Categories – Tips and Tricks

Terraform is both a command line tool, and a configuration language to build, change, and version resources from various Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers. There are pre-existing providers to integrate with major cloud platforms, both private and open-source.

In particular, since Terraform natively supports Openstack, it will also work with Chameleon :)

If you have a complex configuration, involving multiple nodes and networks, across one or more Chameleon Sites, defining them in a declarative format can be easier than creating them imperatively.

The examples from this post show how to provision instances, networks, and floating IPs across multiple Chameleon Sites, and update them as your needs change.

This month's Tips & Tricks blog is an overview of one of the most critical components to experimentation on Chameleon: images! We explore everything that makes a Chameleon image unique, and how you can build your own images!

Chameleon's resources are distributed across multiple sites. If you'd like to move your work between sites, say to take advantage of different hardware, or to find available nodes, good news! It's pretty easy, and this post spells out the details.

In today’s Tips & Tricks post we explore the idea of practical reproducibility: how to make experiments not only reproducible but reproducible in a practical way, i.e. making it as natural to play with science as it is today to read about it via publications. To make this happen we need your help – your experiments packaged in a way that will allow others to easily build upon them by extending them. Let us know what you think!

We go over the benefits of using a bastion host to administer your cluster. It's the easiest way to deploy a secure cluster of hosts for your experiments, and it also helps to save resources!

As has become holiday tradition, we review some of our most common tickets of 2022, and provide answers and context that we hope is a helpful gift for all of our experimenters in the coming year.

Today's Tips&Tricks blog spotlights one of the Chameleon Associate Sites: the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago. Learn about the hardware availability at the site, the motivation behind creating it, and some hands on insights gained in the process of deploying CHI in a Box on the site!

Learn about all of the ways you can store your experiment data on Chameleon, including a fantastic new feature: The Shared Filesystem!

To all of you starting a new academic year – welcome back! To help you hit the ground running with your research we would like to share some tips and tricks on how to make your experiments on Chameleon more productive.

We are excited to announce the first FABRIC facility port at Chameleon’s University of Chicago site.  With this facility port, users can deploy experiments that span Chameleon and FABRIC.