Posted October 11, 2019
CHAPEL HILL – UNC-Chapel Hill and its Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), is spearheading a $20 million project to create a platform for testing novel internet architectures that could enable a faster, more secure Internet.
The platform will be called FABRIC, and it will provide a “nationwide testbed” for reimagining how data can be stored, computed and moved through shared infrastructure.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, it will also allow scientists to explore what a new Internet could look like at scale, and help determine the internet architecture of the future.
“The Internet has been a great enabler for many science disciplines and in people’s everyday lives, but it is showing its age and limitations, especially when it comes to processing large amounts of data,” Ilya Baldin, director of Network Research and Infrastructure at RENCI, who will serve as one of five principal investigators on the project, said in a statement.
“If computer scientists were to start over today, knowing what they now know, the Internet might be designed in a different way.”