The Breakable Experimental Network – or BEN for short – is one of several projects that fall under the umbrella of the National Science Foundation’s Global Environment for Network Innovations initiative.

BEN is a collaboration between the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), Infinera, and Duke University. So it should come as no surprise that their team has done some work on pairing BEN with RENCI’s multi-touch interface technology.

The interface between multi-touch and BEN was developed independently by RENCI. “If we find the funding to develop it further it is meant to become an option primarily for interactive network management,” said Ilia Baldine, manager of the Network Research and Innovation Group at RENCI. “This year our focus is on usability improvements of the software so that BEN can be opened up to the experimenter community by this time next year,”

Watch this video to learn a little more about BEN, GENI and how BEN and multi-touch work together.