The second edition of WTESTBEDS, a satellite event of the Congress of the Brazilian Computing Society (CSBC 2023), which will take place on August 9 and 10 in João Pessoa (PB), will feature international keynote speaker Dr. Paul Michael Ruth, from Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). The professor will give a panel on FABRIC Testbeds on August 9th, at 11:00 am, in addition to a practical tutorial on the same topic, the following day.   

FABRIC is a world-wide, advanced programmable wide-area research network infrastructure that enables network, security, and systems researchers to pave the way for the “Internet of the Future”. Along the way, it simplifies the path to scientific discovery, making it faster and easier to experiment with new underlying cyberinfrastructures and algorithms composed of networked storage, compute, intelligent NICs, GPUs, FPGAs, and software-programmable switches. 

The panel will showcase FABRIC's current deployment and capabilities, including connections to external facilities and instruments, and discuss FABRIC's role among modern scientific cyber-infrastructure and the opportunities made possible by the federation of experimental cloud and network facilities around the world. 

The FABRIC tutorial will allow participants to sign up for the platform and learn how to use it, performing basic experiments using the FABRIC Jupyter Hub. You will also learn how to use FABRIC's experimenter-oriented features, including the FABlib Python API library, and the experiment measurement capabilities on the platform. 
 
This tutorial requires no prior familiarity with FABRIC, although a basic understanding of the Linux command line, the use of SSH, Jupyter Notebooks, and Python is recommended. Participants must bring their own laptops. More information here.  

To participate in the FABRIC panel and tutorial, the participant must be registered in CSBC 2023. The Committee of the event provides the email address wtestbeds2023@rnp.br for questions.  

About Paul Michael Ruth  

Paul Ruth is Assistant Director of the Research and Network Infrastructure Group at RENCI, UNC-Chapel Hill. His research interests include building and using dynamic cloud computing and networking testbeds for software-defined exchanges geared toward data-driven scientific workflows. He is currently a major contributor to the FABRIC and Chameleon testbeds. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2007.