FABRIC, a project funded by the National Science Foundation, announces the formation of a Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) tasked with facilitating collaboration and providing scientific and technological review for the project. FABRIC will create a unique national research infrastructure for testing novel architectures aimed at building an extensible, more secure Internet.

With leadership from the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the FABRIC project will build a large-scale platform with storage, computational and network hardware nodes across the country that are connected by dedicated high-speed optical links. FABRIC will also link major national research facilities such as universities, national labs and supercomputing centers that generate and process enormous scientific data sets.

The SAC will help guide the project by providing recommendations and critical feedback. Initially, the focus will be on reviewing the FABRIC design to ensure it can meet the diverse research needs of the future. The committee will also facilitate critical partnerships between collaborating institutions both within and outside of the US. As work progresses, the SAC will develop grand challenges that focus on solving key research problems using the FABRIC infrastructure.

“We are excited to have key research leaders across diverse career stages in fields such as networking, computing, software and security as our Scientific Advisory Committee,” said Inder Monga, co-PI of the FABRIC project and executive director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The work is progressing well with FABRIC, and we look forward to the committee’s guidance on building an infrastructure that can facilitate testing of radical new ideas and approaches that will help lay the groundwork for the future Internet.”

FABRIC Scientific Advisory Committee Members are:

Sujata Banerjee, VMWare Research

Terry Benzel, University of Southern California

Kaushik De, University of Texas at Arlington

Cees de Laat, University of Amsterdam

Phillipa Gill, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Abraham Matta, Boston University

Craig Partridge, Colorado State University

Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University

Scott Shenker, University of California, Berkeley

Frank Wuerthwein, University of California, San Diego