May ’21 Newsletter


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What’s New With FABRIC?

An update from Ilya Baldin, FABRIC Principal Investigator 

Things continue to heat up! More and more ‘hanks’ are being delivered and are being brought on-line. We are also in the process of initiating the deployment of our first FABRIC-owned optical segments of the core topology, co-located with ESnet6. 

We’re excited to welcome our student interns Ju Lin, Mina William, Mason Hicks, Prabodh Mishra, Snigdhaswin Kar and Tristan Jordan, to the team! Currently, these students are helping test FABRIC portal, as well as the connection between various FABRIC sites. We look forward to seeing what their talent and fresh perspectives will bring to our project. 

Additionally, I would like to take a moment to thank the FABRIC core team members for their hard work. These team members ensure that we have sufficient systems, software and network support, project and event management, and branding and communications efforts. You can see a group photo of them below, which was first presented at the Experimenters Workshop last month.

Team Photo

Experimenters Workshop Was A Success!

April 8-9, 2021

Another workshop is in the books! We had an enthralling two days of presentations and discussions, including from our FABRIC Leadership Team, FAB Partners, Scott Shenker and Phil Porras. The over 191 attendees had the chance to view our demos and provide feedback on the FABRIC Testbed during the “Experiments Workshop” session. You can read the full report on our website.

Did you attend the workshop? We would love to hear your feedback! Please fill out this short workshop evaluation survey if you haven’t done so yet.

Evaluation Survey


Researchers Connect Across International Lines At The FABRIC Across Borders Kickoff

February 18, 2021

The official kickoff for the FABRIC Across Borders (FAB) project, an extension of the FABRIC testbed connecting the core North America infrastructure to four nodes in Asia, Europe, and South America took place on February 18, 2021. Researchers from across these continents gathered to present their planned FAB use cases and share resources that may be useful to their collaborators.

“By placing FABRIC nodes in strategic global locations, we can enable programmable network connectivity that drives innovative research across continents,” said Anita Nikolich, FAB Principal Investigator. “The FAB Kickoff gives us the chance to explore the valuable ways that our partners intend to use the FAB infrastructure to create international collaboration, and to exchange resources and ideas to support their efforts.”

 Read the full blog online.


FABRIC Testbed On YouTube

Presentations on FABRIC Testbed by our leadership team members

We’ve compiled a playlist of presentations given by FABRIC leadership team members at various conferences and events, including Supercomputing 2020, Mass Open Cloud, and Red Hat Research Day.

Watch the full playlist on YouTube.


Defining FABRIC

A glossary for common terms used by our researchers

Control Framework (CF) is a collection of software that can create, modify and destroy resources needed for experiments. It is a distributed set of agents which communicate information about available and requested resources and provision those resources for the user experiments.

Measurement Framework (MF) is a collection of software that supports automated collection of measurements about individual experiments from resources provisioned for the experiments as well as from the underlying infrastructure.

An Authorization Framework is a collection of mechanisms that provide a way to declaratively specify and enforce resource access policies based on a collection of identity attributes of a principal, information about available resources, time of day etc. The authorization framework supports CF and MF by providing discrete policy guards for individual operations available to users within CF and MF.

See the full glossary on our website.


Open Solicitations

Funding opportunities that encourage the use of FABRIC

Resilient & Intelligent NextG Systems (RINGS): The RINGS program seeks to accelerate research in areas that will potentially have significant impact on emerging Next Generation (NextG) wireless and mobile communication, networking, sensing, and computing systems, along with global-scale services, with a focus on greatly improving the resiliency of such networked systems among other performance metrics. Full proposal due July 29.

Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*): The Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) program invests in coordinated campus-level networking and cyberinfrastructure improvements, innovation, integration, and engineering for science applications and distributed research projects. Full proposal due October 11.

See a list of all solicitations mentioning FABRIC on our website. 


Upcoming Events

Leadership team presence at industry or academic events

LSN Interagency Workshop Meeting: FABRIC PI Ilya Baldin will give a short talk on the status of FABRIC at the LSN Interagency Workshop Meeting on Tuesday, May 11 at 12 PM ET.

Internet2 Performance Working Group: FABRIC leadership team member Jim Griffioen from the University of Kentucky will present on the design and implementation of the FABRIC measurement and monitoring infrastructure at the Internet2 Performance Working Group on Tuesday, May 11 at 2 PM ET.

See a list of all upcoming events on our website. 

Updated on July 18, 2022

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