What’s new with FABRIC?
An update from Paul Ruth, FABRIC Principal Investigator
We look forward to seeing you at our upcoming KNIT, scheduled for April 2026 in Hawaii! Join the community for engaging discussions, collaboration, and hands-on exploration of FABRIC and next-generation networking. More details and registration information can be found below.
If you have ideas for getting more involved with FABRIC, whether by being featured in our FABRIC Webinar Series, presenting at the next KNIT workshop, or contributing to community initiatives, we’d love to hear from you.
Reach out to Chelsea Davis, Project Manager, at cdavis@renci.org, and she will connect you with the appropriate FABRIC team member.
In this newsletter, you’ll find information about…
- KNIT12 Registration Open
- Golden Stitch Award: Call for Nominations
- The next FABRIC webinar focused on Joint FABRIC and National Research Platform Experiments
- FABRIC REU Sites Application – Summer 2026
- FABRIC News
- Opportunities to collaborate with the FABRIC team
KNIT 12: Registration Open
April 14-17, 2026 | Honolulu, HI
We cordially invite you to join us for KNIT 12, the next FABRIC Community Workshop, taking place April 14 – 17 in Honolulu, HI.
This engaging multi-day event offers a dynamic mix of activities designed to deepen your knowledge of FABRIC, connect with fellow researchers, and contribute to the future of this innovative platform.
Event Highlights:
- Hands-On FABRIC Tutorials: Participate in small-group sessions tailored for both newcomers and experienced users.
- Advanced Training Topics: Explore in-depth technical content to enhance your expertise.
- Plenary Sessions: Gain insights from expert presentations and open discussions.
- Experiment Showcases: Discover how scientists from diverse fields are leveraging FABRIC to drive groundbreaking research.
- Open Mic Sessions: Share your feedback and ideas to shape FABRIC’s future development.
Don’t miss this chance to explore practical applications, network with the community, and be part of the evolution of FABRIC!
KNIT12 Registration open!
KNIT12 invites participants to share talks on experimentation across scientific domains, getting started with FABRIC, and innovative uses of FABRIC and other testbeds. Speakers are encouraged to showcase active experiments with live views of slices, resources, and results, or propose new ideas with clearly defined workflows and resource needs. This is a great opportunity to highlight your work, exchange insights, and contribute to the growing FABRIC community. Please complete this form by February 27, 2026, if you are interested in presenting at KNIT12.
KNIT12 Hotel Information:
Kaimanna Beach Hotel
2863 Kalākaua Ave, Honolulu, HI 96815
Be sure to use the promo code PRCUH when booking your stay at the Kaimana Beach Hotel to receive the discounted group rate. Please note that the hotel applies additional taxes and a nightly resort fee, which are not included in the discounted rate. This promo code is only available for a limited number of rooms, so we encourage you to book early to secure your spot. KNIT12 Preferred Hotel
Golden Stitch Award 2026: Call for Nominations
Recognizing Innovation in the FABRIC Community
FABRIC is excited to announce the 2026 Golden Stitch nomination process, highlighting the innovative research and educational work happening across our user community.
We invite you to nominate yourself or a colleague who has demonstrated exceptional use of FABRIC resources through impactful experimentation, research, or teaching.
Award Categories:
- Best Published Paper
- Best FABRIC Matrix
- Best FABRIC Experiment (must be packaged as an artifact in the Artifact Manager)
- Best Classroom Use of FABRIC
Eligibility:
- Nominations must actively use FABRIC.
- Submissions may be self-nominations or peer nominations.
Selection Process:
All nominations will be reviewed by the FABRIC Leadership Team. Winners will be selected based on innovative use of FABRIC resources, experiment design, and execution.
Recognition:
Winners will be recognized at KNIT12 (Spring 2026) with a certificate of achievement and be featured in a FABRIC blog post highlighting their work.
Submit Your Nomination:
Nominations are collected via Google Form through March 31, 2026.
Submit a Nomination via this link
Help us celebrate the individuals who are stitching together the next generation of research and innovation with FABRIC.
Joint FABRIC and National Research Platform Experiments | Stitching Together Innovation with FABRIC Users Webinar
February 17, 2026 3:00-4:00 pm ET
Join us February 17, 2026, from 3:00–4:00 PM ET for a FABRIC Tips & Tricks webinar exploring how FABRIC and the NRP Kubernetes environment can be combined to enable powerful, real-world, joint experiments.
FABRIC provides a highly flexible, federated testbed where researchers can prototype, experiment, and “break things” in a safe, multi-tenant environment. At the same time, the National Research Platform (NRP) offers a production-grade Kubernetes environment with large-scale resources such as GPUs. Together, these platforms make it possible to design experiments that span both experimental and production infrastructures—unlocking workflows that neither system can support alone.
In this session, Mohammad Sada will introduce both FABRIC and NRP, explaining what each platform offers, how they differ, and why combining them is valuable for modern research workflows. Participants will learn when it makes sense to use FABRIC’s testbed environment, when to leverage NRP’s production Kubernetes cluster, and how joint experiments allow teams to collaborate across these environments.
The webinar will also walk through the technical foundations that enable this integration, including how FABRIC slices, facility ports, and NRP Kubernetes resources are connected to support cross-platform workflows. Mohammad will demonstrate how researchers can launch a slice in FABRIC, link it to NRP, and use both environments together within a single experimental workflow.
