Research Infrastructure: FABRIC Operations - Accelerating Innovation and Research

The FABRIC project has deployed a state-of-the-art programmable world-wide network infrastructure during the commissioning phase funded through the NSF Midscale research infrastructure-1 program. This infrastructure connects research facilities globally, enabling groundbreaking distributed applications and services using while more than 30 interconnected FABRIC sites already deployed.

FABRIC enhances research capabilities in wide-area networking protocols, Internet-of-Things (IoT), Big Data, machine learning, mobile technologies and high-performance computing, fostering scientific discoveries and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

The FABRIC project, now in its operations phase, aims to further grow user communities, foster operational excellence, develop new features, and demonstrate success to its stakeholder communities. Expanding the user base amplifies the impact of FABRIC and other NSF testbeds on science. By providing reliable services, FABRIC ensures reproducibility of complex experiments.

The development of new features attracts users from various communities, helping address their specific needs. Demonstrating success through measured outcomes informs the funders and reinforces FABRIC's impact on stakeholder communities. Its intellectual merits lie in infrastructure programmability and interconnectivity, enabling experimentation with distributed systems at unprecedented scales.

It supports scientific reproducibility and is a crucial component of the scientific cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. Its impact spans diverse domains, such as high-energy physics, astrophysics, cybersecurity, and scientific instrument streaming services, empowering researchers to achieve breakthrough discoveries.

FABRIC's broader impacts extend to researchers in computer science, engineering, and domain sciences such as genomics, astronomy and climate research. It actively engages the research community through KNIT workshops and the ambassador program designed to expand FABRIC’s reach to researchers from all disciplines and institutions, regardless of background.

FABRIC provides educational resources to faculty, and develops collaborations with minority-serving institutions, simplifying access to advanced research tools and infrastructure for many communities.

The project website, [https://www.fabric-testbed.net], serves as a central repository for project updates, data, code, and resources, fostering collaboration and accessibility worldwide.

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.