Hey! It's your friendly neighborhood Chameleon changelog, back from a long vacation. This month we announce general availability for CHI@NU, new Cascade Lake racks at CHI@TACC, and more!

As another semester begins, we’ve rounded up a series of fully packaged experiments on Chameleon. These experiments are all publicly available on Trovi, Chameleon’s sharing platform. The experiments can be used for classes to introduce different topics, tools, or datasets, or serve as an introduction to provisioning resources on Chameleon with Jupyter Notebook. Once you launch an experiment, you can edit the notebook, allowing individual experimentation, and letting you introduce variation, such as trying different resources or datasets.

January’s User Experiment’s blog features Keivan Bahmani, a PhD candidate at Clarkson University. Learn more about Bahmani and his use of Chameleon for biometric research.

We'd like to take a brief moment to reflect with gratitude on what went right this year, at least in the (small) realm of our work on this research testbed. So here’s one year in review, representing combined “changelog” information from the entire year.

Is your instance not launching? Are your Floating IPs drifting aimlessly through the ether? Do you have a PI eligibility request? Chameleon tickets are the fastest way to reach the Chameleon support team and receive assistance for all your testbed needs. It’s 2020. Everyone could use a little extra help. 

As 2021 and Oscars season approaches, the Chameleon team has compiled “Tickets of the Year” designed to help you avoid (at least some of) the same stumbling blocks of 2020. Read on to learn about some of the most common tickets, their solutions, and some special ticket award categories. You can always reach out to the Help Desk team for white-glove troubleshooting help. 

Dr. Xiaoyi Lu is a research assistant professor at The Ohio State University focusing on High Performance Interconnects and Protocols, Big Data Computing, Deep Learning, Parallel Computing, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing. In this blog post, we explore his research and usage of Chameleon Cloud.

November’s Chameleon User Experiments blog features Nanqinqin Li, a first-year PhD student at Princeton University. Learn more about Li, his summer research on reproducibility and Solid-State Drive Simulators, and learn where to replicate his experiment on Trovi!

Trovi is the next iteration of the Chameleon experiment management and sharing platform. With Trovi, you can set up and configure your experimental environment from within a Jupyter notebook, document and save your experiment similarly in notebook form, and privately share it with collaborators or publish it for any Chameleon user to build on. Learn more inside!

This summer, a team of students worked on an experiment that ultimately became part of the LinnOS paper that infers the SSD performance with the help of its built in light neural network architecture. The LinnOS paper, which utilizes Chameleon testbed to provide a public executable workflow, will be presented in OSDI ’20 and is available here. 

Two of the students, Levent Toksoz and Mingzhe Hao, write about their experience in this Chameleon User Stories series. Toksoz is a recent graduate of the University of Chicago computer science masters program. He studied physics and math as an undergrad at the University of Michigan and is planning to apply to PhD programs in computer science. Hao is a Ph.D candidate of the UCARE group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include operating systems, storage systems, and distributed systems.

Chameleon integrates directly with Jupyter Notebook to provide an experimental environment that has everything you could need for research - a cloud testbed, a way to combine actionable code with written documentation, and sharing capabilities through Zenodo. Learn more about how to take advantage of all these capabilities and package your notebooks for publishing.