Feb 2020: FABRIC: the Adaptive programmaBle networked Research Infrastructure for Computer science

Testbeds can be great for trying out new ideas and not taking down a production network, or they can be useless and impossible to figure out. FABRIC took the best of past testbeds and is creating a new, useful national research infrastructure to enable cutting-edge, exploratory research at-scale in computer networking, security, machine learning, distributed computing and applications.

It will be a nation-wide high-speed (100-1000 Gbps) network interconnecting major research centers and computing facilities that will allow researchers, operators and engineers to develop and experiment with new distributed application, compute and network architectures not possible today. 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 visit https://www.fabric-testbed.net.

Speaker Bio: Anita Nikolich is a Research Professor in Computer Science at Illinois Tech, Fellow at the Cyber Policy Initiative at the Harris School of Public Policy at The University of Chicago, co-organizer of the DEFCON AI Village, and ARIN Advisory Council member. She is Co-Director of FABRIC.