing as a service for its customers is the ability to set up virtual LANs across multiple network segments, Boyd said. This makes higher performance possible over long distances such as across an ocean and two continents, he said.

One emerging tool that SDN helped make possible is FlowVisor, a platform developed by graduate students at Stanford to create "slices" of a network for one particular application or use of the infrastructure. Internet2 and partners, including Indiana University, hope to make FlowVisor more ready for use in production networks by next year, Boyd said. Beyond that, it might form the basis of a service offered over Internet2, he said.