What’s new with FABRIC?
An update from Ilya Baldin, FABRIC Principal Investigator
In the past few months, the team focused on making a lot of small improvements to the facility. One of the major milestones has been the addition of FPGA support to the list of available hardware. Most FABRIC sites today have a U280 FPGA deployed and the team is working with several researchers to test and document how to develop and deploy P4-on-FPGAs.
While we are not yet able to offer to the experimenters the use of the SuperCore ring, all the preliminary work has now been completed and we expect to put it in service in the next few weeks along with a large number of new US-based and international sites. Additionally, we are happy to announce that the equipment for a large educational site to be located at the University of Kentucky has mostly arrived and we will begin work on configuring it shortly, so we can make it available to the FABRIC’s educational community as close to the beginning of the fall semester as possible.
In upcoming events, the team is hard at work in preparing for the KNIT 7 Workshop. Also, please come see our tutorials at the upcoming Internet2 Tech Ex and SIGCOMM conferences. More information on all of these events can be found further down in the newsletter.
Save The Date: KNIT 7
September 27 – 29, 2023 | Columbus, OH
KNIT 7, the third in-person FABRIC Community Workshop, will take place from September 27-29, 2023 in Columbus, OH. KNIT 7 will be hosted by The Quilt and co-located with the NSF CC* PI Workshop. It will be the last workshop before FABRIC enters full operations.
We’ll kick off the workshop on September 27 with small-group, hands-on FABRIC tutorial sessions and advanced training topics. From September 28-29, 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, birds-of-a-feather sessions, and the demo night. Additionally, attendees will have the chance to hear unique plenary discussions, including a panel featuring NSF officers. Attendees will get the chance to explore what FABRIC has to offer, connect with the FABRIC community, and provide feedback to the FABRIC team.
Look out for registration opening soon! Stay tuned to our website for the latest information.
Travel Stipend
The purpose of the travel grants is to increase the diversity of conference attendees and to create opportunities for informal social networking between participants from a wide range of universities and companies, and most importantly to provide opportunities for experimenters to be exposed to FABRIC concepts and receive training that will enable them to successfully complete experiments using FABRIC infrastructure.
We’re delighted to offer a limited number of travel grants for the upcoming KNIT7 Workshop, which takes place in Columbus, OH, September 26-29, 2023. 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 August 11, 2023. If you are interested in receiving a travel stipend for KNIT 7, please use our form to apply.
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
Image Format: In the FABRIC Slice Builder, this term refers to the binary format of the operating system image a user wishes to employ on the virtual machines (VMs) in a particular topology. Currently, only one type is permitted—copy on write (COW). Learn more about COW.
Operating System (OS) Image: This term refers to the specific flavors and versions of the Linux operating system users would like to run on the virtual machines (VMs) in their topologies. Currently, choices include Centos 8 and 9 Stream, Centos 7 and 8, Debian 10, Fedora 35, Rocky 8, Ubuntu 18, 20, 21, and 22.
See the full glossary on our website.
Community Opportunities
Programming of interest to the FABRIC community
10th Workshop on Innovating the Network for Data-Intensive Science (INDIS 2023): The INDIS workshop brings together network researchers and engineers to share findings, challenges and potential solutions in distributed computing, information systems and networking communities. The team invites researchers and engineers to submit high-quality technical academic papers that propose new and novel techniques that increase the capacity, improve functionality of scientific computing and wide-area networks and tackle some of the pressing challenges in massive data movement challenges such as those faced in science and industry applications. This workshop encourages submissions that address one or more of the following networking research challenges; and developments that are essential in the networking systems infrastructure and distributed computing for the scientific discovery process. Papers are due August 11.
Next Generation Internet (NGI) Enrichers: NGI Enrichers is an initiative that supports transatlantic research cooperation in areas related to the next generation of the internet, such as networking, cybersecurity, virtual reality, 5G, machine learning, and several others. Selected candidates will spend three to six months in the US or Canada to work and collaborate with host organizations and to promote knowledge-sharing and establish long-term collaborations on NGI technologies, services, and standards. The program is well-positioned for the FABRIC experimenter community and other stakeholders to take on a fully-funded team member to work on projects and experiments on FABRIC. The FABRIC team is interested in learning if you chose to use this program as part of your team’s experiments on FABRIC. Feel free to let us know at info@fabric-testbed.net. The next round of open calls begins in Autumn 2023.
Open Solicitations
Funding opportunities that encourage the use of FABRIC
Community Infrastructure for Research in Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CIRC): The Community Research Infrastructure for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CIRC) program will specifically support diverse communities of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) researchers pursuing focused research agendas in computer and information science and engineering. This support involves developing the accompanying user services and engagement needed to attract, nurture, and grow a robust research community that is actively involved in determining directions for the infrastructure, as well as management of the infrastructure. Full proposals are due September 8, 2023.
Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*): The Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) program invests in coordinated campus-level cyberinfrastructure improvements, innovation, integration, and engineering for science applications and distributed research projects. Learning and workforce development (LWD) in cyberinfrastructure is explicitly addressed in the program. Projects that help overcome disparities in cyber-connectivity associated with geographic location, and thereby advancing the geography of innovation and enabling populations based in these locales to become more nationally competitive in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) research and education are particularly encouraged. Science-driven requirements are the primary motivation for any proposed activity. Full proposals are due September 11, 2023.
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.
Upcoming Events
Leadership team presence at industry or academic events
SIGCOMM 2023: ACM SIGCOMM is the flagship annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM). FABRIC leadership team members will be present at the event and will host a tutorial on using the platform. The event will take place in New York City, from September 10 – 14.
2023 Internet2 Technology Exchange: The Internet2 Technology Exchange is the premier technical event in the global research and education (R&E) community. The event brings together a community of technical visionaries – a group that includes the most inventive chief technologists, scientists, engineers, architects, operators, and students – in a forum for debate, discussion, and the conversations critical to ensuring that global technology leaders are aligned and moving forward together. FABRIC leadership team members will be present at the event and will host a tutorial on using the platform. The event will take place in Minneapolis, MN, from September 18 – 22.
See a list of all upcoming events on our website.