The two-day workshop will take place March 12 – 15, 2025 in Chapel Hill, NC
KNIT10, the next FABRIC Community Workshop, will take place March 11 – 12, 2025, in Chapel Hill, NC. This engaging two-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.
FABRIC is an infrastructure designed to explore impactful new ideas that are impossible or impractical with the current Internet. FABRIC’s goal is to enable rapid prototyping and validation of new network and distributed computing methods and applications that leverage novel technologies that are not accessible, programmable, or at sufficient levels elsewhere.
The event offers a unique opportunity to connect with FABRIC users from across the world, find pathways to collaborate, and help shape the future of the testbed. KNIT workshops are ideal for a wide range of users and stakeholders:
- Researchers exploring networking, distributed computing, storage, cyberinfrastructure, machine learning, or related fields who want to leverage FABRIC’s scale and flexibility.
- Newcomers curious about what FABRIC offers and how to get started with experiments.
- Experienced experimenters looking to share their work, get feedback, and discover new collaboration opportunities within the FABRIC community.
The agenda includes an international panel featuring researchers working in 5G, telecoms, and next-generation R&E network architectures, a demo night spotlighting live experiments from current users, and multiple tutorial and talk tracks that attendees can choose from depending on their experience level.
Notable sessions include:
- A Duality between Experiments and Tools (Nik Sultana, IIT): The FABRIC testbed provides both a wealth of resources for carrying out sophisticated experiments as well as powerful interfaces to devise and control those experiments. Like in other research settings, conducting experiments on FABRIC can involve substantial effort but experiments usually only have a supporting role within some larger project — experiments serve to gather observations to help researchers understand some (more general) idea. This talk discusses how researchers’ experiments on FABRIC can simultaneously serve as *tools* that benefit other users of the research testbed by augmenting its features. The talk gives examples of this idea and underscores the perspective that today’s testbeds can be more than a collection of resources and APIs, and that they can further evolve towards being living communities of researchers who gain actionable opportunities for collaboration through the research resources that they share.
- Enhancing the FABRIC Testbed with Ciena’s Open tfNode and Enabling Better Outcomes for the R&E Community (Gauravdeep Shami & Akbar Kara, Ciena): In this insightful talk, Ciena discusses its contribution to the FABRIC project with the novel tfNode design. Discover how Ciena achieved multi-vendor interoperability with FABRIC Layer2/Layer3 services and reduced barriers for access for new institutions with a vendor-independent testbed design. We also discuss the impactful contributions of tfNode in the community thus far and what the future holds to unlock new features while avoiding software lock-in.
- The Internet needs the InterEdge, and the InterEdge needs FABRIC (Scott Shenker, UC Berkeley): In a SIGCOMM 2024 paper, the project team laid out the reasons why the Internet needs to be augmented with an architecture for edge networking services, which they call the InterEdge. This talk will briefly describe the rationale for and the design of the InterEdge, and then will discuss how the team is using the FABRIC testbed as the key enabler for the InterEdge’s development and evolution.
More information is available on the KNIT website: https://knit.fabric-testbed.net/#/.
About FABRIC
FABRIC is an infrastructure designed to explore impactful new ideas that are impossible or impractical with the current Internet. FABRIC’s goal is to enable rapid prototyping and validation of new network and distributed computing methods and applications that leverage novel technologies that are not accessible, programmable, or at sufficient levels elsewhere.
If you are interested in learning more about KNIT10 or connecting with FABRIC team members, please contact Jayasree Jaganatha.