Categories – Tips and Tricks

Chameleon has supported artifact evaluations at more than 30 events across 16 major HPC and systems conferences. This guide distills those lessons into practical advice for AE organizers: how to plan hardware access, structure author and reviewer workflows, and keep reproducible artifacts alive after the evaluation closes.

Chameleon's stitch port feature lets you connect bare-metal GPU servers directly to FABRIC's network fabric — no public IP required. This post walks through a Trovi artifact that provisions a Chameleon GPU node, links it to a FABRIC slice over fabnet, and runs LLM inference across the stitched network. Grab the notebook and adapt it to your own cross-testbed workflows.

Since KVM@TACC now requires bounded reservations, VM instances and their data are deleted when reservations end. While snapshots can preserve entire instances, persistent volumes offer a more flexible solution for storing experiment scripts and data that persists independently of your VM lifecycle. This guide walks through creating volumes via the GUI, partitioning and mounting storage, and extending volumes as your storage needs grow.

We’re excited to shine a spotlight on the recently refreshed hardware discovery browser on Chameleon! Launched a little while ago, this upgrade makes it easier and faster to pinpoint the exact hardware you need for your experiments, connecting you directly to real-time scheduling and reservations.

As you most likely know, Chameleon offers dedicated, reservable resources. That means your work gets exclusive access to the nodes you choose but navigating hardware specs and reservation calendars together can sometimes be a bit of frustration.

The new resource discovery experience helps you link “what hardware am I getting?” with “when can I actually run?” into a more streamlined workflow than previously.

It's the end of the year, so that means it's time for our annual Tickets of the Year blog! This blog covers some of our most common help desk tickets and provides solutions, so it can hopefully be a helpful reference if you run into any of these problems. If you need more help, the best places to look would be the docs, the FAQ, or submitting a new ticket to the help desk.

Trovi helps you package and share computational artifacts that run on Chameleon, from Jupyter notebooks to complete experimental workflows. Whether you're importing code from GitHub, organizing artifacts into Collections, collaborating with co-authors, or publishing work to get a citable DOI, these tips will help you make the most of Trovi for your research and teaching.

Not sure whether to use bare metal or KVM for your next Chameleon experiment? You're not alone. With KVM's recent addition of H100 GPUs and advance reservations, the choice isn't always obvious. This comprehensive comparison walks you through the practical trade-offs: when you need the isolation of bare metal for accurate benchmarking, when KVM's 6-month leases and resource sharing make more sense, and how to navigate the different storage and networking options. Make informed infrastructure decisions that accelerate your research.

Don't let authentication problems derail your research momentum. This practical guide demystifies Chameleon's login system and arms you with clear, step-by-step solutions for the authentication challenges that frustrate users most. Learn to confidently navigate multiple accounts, identity provider changes, and stubborn login issues.

Have you completed the Chameleon Getting Started guide and are wondering what comes next? This post will help you dive deeper by moving beyond the basics. You will learn how to interact with the Chameleon API from the command line on an instance and from your laptop. We'll also cover how to use tools like rclone and cc-snapshot to securely save and manage your valuable research data.

Whether you're provisioning your first bare metal node or building complex edge computing experiments, finding the right documentation quickly can make the difference between a productive research day and hours of frustration. Chameleon's documentation ecosystem has grown to include multiple specialized resources—each designed for different needs. This guide will help you navigate to the right place, the first time.