Dear Chameleon users,

 

Summer is once again about to be in the rearview mirror as the new academic year gets started. Here in Chicago we're on the quarter system so we have another month of denial and trips to the lake before reality sets in :) -- nonetheless, we've been working to prepare the testbed for you all in the upcoming year!

 

More control over devices contributed to CHI@Edge! For those who have already enrolled edge devices into the CHI@Edge testbed, we have added a mechanism for effectively "locking down" your device to a specific list of allowed projects. When you lock, or restrict, a device to specific projects, only those projects can make leases on that device. Other users on other projects will still see the device in the resource calendar, but it is highlighted to indicate that it cannot be reserved by that user, and displays some additional text to explain, which you can specify. Currently, you must request a CHI@Edge admin configure this for you when you want changes, but eventually we will provide a mechanism for doing this yourself--to request this, do so on the chameleon-edge-users mailing list.

 

When you are not actively using the device, please ensure that it can be maximally utilized by removing the restrictions so that others can use your device for their own experimentation!

 

CHI-in-a-Box comes to Ubuntu. Prior, CHI-in-a-Box, the packaging of Chameleon, was targeted and tested only on CentOS7 systems. Given the somewhat dubious state of CentOS and the fact that we've heard from some of you that Ubuntu support would be preferred, we took some time to ensure compatibility with the tooling. You can now deploy and configure the Chameleon testbed infrastructure on Ubuntu 18.04 OS releases--we expect to update this in the future to support 20.04 and more LTS releases.

 

Say cheese! Jetson Nano edition. We've got our Jetson Nano node nano-01 hooked up to a Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2, but it needed some additional work to ensure the camera could properly be accessed via containers launched on the Nano. We now have a Docker Hub image published that contains all the software dependencies to interface with the camera (via GStreamer). In order to grant the container access to the camera, make sure to use the Python interface and launch the container with "jetson_csi_camera" set in the device_profiles list. Check out the "edgy" user mailing list for more discussion on the edge platform and submit your questions there, if you have any!

 

Last but not least, we look forward to seeing some of you (hopefully quite a lot of you!) at the upcoming CHI@Edge Workshop next Thursday. We're on the "edge" of our seats (sorry.)