Release Date 07/23/2021
Major Changes
This is the first major release of FABRIC software stack. It includes basic functionality for all components. Major user-facing features include:
- Ability to login to the portal, create and join projects, obtain and download credentials, inspect resource availability
- Ability to provision basic compute nodes (VMs) and attach available PCI devices. This capability is supported jointly by the Control Framework, system services and command-line tools. Supports the following PCI device types:
- Network cards (ConnectX-5, ConnectX-6 dedicated and shared/SR-IOV)
- NVMe drives
- GPUs
- Ability to provision basic network services – Layer 2 Bridge (L2Bridge), Layer 2 Port-to-Port (L2PTP) and Layer 2 Site-to-Site (L2STS) to interconnect compute nodes.
- Ability to user JupyterHub using federated identity. Ability to run Python tools library from pre-configured notebooks.
- Ability to use the knowledge base (learn.fabric-testbed.net) using federated identity – provides structured documentation and discussion forums
Packages and Components
Control Framework
| Control Framework Core | Inter-actor messaging via Kafka, actor policies and state machines, integration with FIM. |
| Orchestrator | Embedding support for compute and network services and attachment of PCI device components |
| Broker | Resource accounting, resource advertisements using a combined model of site and network advertisements. |
| Site Aggregate Manager | Support for provisioning virtual machines of multiple flavors through OpenStack and attachment/detachment of indicated PCI devices via Ansible. |
| Network Aggregate Manager | Support for provisioning initial set of L2 services (L2Bridge, L2PTP, L2STS). |
FIM (FABRIC Information Model)
| Basic resource descriptions | Provides the ability to create, save, serialize and deserialize FIM resource descriptions (slices, aggregates) using a combination of Neo4j and NetworkX. Supports basic compute (VM), components (NVMe, GPUs, Network cards). |
JupyterHub
| Federated Identity | Ability by users to log in using institutional credentials after registering with COmanage |
| Storage | Use attached 10TB storage for user notebook data |
Portal and System Services
| Portal | Federated login with COmanage support, display resource availability map with real-time information on compute resources, create/populate/delete projects, obtain CF credentials |
| Project Registry | Manage project data in conjunction with COmanage. |
| User Information Service | Manage user data in conjunction with COmanage |
| Credential Manager | Issue CF credentials to users using federated identity |
Limitations
We expect all/most of the following feature limitations to be addressed in upcoming releases (expected release date indicated):
| Feature limitation | Expected in release |
| Fall 2021 | |
| No advance reservation support | Spring 2022 |
| No ability to modify slices after creation | Spring 2022 |
| No ability to list available compute images | Spring 2022 |
| No ability to define/save an image | Fall 2021 |
| No ability to configure compute sliver behavior (post-boot scripts, interface configuration etc) | Fall 2021 |
| No ability to attach rotating storage volumes to VMs | Fall 2021 |
| No support for FPGAs | TBD |
Bugs
The following known bugs are present in the currently deployed versions of software: