Mid-Scale RI-1 (M1:IP): FABRIC: Adaptive Programmable Research Infrastructure for Computer Science and Science Applications

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FABRIC is a unique national research infrastructure to enable cutting-edge, and exploratory research at-scale in computer networking, distributed computing systems, and applications. It is a platform on which researchers will experiment with new ideas that will become building blocks of the next generation Internet and address requirements for emerging science applications that depend on large-scale networking. FABRIC will create the opportunities to explore innovative solutions not previously possible for a large variety of high-end science applications. FABRIC will provide a platform on which to educate and train the next generation of researchers on future advanced distributed systems designs. It will engage with students and educators from under-represented communities to create a diverse cohort of developers and experimenters. FABRIC members will participate in community building and will engage in outreach and tech transfer to industry affiliates. The FABRIC team is led by researchers from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Kentucky, Clemson University, Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Department of Energy's ESnet (Energy Sciences Network). The team also includes researchers from many other universities to help test the design of the facility and integrate their computing facilities, testbeds and instruments into FABRIC. The main focus of the project is to create a nation-wide high-speed (100-1000 Gigabits per-second) network interconnecting major research centers and national computing facilities that will allow researchers and scientists at these facilities to develop and experiment with new distributed application, compute and network architectures not possible today. Uniquely, FABRIC nodes can store and process information "in the network" in ways not possible in the current Internet, which will lead to completely new networking protocols, architectures and applications that address pressing problems with performance, security and adaptability in the Internet. Reaching deep into university campuses, FABRIC will connect university researchers and their local compute clusters and scientific instruments to the larger FABRIC infrastructure. The infrastructure will also provide access to public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. This experimental facility will allow multiple experiments to be conducted simultaneously, and is capable of incorporating real traffic and real users into experiments. For more information about FABRIC including current plans for connected facilities visit https://www.fabric-testbed.net. All project software is available at https://github.com/FABRIC-testbed.This project is supported by the Foundation-wide Mid-scale Research Infrastructure program. The project will be managed by the Division of Computer & Network Systems (CNS) within the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.