Dear Chameleon Users,

We’re about to wrap up the year – and what a year it has been! The testbed grew at an unprecedented rate in terms of the experiments we can support. First, because we added lots of new hardware capabilities with the most significant being new AMD nodes, ARM nodes, Fugaku nodes, support for SGX capable nodes, and MI100 and A100 GPUs. And counting – we expect more exciting hardware to come online in the New Year! Even more significantly, the testbed expanded because the work to package Chameleon Infrastructure into CHI-in-a-box really paid off and allowed site operators to bring online three new Chameleon volunteer sites at CHI@NCAR, CHI@EVL, and CHI@IIT – as well as an ephemeral site at Purdue made available expressly for the support of the IndySCC competition. If you have resources that you would like to make available for computer science research as part of Chameleon our CHI-in-a-Box paper explains how to do it. Finally, our edge testbed, CHI@Edge, got a major makeover based on feedback from the edge community workshop last year and now supports bring-your-own-device (BYOD) functionality which lets you add your devices easily. 

We didn’t just grow the testbed in terms of footprint – we added new capabilities as well. Foremost among those was the addition of a shared filesystem which has been a longstanding user request. Further, integration with the FABRIC testbed allows our users to use Chameleon and FABRIC in conjunction. And Trovi, our experiment repository, got a major makeover too: it now supports open APIs that allow other testbeds to integrate – we hope it will  ultimately give you more opportunities to run experiments over more platforms. Last but not least, we are proud to say that our paper on federated identity won best paper at PEARC’22 – it is a story of migrating a mature community to a new login paradigm; we took a lot of care to design a painless migration and it was good to see it appreciated. 

With all this we still have a bit of a new tidbit for you to enjoy in December: 

CHI@Edge Xena Upgrade. Our edge testbed, CHI@Edge now has been fully migrated to Openstack’s Xena release, along with the support for CHI@Edge-like-features with CHI-in-a-box. This primarily will ease future development and it should also help CHI@Edge stay stable and reliable for your experiments. 

Upcoming Infrastructure Upgrades. More exciting stuff coming down the pike! We have been working for some time on a big infrastructure upgrade to JupyterHub and are preparing to deploy it in the first week of January; it will require some downtime but we hope it will result in a better performing service. This downtime is planned to last the whole day on January 5.

That’s all from us this year! Before we sign off a quick reminder: our Help Desk  will be on break until January 3. And now we’d like to wish you a warm and restful Holiday and a fantastic New Year – looking forward to seeing you then!