FABRIC announces leadership transitions
Paul Ruth to assume FABRIC Lead PI role
Ilya Baldin has recently accepted a leadership role with DOE’s new HPDF Facility at Jefferson Labs and will be moving on from his position as Lead PI of the FABRIC project. Baldin led the development and construction of the FABRIC platform since its inception in 2019 and transitioned it successfully to operations in 2023, We greatly appreciate his leadership and contributions to FABRIC and wish him well in his future endeavors.
Paul Ruth, who has been a key member of the FABRIC leadership team since its inception, will assume the FABRIC Lead PI role and seamlessly continue future development and operations of FABRIC. Ruth led the development of the FABRIC API libraries and onboarded and guided early FABRIC user projects during the construction phase. Ruth is also co-PI of Chameleon Cloud and contributed critical work to the ExoGENI project prior to its decommission.
What’s new with FABRIC?
An update from Paul Ruth, FABRIC Principal Investigator
FABRIC is getting closer to full deployment. Two more sites were brought online in December/January. The site in Hawaii (HAWI) and the large educational site at U. of Kentucky (EDUKY) can now be used. The EDUKY site includes a larger number of machines and enables FABRIC to support classes with more students. With these additions, there are only three sites to go: University of Bristol, University of Tokyo, and SRI. All remaining sites will be ready soon!
In upcoming events, the team is hard at work in preparing for the KNIT 8 Workshop. More information can be found below.
KNIT 8: A FABRIC Community Workshop
March 19 – 21, 2024 | San Diego, CA
KNIT 8, the next FABRIC Community Workshop, will take place March 19-21, 2024 in San Diego, CA. KNIT 8 will be hosted by the San Diego Supercomputer Center and co-located with the Fifth National Research Platform (5NRP) Workshop. It will be the first workshop since FABRIC has entered full operations.
The workshop will include small-group, hands-on FABRIC tutorial sessions and advanced training topics. During the event, experimenters across multiple science domains will highlight their use of FABRIC to push forward compelling experiments. The FABRIC team will set the stage for the future of FABRIC and solicit feedback from fellow participants during talks and open mic sessions. Additionally, the team will host an information session for users interested in becoming FABRIC Ambassadors. Attendees will get the chance to explore what FABRIC has to offer, connect with the FABRIC community, and provide feedback to the FABRIC team.
During the week, FABRIC and NRP will co-host two events — a demo night and a social program — giving attendees from both workshops a chance to connect and create pathways for collaboration. Additionally, attendees will have the chance to hear keynotes and plenary discussions built around the interests of both FABRIC users and NRP members.
Registration
Registration is now open for KNIT 8! Attendees who register by February 1, 2024 are eligible for our Early Bird rate. Previous KNIT attendees and students are eligible to receive discounted pricing as well.
If you would like to attend KNIT 8, please visit our registration site and bookmark our event page for the latest information on travel, lodging, and sessions.
Travel Stipend
The purpose of the travel grant is to increase the diversity of conference attendees from a wide range of institutions and organizations, and most importantly to provide opportunities for attendees to contribute ideas, share expertise, and receive training that will stimulate successful FABRIC experiments that can lead to important scientific impacts in a diverse range of science domains.
We’re delighted to offer a limited number of travel grants for the upcoming KNIT 8 Workshop. UNC employees are not eligible for support.
These grants will cover the following expenses: Airfare (must be a US Flag carrier and generally economy class booking), hotel registration, meal reimbursement (for meals not provided free at hotel or venue or as part of the registration) and ground transportation.
The application deadline is January 22, 2024. If you are interested in receiving a travel stipend for KNIT 8, please use our form to apply.
Call for Lightning Talks
FABRIC has scheduled sessions for attendees to propose to present lightning talks on the following topics:
- Enabling experimentation in various science domains
- Getting started with FABRIC – Unique features, useful tricks, sharable services
- Experiments across FABRIC and other testbeds
You are welcome to propose talks in any of the above, or compelling new topics. We highly encourage talks to show active FABRIC experiment views and results. For planned experiments, we encourage presenting planned topology and resources (FABRIC and other) as specific as possible.
The deadline to propose a lightning talk is February 5, 2024. If you are interested in presenting at KNIT 8, please use our form to apply.
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 In The News
Changing the very FABRIC of computer networking
Princeton will join an expanding global research testbed to help shape future generations of computer networks. The “research internet,” called FABRIC, is designed to build and test innovative types of flexible, programmable networks, enabling researchers to run experiments at a scale that was once unimaginable.
Already in operation at 29 other top-tier research universities, cloud providers and laboratories, FABRIC is an unprecedented national network infrastructure, allowing cutting-edge, at-scale exploration of networking, cybersecurity, distributed computing, storage, virtual reality, 5G, machine learning, and a massive set of scientific applications.
Read the full article online.
Advancing Security
Using FABRIC for Security Research
AI Security is all the rage! Do you have an interesting idea about how to use Machine Learning/AI techniques to enable better network or systems security (that’s AI for Security)? FABRIC collects a lot of data – the leadership team is willing and able to share most of it with our experimenters. Reach out to info@fabric-testbed.net if you think some of our data could be used to shape your security experiment.
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
Forum: On the FABRIC Knowledge Base, users may access the the Forum to review FABRIC announcements, keep up to date on FABRIC development (changes and known bugs), request accounts and report problems with account set-up, and request help with problems and gain advice from the community on how to maximize use of FABRIC.
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. Proposals that advance the field of cybersecurity and privacy within a single discipline or interdisciplinary efforts that span multiple disciplines are both welcome. 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.