This article was originally published on NJ Edge.
Edge recently partnered with FABRIC, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and Princeton University to provide high performance network infrastructure connecting university researchers and their local compute clusters and scientific instruments to the larger FABRIC infrastructure.
Notes Dr. Forough Ghahramani, Assistant Vice President for Research, Innovation, and Sponsored Programs, Edge, “The partnership with the FABRIC team and researchers at Princeton University and Rutgers will create opportunities to explore innovative solutions not previously possible for a large variety of high-end science applications and provide a platform on which to educate and train the next generation of researchers on future advanced distributed system designs.”
FABRIC is an international infrastructure that enables cutting-edge experimentation and research at-scale in the areas of networking, cybersecurity, distributed computing, storage, virtual reality, 5G, machine learning, and science applications. Funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure program, FABRIC enables computer science and networking researchers to develop and test innovative architectures that could yield a faster, more secure Internet.
“EdgeNet is uniquely well-positioned to provide infrastructure support to these types of research networking initiatives,” explains Bruce Tyrrell, Associate Vice President, Programs & Services, Edge. Continues Tyrrell, “As a backbone and external services provider to both Rutgers and Princeton University, Edge has the capacity and capability to meet the high bandwidth research needs of our partner institutions. Our extensive optical backbone enables Edge to efficiently and economically deploy 100Gb transport services to all of our members.”
The FABRIC team is led by researchers from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Kentucky, Clemson University, University of Illinois, and the Department of Energy’s ESnet (Energy Sciences Network). The team also includes researchers from many other universities, including Rutgers and Princeton University, to help test the design of the facility and integrate their computing facilities, testbeds, and instruments into FABRIC.
“The partnership with the FABRIC team and researchers at Princeton University and Rutgers will create opportunities to explore innovative solutions not previously possible for a large variety of high-end science applications and provide a platform on which to educate and train the next generation of researchers on future advanced distributed system designs.”
Dr. Forough Ghahramani
Assistant Vice President for Research, Innovation, and Sponsored Programs, Edge
“FABRIC aims to be an infrastructure to explore impactful new ideas that are impossible or impractical with the current Internet. It provides an experimental sandbox that is connected to the globally distributed testbeds, scientific instruments, computing centers, data, and campuses that researchers rely on everyday,” said Paul Ruth, FABRIC Lead PI. “Edge enables us to support research across many facilities including the COSMOS wireless testbed, Princeton’s experimental P4 testbed, and remotely controlled instruments such as a CyroEM microscope at Rutgers.”
“The integration of FABRIC with COSMOS, both being pivotal national testbeds, opens unparalleled avenues for experimentation that blend wired and wireless networking with edge computing. Supported by Edge’s provision of connectivity between these pivotal national testbeds as well as to other national and international networks in NYC and Philadelphia carrier hotels, it opens unparalleled avenues for experimentation that blend wired and wireless networking with edge computing. This synergy not only enhances our research capabilities but also paves the way for groundbreaking advancements in network infrastructure and distributed systems,” notes Ivan Seskar, Chief Technologist at WINLAB, Rutgers, emphasizing the importance of collaborative efforts in pushing the boundaries of networking and computing research.
Bruce Tyrell
“As a backbone and external services provider to both Rutgers and Princeton University, Edge has the capacity and capability to meet the high bandwidth research needs of our partner institutions. Our extensive optical backbone enables Edge to efficiently and economically deploy 100Gb transport services to all of our members.”
Associate Vice President, Programs & Services, Edge
Princeton University Provost and Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor in Engineering and Computer Science, Dr. Jennifer Rexford, was an early supporter of bringing FABRIC to Princeton, serving as a founding member of the project’s steering committee. Shares Rexford, “Linking into FABRIC allows Princeton to support science on a global scale, across multiple domains and enables researchers to reinvent the internet by experimenting with novel networking ideas in a realistic setting — at tremendous speed, scope and scale.” Further elaborates Jack Brassil, Ph.D., Senior Director of Advanced CyberInfrastructure, Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, and Senior Research Scholar Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, “FABRIC enables the Princeton University campus to usher in a new generation of terabit per second networking applications.By connecting our faculty to experimental testbeds, scientific instruments, and research collaborators at other higher education institutions, FABRIC will provide a fast path to scientific discovery.”