What’s new with FABRIC?
An update from Ilya Baldin
We are very excited to be bringing online the first batch of production FABRIC sites (University of Maryland/MAX, StarLight, NCSA, TACC, University of Utah) with University of Michigan and UMass Amherst/MGHPCC not far behind. We are simultaneously welcoming our first early experimenters to start taking advantage of these capabilities (see Beta Tester Updates below). This month we are shipping hardware to our first three commercial colo locations in Maryland, Salt Lake City and Dallas. With the help from our ESnet colleagues we also expect to begin turning up our native 100G cross-site DWDM capabilities between those sites. The final batch of Phase I sites (Clemson, FIU, GPN, UCSD/SDSC, GATech) are in assembly at the vendor integration center and are expected to be shipped to their hosting locations soon. Finally we’ve placed the order for the set of hardware for the first FAB CERN site, we expect this site to be in place in early 2022.
For those of you planning to attend SC21, we look forward to seeing you at the RENCI booth (#2619) for presentations/demos/short tutorials and meeting members of the FABRIC team. Additionally, we hope to see you at the Workshop for AI in Network Systems in October and the KNIT (Keeping Networks Innovative Together) Winter ‘21: A FABRIC Community Workshop in December. More information on these events can be found below.
FABRIC Knowledge Base
Your guide to getting started with FABRIC
We are excited to announce 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 updates to several design documents, including “Network Services and Peering” and “Acceptable Use Policy.” See the full list of design documents on our website.
Beta Tester Updates
Take a look at the early experiments from our beta testers
We have invited 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.
Workshop on Data for AI in Network Systems
October 20 – 21, 2021
In a future world where AI is pervasively deployed across networks and applications the society depends on, having a good understanding of the data that will be shaping them and subsequently shaping us is timely and critical. What data will be made available for AI network systems? How will they be collected and used? What properties of such data, and in what ways, would they impact the networks and applications in technical, legal, and ethical contexts? And, most importantly, how will the mindsets of AI researchers, developers, and our next generation of students evolve and transform as we head into the future?
In order to answer these questions, FABRIC leadership team members Anita Nikolich and Kuang-Ching Wang, along with IT experts Ron Hutchins and Tho Nyguyen, have announced the Workshop on Data for AI in Network Systems, which will be held virtually from October 20 – 21. The event is funded by NSF and hosted by RENCI.
To be invited to give a lightning talk, please submit a 1-2 page whitepaper for consideration. The submission deadline for whitepapers is September 18, 2021.
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.
Experimenters may be selected for a poster session, whiteboard session, or an office hours meeting with FABRIC leadership team members to discuss their experiment. Submit a whitepaper by October 15 to be considered.
Defining FABRIC
A glossary for common terms used by our researchers
Broker: an agent of the Control Framework that collects resource availability information from multiple Aggregate Managers and can make resource promises on their behalf.
Orchestrator: an agent of the Control Framework that makes allocation decisions (embedding) of user requests into available resources. The Orchestrator communicates with users to collect slice requests, communicates with the Broker to collect resource promises, and communicates with Aggregate Managers to provision promised resources. The Orchestrator creates slices, configures resources, maintains their state, modifies slices and slivers.
See the full glossary on our website.
Open Solicitations
Funding opportunities that encourage the use of FABRIC
Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII): The CISE CRII program seeks to award grants intended to support research independence among early-career academicians who specifically lack access to adequate organizational or other resources. Full proposal due September 20.
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.
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
2nd Global Research Platform Workshop 2021: FABRIC leadership team member Anita Nikolich will present at the 2nd Global Research Platform Workshop 2021, which focuses on recent and emerging advances in architecture, services, technologies and infrastructure. Speakers explain how their innovations can directly support global data-intensive science research. The event will take place from September 20 – 24.
2021 NSF Cybersecurity Summit: FABRIC leadership team member Anita Nikolich is on the planning committee for the 2021 NSF Cybersecurity Summit. The NSF cyberinfrastructure ecosystem presents an aggregate of complex cybersecurity needs (e.g., scientific data and instruments, unique computational and storage resources, complex collaborations) as compared to other organizations and sectors. The deadline to register for the Summit is October 4. The event will take place on select days between October 12 – 19.
Commonwealth Computational Summit 2021: FABRIC leadership team member Jim Griffioen from Center for Computational Sciences at the University of Kentucky will be hosting and organizing a day of mini-workshops, tutorials, demos and technical in-depth talks by industry and key organizations such as Dell, Google, Intel, IBM, Lenovo, MathWorks, Microsoft, NERSC-LBL, NVIDIA, ORAU, Red Hat, and Spectra Logic. The event will take place from October 19 – 20.
See a list of all upcoming events on our website.