FABRIC is excited to announce the launch of FABRIC Services, a new initiative designed to harness creative functions created by FABRIC users to make the testbed’s advanced networking technologies more accessible to a wider range of researchers and scientific communities. The effort assists FABRIC users in packaging complex networking capabilities created in their FABRIC experiments into ready-to-use services, reducing barriers to entry and enabling more users to take advantage of FABRIC’s programmable infrastructure without needing deep networking expertise.
“FABRIC is incredibly powerful, but historically it required users to work at a very detailed, technical level to build what they needed,” said James Griffioen, Professor at the University of Kentucky and lead architect behind FABRIC Services. “We realized there are many users, from scientific computing to national research facilities, who want advanced capabilities without building everything from scratch. FABRIC Services is our answer to that need.”
Raising the Starting Point for Users
FABRIC Services provides pre-configured, high-level offerings that users can deploy immediately or with little effort. Instead of manually building networks or configuring complex software stacks, users can select expert-built services and integrate them directly into their workflows.
“A user simply wants the network to work for them,” Griffioen explained. “FABRIC Services allows those users to get powerful capabilities without having to become network programmers.”
This shift is especially beneficial for domain researchers at supercomputing centers, national labs, and other scientific institutions that want to leverage FABRIC but face steep onboarding curves when working with technical infrastructure.
Early Services Highlight What’s Possible
Inspired by Named Data Networking concepts, FabCache demonstrated how advanced ideas can be delivered as ready-to-use capabilities for non-expert users. When the service was presented at recent KNIT workshops, the response from the community was overwhelmingly positive.
“When we presented FabCache at the workshop, we got some very encouraging feedback; the community really loved it,” said Griffieon. “Several scientific projects immediately saw clear use cases, and people told us this is a great model for turning powerful research tools into services others can actually use.”
A second service, a distributed Ceph-based file storage system developed by a RENCI-led team, showed how FABRIC Services can support data sharing, replication, and storage across multiple FABRIC sites.
“Each service has taught us something new about deployment frameworks, metadata, user expectations, and documentation,” Griffioen said. “Those lessons are shaping the architecture for a scalable services ecosystem.”
A Growing Collaborative Ecosystem
FABRIC Services is guided by the FABRIC leadership team, with contributions from multiple institutions who are building, testing, and refining new offerings. The initiative reflects a broader cultural shift in how research infrastructure is shared and reused. “A lot of science really flourishes when the tools researchers create are used by others; it’s a testament to the value of that work,” Griffioen said. “This kind of sharing reflects the collaborative culture that has always existed in academia, and FABRIC Services helps support and facilitate that in a very concrete way.” “When researchers see FABRIC connecting major national resources with programmable infrastructure, they see potential,” Griffioen expands. “FABRIC Services will help them actually use that potential.”
Looking Ahead
The FABRIC team plans to expand the catalog of services as new tools and prototypes reach maturity. Scientists interested in providing their FABRIC work as a service should contact the FABRIC leadership team by visiting portal.fabric-testbed.net/help.
“This is an evolving ecosystem,” Griffioen emphasized. “Ultimately, FABRIC Services will give researchers access to capabilities that simply don’t exist on today’s internet, and make them easy enough for anyone to use.”