Dear Chameleon users,

 

Wow, we're already well into October, as it turns out! We lost track of time a bit, as we've been focused on doing a massive upgrade of the CHI@UC infrastructure to support some cool new hardware that should be released to you shortly. Good things come to those who wait, after all. Thanks for your patience; we're happy to say that we've got some pretty exciting things to announce in the meanwhile!

 

Announcing Daypass: Chameleon for a day! (preview) Trovi has been the place to share your experiments with Chameleon, but for another user to launch these notebooks, they had to be on an active project. This meant that reviewers or other researchers interested in your research couldn’t easily reproduce your experiment and analysis. That's why we are rolling out Daypass, which is a way to provide limited access to Chameleon resources specifically for the purpose of reproducing research artifacts. Owners of a Trovi artifact can now link them with an existing project and enable “reproducibility requests" via the Share menu. If enabled, below the “Launch” button on the artifact page there will be a button to “Request Daypass", like this:

 

 

This button is basically magic: it allows a user to submit a request to the managers of the artifact’s project, which, if accepted, grants the user access to all of Chameleon for a few hours (or however long it takes to reproduce the artifact as specified by its author). See our documentation for a detailed explanation, and how to get started.

 

You can now designate a PI delegate on Chameleon projects! One of the roles of a Chameleon project PI is to manage membership of their project(s). However, this can be an arduous task, especially for PIs who are teachers and running classes where many students need to be added. PIs have asked (for quite a long time!) about being able to delegate this responsibility of project membership management to a trusted project member. We're very happy to say that this is now possible! PIs can now assign the Manager or Member (default) role to the project members. The Managers of the project have the ability to add and remove other members. Please read our user documentation on how to manage roles and how to manage membership to learn more!

 

Nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure. Oops! You just uploaded some of your research to Trovi, but it wasn't ready yet. This is not a big deal, because anything you save in Trovi is private by default, and thus nobody will see it. But, sometimes you just want a big "undo" button--we've now built in a way to entirely delete one of your Trovi artifacts, including all versions. Please, use responsibly, and as always, refer to the docs for more info.

 

New release of Jupyter Notebook environment with Python 3.9. We updated the default Jupyter Notebook environment available on Chameleon's JupyterHub to support Python 3.9. Along with this upgrade, a few new features were added thanks to upstream Jupyter developers, notably support for a built-in debugger for Python and other supported kernels!

Finally, it's time to go Live! As a reminder, on October 22 at 11.30a PT / 1.30p CT / 2.30p ET we’ll be hosting Chameleon Live for the first time! Chameleon Live is a periodic webinar where the Chameleon team will showcase the newest features, developments, and other happenings in the testbed. Think of it as office hours to learn all about Chameleon updates and how to use them! Please register here so we know how many virtual cookies to bake.