About FABRIC
FABRIC (FABRIC is Adaptive Programmable Research Infrastructure for Computer Science and Science Applications) is an International infrastructure that enables cutting-edge experimentation and research at-scale in the areas of networking, cybersecurity, distributed computing, storage, virtual reality, 5G, machine learning, and science applications. FABRIC is designed for users to prototype and validate novel network and computing solutions that are impossible or impractical with the current Internet.
The FABRIC infrastructure is a distributed set of equipment at commercial collocation spaces, national labs and campuses. Each FABRIC site has large amounts of compute and storage, interconnected by high speed, dedicated optical links. It also connects to specialized testbeds (5G/IoT PAWR, NSF Clouds), the Internet and high-performance computing facilities to create a rich environment for a wide variety of experimental activities.
FABRIC connects users, computers, and scientific instruments across a wide area that includes:
- 34 locations distributed around the globe, including additional nodes in Asia and Europe.
- A Smart programmable core network
- Direct links to major computing facilities and public clouds
- Dedicated links at speeds up to 1.2Tbps
- Controllable peering with Internet
- Programmable computational resources, such as CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, memory, and storage
- In-network network switches (SDN) and smart NIC
What sets FABRIC apart?
In-Network Accelerators and Storage
- GPUs
- FPGAs
- SmartNICs
- NvME
- Persistent Volumes
Software Defined Networking (P4)
- BMv2 (software)
- Tofino Model (software)
- DPDK (software w/ passthrough)
- Xilinx (FPGA)
- Tofino (native)