A live, notebook-based demonstration will show how to start a slice using FABlib, connect through FABRIC facility ports, and interact with NRP’s Kubernetes cluster to run a joint experiment. This end-to-end example will illustrate how researchers can seamlessly bridge prototyping on FABRIC with scalable execution on NRP.
Whether you are new to FABRIC, exploring Kubernetes-based workflows, or looking to run experiments that span testbed and production environments, this session will show you how joint FABRIC–NRP experiments make advanced, collaborative research both practical and powerful. Register Here
Now Open: FABRIC REU Sites Application – Summer 2026
Applications are now open for the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site: Multi-disciplinary Research with the FABRIC Network, hosted by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at UNC–Chapel Hill. This 9-week, full-time summer program (May 25–July 24, 2026) offers undergraduate students hands-on research experience using the NSF FABRIC nationwide testbed.
Participants will work on cutting-edge projects at the intersection of advanced networking, distributed systems, machine learning, cybersecurity, and emerging cyberinfrastructure, with potential topics including P4 and FPGA-based networking, in-band telemetry, ML-driven cybersecurity, federated learning, TCP congestion control, and AI-assisted medical imaging.
Each cohort will include eight undergraduate students supported by faculty, researchers, peer mentors, and FABRIC staff. The program begins with a 3-week core phase focused on training, workshops, and FABRIC onboarding, followed by a 6–7 week research phase where students collaborate closely with mentors and present their findings at the end of the program.
Eligibility: Open to U.S. citizens, nationals, or permanent residents who are enrolled undergraduates in good academic standing, with Python proficiency and basic computer systems knowledge.
Application deadline: April 10, 2026
Final decisions announced: April 31, 2026
Learn more and apply to join a vibrant, multidisciplinary research community powered by FABRIC. More information can be found linked here
FABRIC News
Dr. Rafael Coelho Lopes de Sá, Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and member of the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, has joined the FABRIC Ambassador Program. His research focuses on experimental particle physics and the management of large-scale distributed computing and data infrastructure supporting U.S. ATLAS institutions nationwide. Rafael leverages FABRIC as a testbed to prototype and evaluate advanced networking, distributed data processing, and intelligent data movement solutions required for increasingly data-intensive scientific workflows. As a FABRIC Ambassador, he will promote adoption of programmable research infrastructure, support community outreach, and foster collaboration between domain scientists and networking researchers to advance scalable, high-performance scientific computing. Read the full article linked here.
FABRIC’s integration with Chameleon GPUs, is now fully deployed and available in production, enabling researchers to combine FABRIC’s programmable, high-performance networking with Chameleon’s GPU resources for distributed experimentation. Unlike the previous backend-only configuration, the new integration requires explicit use of FABRIC, allowing researchers to design custom network topologies, access advanced programmable networking hardware, orchestrate cross-site data movement, and link distributed data resources directly to GPU workflows. By supporting high-performance data transfer, cross-site experimentation, programmable network research, and infrastructure-aware workflows, the integration expands researchers’ ability to experiment with both compute and network capabilities as a unified infrastructure. Read the full article linked here.
Educational Use: Using FABRIC for Class Projects
These experiments include basic ping, network routing, exploring IPv6, TCP analysis, traffic generation, setting up a webserver, using Ansible to manage a set of nodes, etc. They are available via github as well as the FABRIC Artifact Manager. Of course, you can create your own assignments for students to do on the FABRIC infrastructure. The FABRIC team provides support from creating an education project, enrolling students, to answering questions from instructors and students. More information can be found here.
FABRIC Ambassador Program
Share your expertise on FABRIC with the world
The FABRIC team is seeking ambassadors to join our team and spread the word about our platform. Ambassadors should have experience running experiments on FABRIC and guiding collaborators through the portal.
FABRIC ambassadors will help researchers learn more about FABRIC and its features through hosting annual local or virtual gatherings, presenting at KNIT workshops and community webinars, and identifying user success stories. Additionally, they will engage students in active learning on the FABRIC portal by leading tutorials and identifying opportunities for students to present their work. Program participants will get the first opportunity to test and approve new features on the FABRIC portal, receive discounts to in-person FABRIC events, and have their research promoted directly to our NSF program managers, as well as our community through social media and mailing channels. Complete our interest form.
FABRIC Office Hours
Connect and troubleshoot with leadership and support
We have made a new office hours system available from the FABRIC portal that allows stakeholders to directly book time with the leadership team and technical team members to discuss anything from the feasibility of their experiments, to software questions, to experiment security, to connecting new facilities into FABRIC.
Book an appointment on our scheduling platform.
Defining FABRIC
A glossary for common terms used by our researchers
Experiment – As in general English, the term experiment used in FABRIC (and most testbeds) refers to the work conducted by an individual(s) to investigate a research question, test a hypothesis, or solve a problem. Projects may conduct different experiments, and experiments are conducted using slices.
See the full glossary on our website.
Open Solicitations
Funding opportunities that encourage the use of FABRIC
Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC): The SaTC program welcomes proposals that address cybersecurity and privacy, drawing on expertise in one or more of these areas: computing, communication, and information sciences; engineering; education; mathematics; statistics; and social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Full proposals can be submitted at any time.
See a list of all solicitations mentioning FABRIC on our website.
Do you have a project idea that would benefit from using FABRIC? The FABRIC team welcomes requests for Letters of Collaboration. To expedite the process, please contact us by filling out the form.
Upcoming Events
See a list of all upcoming events on our website.