Patchwork projectPatchwork is a tool for profiling the network's dataplane on the FABRIC testbed. Patchwork can be used by individual FABRIC users on their experiments, and can also be used to generate a testbed-wide profile of network traffic. The testbed-wide profile is used to carry out a large-scale analysis of network experiments on FABRIC.
Patchwork received the Community Contribution Award (plaque JPEG) at IMC'25!
Quick links
: Our CNERT'24 paper (PDF) describes Patchwork's initial design and an early study of FABRIC's network profile. Since that paper, the design has evolved considerably to address several of the limitations that are mentioned in that paper.
: Starting this month, you can receive early access to Patchwork by contacting the Patchwork development team. Early access consists of Patchwork's code and documentation that'll help get you started.
: See Nishanth's KNIT9 slides (PDF) about Patchwork, and Bjoern's demo poster (PDF) that accompanied his demo at KNIT9 and MERIF 2024.
: Watch the work-in-progress talk (YouTube) about Patchwork that was given at the CIEng Lunch & Learn series that is organized by ESnet.
: The edition of SIGCOMM CCR published this month features research done by members of this group and our collaborators. This research tackles a topic that is central to Patchwork: packet filtering. Read the packet-filtering survey (PDF).
: At KNIT10, Vaneshi and Nishanth worked on the first integration demo (PDF) that shows how to integrate Patchwork with a third-party FABRIC user experiment (building on Vaneshi and Hyunsuk's work involving GraphBLAS (PDF)), and Vaneshi gave a great talk about this. A Patchwork-related update was also given in Nik's KNIT10 keynote (PDF), in the context of a bigger research idea.
: After 8 alpha and 2 beta releases, during which around 20 people used the system, the source code of Patchwork is now available to all! This includes both the data gathering component and the analysis and visualization component.
: We're excited to share our work on Patchwork through our IMC'25 Patchwork paper (PDF) that was accepted at IMC 2025. Congrats to the whole team, and thanks to the many who contributed, and to the FABRIC community for giving us an interesting problem to work on!
: Patchwork now has a dashboard! Every few days, Patchwork runs on FABRIC and automatically updates the dashboard. It also automatically updates a dedicated RSS feed. The dashboard is open source — patches welcome!
: Our tutorial notebook for the Patchwork tutorial slides (PDF) is now available. This tutorial was prepared for KNIT11 (the workshop of the FABRIC testbed). Thank you to Nishanth Shyamkumar for preparing these materials, and to Lucas Ferguson for testing.
: In case you weren't able to attend the interactive tutorial at KNIT11, you can view the tutorial recording (MP4) and use the tutorial materials linked from the previous entry on this page (titled “KNIT11”).
: The Patchwork paper received the Community Contribution Award at IMC'25! Well-deserved congrats to the whole team, and a huge thank you to our research community!
: DPDK is an important dependency of Patchwork. Watch Nishanth's DPDK introduction (YouTube), given to the GlobalCpp gathering. You can access the FABRIC materials for this through the Spring'25 CS542 page.
and : Nik talked about Patchwork at (1) the 2026 meeting of Midwest RCD, (2) the participants on the FABRIC REU site, and (3) at this year's meeting on Research Computing at Smaller Institutions.
: Congrats to Mayank Handa for completing a Patchwork-related project as part of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program as part of FABRIC's REU site! If this kind of program interests you, do check it out for next summer.
: This post marks the first year of updates on the Patchwork Dashboard and describes a recent extension.
