What’s new with FABRIC?
An update from Ilya Baldin
We are excited to be ‘soft-launching’ FABRIC into limited early operations with the initial set of 5 production-ready sites (StarLight, University of Maryland/MAX, University of Utah, UIUC/NCSA and TACC) and with several more (University of Michigan, University of Massachusetts/Amherst/MGHPCC, Washington, Salt Lake City and Dallas) sites in testing and getting ready to enter production. FABRIC early experimenter teams are already building their experiments using this infrastructure.
Additionally, we are excited to be able to offer our experimenters the first dedicated FABRIC-native DWDM 100Gbps connections (NCSA-to-StarLight via ICCN and University of Michigan-to-StaLight via MERIT) in the coming weeks. Several other core and regional DWDM connections are expected to come on-line in the coming months.
FABRIC now has functioning Layer 2 on-demand experimenter-driven network services, with IPv4 and IPv6 Layer 3 services and on-demand peering expected to become available in the first quarter of CY2022 (first peering point at StarLight and then in other locations).
For those of you planning to attend SC21, we encourage you to visit RENCI’s virtual booth to take a look at FABRIC presentations and materials, as well as request meetings with members of our team.
KNIT Winter ‘21: A FABRIC Community Workshop
December 8 – 9, 2021
Join us for the “Keeping Networks Innovative Together (KNIT) Winter ‘21: A FABRIC Community Workshop”. During the workshop, the FABRIC (and FAB) Leadership team will demonstrate new platform highlights, beta testers will showcase their early experiments and we’ll demonstrate how to set up an experiment. Those new to testbeds are encouraged to join and listen to why the FABRIC International testbed is a perfect complement to their research or product development lifecycle. Our facility partners will share their early experiences in FABRIC infrastructure deployment and operation. Industries are welcome to participate to see emerging FABRIC research experiments.
Please register for KNIT Winter ’21 A FABRIC Community Workshop no later than Monday, December 6, 2021 in order to receive login details.
FABRIC In The News
RENCI’s Network Research and Infrastructure Group works to advance the nation’s cyberinfrastructure
“If computer scientists were to start over and design the Internet from scratch today, it would likely be done in a very different way,” said Ilya Baldin, who is part of the leadership team for the FABRIC project. “Due to the huge cost reduction in computing memory and storage, it now seems feasible to add intelligence to the core of the network, rather than just processing data at the end hosts, as is done now.”
FABRIC is being designed to let computer scientists study completely new approaches to storing and processing data on the fly so that they can figure out what might be viable. Although the project is two years into a planned four-year construction, parts of the testbed are already operational, and teams are actively building hardware and software to enable experimenters to use the system.
In October 2020, the NSF funded work to expand FABRIC beyond the U.S. Placing FABRIC nodes overseas will allow experiments to move large amounts of data across long distances. These additional sites will be at the University of Tokyo; CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland; the University of Bristol in the UK; and the University of Amsterdam.
Read the full blog online.
FABRIC Knowledge Base
Your guide to getting started with FABRIC
We recently announced the official launch of the FABRIC Knowledge Base! This site was created to guide users through experiments conducted in the FABRIC Portal, and features user guides, release notes, FAQs, workshop reports and more! Currently, the portal is only open to beta testers. If you are interested in conducting early experiments on FABRIC, apply to be a beta tester for consideration.
The launch of the knowledge base includes a newsletter archive and multiple forums where users can ask questions and find announcements from the FABRIC team.
Beta Tester Updates
Take a look at the early experiments from our beta testers
We have allowed several beta testers to explore the three initial FABRIC beta sites. They are all excited to help us get FABRIC ready for general users while learning how to deploy their experiments. The five initial projects are looking into security and anonymity tools for distributed group communication, large scale reliable file transfer, malicious traffic source detection and automated micro-policy response using reinforcement learning, data flow in distributed sensor architectures, and virtualized genomics data repositories using named data networks.
The number of beta projects we can support is limited by the size of our initial hardware deployment. We look forward to adding more beta testing projects over the next couple months as more FABRIC sites come online. If you have already requested becoming a beta tester, the FABRIC team will reach out to you once resources become available.
To be considered a FABRIC beta tester, please fill out the form.
Defining FABRIC
A glossary for common terms used by our researchers
Project: the logical grouping of users working on a set of related experiments over a period of time; the resource rights and limits are set at the project level.
Project Lead: the FABRIC user responsible for creating projects and the oversight of project
owners and project members associated with the project.
Project Owner: a user on a project with the ability to add/delete project members.
Project Member: a user associated with a project conferred with rights associated with the project.
See the full glossary on our website.
Open Solicitations
Funding opportunities that encourage the use of FABRIC
CISE Community Research Infrastructure (CCRI): The Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Community Research Infrastructure (CCRI) program drives discovery and learning in the core CISE disciplines of the three participating divisions [Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF), Computer and Network Systems (CNS), and Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS)] by funding the creation and enhancement of world-class research infrastructure. Full proposal due January 11.
Computer and Information Science and Engineering Minority-Serving Institutions Research Expansion Program (CISE-MSI Program): With this solicitation, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is continuing its support of research expansion for Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs). Full proposal due February 11.
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
Panel: Experimental Networks (XNet) Planning and SCinet Integration: FABRIC leadership team member Paul Ruth will participate in a virtual panel on experimental networks and the integration of Supercomputing’s high-capacity network, as part of INDIS’21: 8th Workshop on Innovating the Network for Data-Intensive Science. The event will take place on November 15 at 5:40 PM EST.
See a list of all upcoming events on our website.