FABRIC testbed
fabric-testbed.net · 2 records in Compute, Storage · JSON
Records 2
- fails: identityFABRIC
Computefree tieridentity institutionno cardlimit write-gatedevidence documentedstale on 2026-11-22
- fails: identityFABRIC testbed
Storagefree tieridentity institutionno cardevidence reportedstale on 2026-11-05
FABRIC
Compute- Free allowance
- FABRIC is an NSF-funded instrument of 29 sites across commercial collocation, national laboratories and campuses, connecting configurable compute with SmartNICs, GPUs, FPGAs and NVMe, plus P4-programmable switches at selected sites.
- Verdict
- fails: identitythe identity required is not reachable without it
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- institutionno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- write-gatedThe documented sign-up route is an institutional login through CILogon, and access to resources additionally requires membership of an active FABRIC project; ORCID, Google, GitHub and Microsoft are named as possible identity providers...
- Evidence
- documented5 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-22checked 2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-22
| Free tier | FABRIC is an NSF-funded instrument of 29 sites across commercial collocation, national laboratories and campuses, connecting configurable compute with SmartNICs, GPUs, FPGAs and NVMe, plus P4-programmable switches at selected sites. Experimenters build project-scoped slices of virtual machines, network services and storage across sites, through the portal, a JupyterHub, or the FABlib API. unit none; metered on wall-clock; unmetered-experiment-slices |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
|
| Identity | institution an institutional login through CILogon: the signup guide states 'Currently, FABRIC requires the use of your institutional login via CI Logon. Using other options like Google, GitHub, Microsoft, or ORCID might require extra approvals and should be avoided whenever possible', and resource access additionally needs 'membership in an active FABRIC project'. The portal's identity-provider dropdown defaults to ORCID, which anyone can register for, so whether an ORCID signup completes without staff approval is unverified. No card, hold, debit or prepaid term is stated. |
| Egress | not stated |
| Interface | rest inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed |
| Tooling | not stated |
| Composes with | FABRIC composes with an ACCESS allocation for anything compute-heavy, because it supplies the programmable network and SmartNIC hardware that Jetstream2 and the OSPool do not, and its API means a slice can be created from a script rather than a portal session. |
| Reliability | no reliability event recorded |
| Notes | Contradictory evidence, recorded rather than smoothed. The portal defaults to ORCID, which anyone can register for free and which would make this reachable with an email-level identity; the teaching materials say institutional login is required and that ORCID needs extra approval. No page read names the approval criteria or the person who grants it, so the weaker verdict is recorded. Per-slice core and node ceilings are not published on the pages read, so the shape fields are null; FABRIC is an instrument for experiments rather than a batch queue, so a core-hour figure would be the wrong unit even if it existed. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 5
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | portal.fabric-testbed.net/about/about-fabric | 29 sites of equipment at commercial collocation spaces, national laboratories and campuses, quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | support.access-ci.org/documentation/resources/fabric | FABRIC provides compute and storage with SmartNICs, GPUs, FPGAs and NVMe; "Specialized components such as GPUs, FPGAs, SmartNICs, NVMe devices, or programmable switches may require additional project permissions and are subject to site availability", quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | github.com/fabric-testbed/teaching-materials/blob/main/Aditi | "Currently, FABRIC requires the use of your institutional login via CI Logon. Using other options like Google, GitHub, Microsoft, or ORCID might require extra approvals and should be avoided whenever possible", quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | support.access-ci.org/documentation/resources/fabric | "Access to testbed resources also requires membership in an active FABRIC project", quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | teaching-on-testbeds.github.io/hello-fabric/ | the portal's identity provider dropdown defaults to ORCID, and the instructions say to change it to a university affiliation, quoted |
More fields 1
| facets | {"class": "open-science-grid","free_tier_kind": "unmetered-experiment-slices","shape": {"vcpu": null,"ram_gib": null,"gpu_class": null,"gpu_count": null}} |
|---|
Unknown values 6
- egress metered: egress metering was not published
- egress terms: a source was read and is silent on this field
- per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- reliability note: nothing of this kind was observed
- retention stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- tooling: a source was read and is silent on this field
FABRIC testbed
Storage- Free allowance
- VMs up to 64 cores / 384 GB RAM with directly attached NVMe, GPUs, SmartNICs; 'large storage volumes'; facility holds 'between 1/2 and 1PB of file storage space' for experiment data, plus experiment-attached block storage
- Verdict
- fails: identitythe identity required is not reachable without it
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- institutionno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- noneno named constraint binds
- Evidence
- reported3 sources; a third party said so
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05
| Free tier | VMs up to 64 cores / 384 GB RAM with directly attached NVMe, GPUs, SmartNICs; 'large storage volumes'; facility holds 'between 1/2 and 1PB of file storage space' for experiment data, plus experiment-attached block storage unit GB; metered on stored-bytes |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits | Slices have 'a finite lifetime, but can typically be extended before they expire'. Management plane is rate-limited to ~1 Gbps and 'has traffic filtering rules to prevent hosting Internet-facing services' - so you cannot serve from the control network, only from experiment links. Identity is CILogon/InCommon R&S, i.e. an institutional IdP. Bastion keys expire in 6 months, sliver keys in 2 years. |
| Identity | institution institution |
| Egress | free; on-demand 25-100 Gbps inter-site links, public IPv4/IPv6 peering, Internet2 100 Gbps cloud peering |
| Per-object cap | not stated |
| Retention | Bastion keys expire in 6 months, sliver keys in 2 years. (180 days) |
| Interface | ssh, cli fablib Python API, JupyterHub, portal; ssh via bastion.fabric-testbed.net |
| Tooling | fablib, FABRIC CLI, Jupyter notebooks with preloaded tokens |
| Composes with | slice with NVMe + block storage; the management plane is explicitly not a data path |
| Reliability | Explicitly 'experimental and no production'; not expected to provide production-grade reliability. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 3
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | learn.fabric-testbed.net/knowledge-base/frequently-asked-sta | 'The facility has between 1/2 and 1PB of file storage space'; VMs 'with storage in the form of dedicated NVMe drives and slower, but larger persistent block storage'; 'The portal and Jupyter Hub use federated identity through CI Logon and support any institutional identity provider that is part of InCommon R&S' |
| 2026-10-21 | learn.fabric-testbed.net/knowledge-base/things-to-know-when- | 'Management plane is rate-limited to about 1Gbps ... has traffic filtering rules to prevent hosting Internet-facing services and should not be used as part of experiment data flows'; 'Slices have a finite lifetime' |
| 2026-10-21 | learn.fabric-testbed.net/knowledge-base/frequently-asked-sta | international nodes exist at CERN, University of Amsterdam, Bristol, Tokyo, but framed as partner facilities, not individual access |
More fields 1
| dead end | {"failure_class": "quota","why": "VMs up to 64 cores / 384 GB RAM with directly attached NVMe, GPUs, SmartNICs; 'large storage volumes'; facility holds 'between 1/2 and 1PB of file storage space' for experiment data, plus experiment-attached block storage","retry_when": null,"first_recorded": "2026-10-21"} |
|---|
Unknown values 3
- per object cap notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- per object cap stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read