| NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 16, 2019 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | February 16, 2024 |
| Award Number: | 1935966 |
| Award Instrument: | Cooperative Agreement |
| Program Manager: |
Deepankar Medhi
dmedhi@nsf.gov (703)292-2935 CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | October 1, 2019 |
| End Date: | September 30, 2024 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $19,980,600.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $21,793,116.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2020 = $6,920,885.00 FY 2021 = $32,000.00 FY 2022 = $1,780,516.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
104 AIRPORT DR STE 2200 CHAPEL HILL NC US 27599-5023 (919)966-3411 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
104 Airport Drive Chapel Hill NC US 27599-1350 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
Mid-scale RI - Track 1, RSCH EXPER FOR UNDERGRAD SITES, Special Projects - CNS, CISE Research Resources, Networking Technology and Syst |
| Primary Program Source: |
010V2122DB R&RA ARP Act DEFC V 01001920DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01002122DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070, 47.083 |
ABSTRACT
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.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This project constructed the FABRIC systems and network testbed which is a unique national research infrastructure that enables cutting-edge and exploratory research at-scale in networking, cybersecurity, distributed computing and storage systems, machine learning, and science applications. FABRIC hardware and network connections were installed at and between 29 sites across the U.S. and 4 international locations funded by a separate NSF IRNC award (#2029261) at (Bristol, Switzerland-CERN, Amsterdam, and Tokyo). FABRIC enables many scientific communities to test novel cyberinfrastructure enhancements for improved globally distributed science collaborations.
The FABRIC testbed is an everywhere programmable nationwide instrument composed of novel extensible network elements equipped with large amounts of compute and storage, interconnected by high speed, dedicated optical links. It connects a number of specialized testbeds (5G/IoT PAWR, NSF Clouds) and high-performance computing facilities to create a rich fabric for a wide variety of experimental activities.
Intellectual Merit: FABRIC’s ability to program the high-speed network core that interconnects national research facilities and their users (e.g., national HPC centers, cloud testbeds, wireless testbeds, and national data repositories in the commercial cloud) as well as the regional networks that connect to researchers and their instruments, devices, and systems at the edge will enables a wide range of novel research applications not possible in today’s Internet including mobile, IoT, big data, ML/AI, cloud, high performance/throughput computing and many other emerging applications that are having a transformative affect and leading to breakthrough research discoveries. In addition, FABRIC features such as facility ports and highly accurate GPS-based timestamp services enable researchers to transmit and process real-world facility data/traffic over FABRIC while precisely and accurately recording and timestamping events that can be compared network-wide to reveal system behaviors not observable in the Internet. As the FABRIC construction phase completes and operations starts, we have already begun to see the ways in which FABRIC can enhance and accelerate research in areas such as high energy physics, astrophysics, cybersecurity, information-centric/named data networking, and scientific instrument streaming services and will continue to grow the research community and research domains that can be advanced by FABRIC.
Broader Impacts: FABRIC impacts research across a wide range of areas. FABRIC is used by many branches of computer science and engineering including systems, networking, security, and AI/ML research. It is also leveraged by a broad range of domain sciences including astronomy, high-energy physics, genomics, and climate research, and, with so many research areas turning to machine learning and federated learning techniques, FABRIC offers an ideal platform that could impact almost all areas of research. FABRIC’s KNIT workshops have expanded FABRIC’s reach to researchers from all disciplines and institutions, regardless of background or resources, thereby simplifying and democratizing access to advanced research infrastructure and FABRIC-connected research facilities. FABRIC has engaged faculty and students through REU and internship opportunities as well as workshop participation.
Last Modified: 02/04/2025
Modified by: Paul Ruth
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