Dear Chameleon users,

That groundhog may have prescribed us six more weeks of winter, but fortunately (a) while very smart, it's an open research question how much of their intelligence can be translated to human-friendly meteorological prognostications and (b) even if we do have more time inside, at least we have a lot of cool stuff for you to use in March.

A new site at CHI@EVL is now online! On the heels of our announcement last month of CHI@NCAR, we're happy to announce yet another CHI associate site, this time at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at UIUC! EVL was awarded part of Chameleon's phase 1 hardware as part of the Chameleon Legacy Hardware program, and has finished integrating and configuring it for more service to the research community. This site is a good option for those who want experiments utilizing several nodes of the same type. The nodes are the compute_haswell nodes that until phase 3 were configured as part of the CHI@TACC primary site. Currently 8 of the total 23 nodes are online, with more coming soon.

More hardware rollouts at CHI@TACC. Last month we announced 20 new AMD nodes at TACC, of which 4 are configured with MI100 GPUs. As of this month, we've increased total capacity to 40 nodes, of which 8 have the GPUs available. You can find these in the resource catalogue as compute_zen3 and gpu_mi100 node types, respectively. And… *drumroll*... all these nodes are now InfiniBand-connected! We look forward to hearing about what kinds of experiments you can construct with these capabilities combined (for the record, as a reminder, the V100 GPU nodes at CHI@UC are also IB-connected, and you can find all such nodes by going to the resource catalogue and checking both the "GPU" and "InfiniBand" filters.)

Open enrollment preview for Raspberry Pis on CHI@Edge. Most of the edge devices currently reservable on the CHI@Edge edge/IoT testbed are owned and operated by the core Chameleon team at UC. While we have worked with several partners to contribute their own bespoke devices, it was always our intention to open enrollment up such that we had a streamlined mechanism for adding your own edge devices to the testbed (both to use w/in your own group, but also to share with others!) CHI@Edge provides better interfaces to your devices, allowing you to configure container workloads, get interactive console and logging, interface with attached peripherals, single device tenancy, and public IP connectivity using IPv4 pools owned by Chameleon. Over the last months we have worked to scale this architecture up to allow open enrollment, and are providing an Edge SDK to assist you in enrolling and managing your devices. Check out our brand new documentation portal for information about CHI@Edge and device enrollment, and for any questions, please check out the chameleon-edge-users group.

Improvements to lease management when reserving IPs. Some of you have found that, when reserving floating IPs along with, e.g., bare metal nodes, it becomes hard to extend your lease even if nobody has reserved your node(s) in the future. The reason for this was because there could be a claim on your IP instead! To help resolve this in the future, we've updated the lease update UI to let you manage your floating IP reservations with greater detail: now you can delete floating IPs that are "blocking" you from extending the lease on your current resources. Hope that helps! Refer to our docs for more details on how this works. This is currently deployed at CHI@UC and will be available at CHI@TACC in the coming days.

CHI-in-a-Box point release. We've got another point release for CHI-in-a-Box this month. In general, it's probably good to check the releases page each month to see what's new! This month we're starting the deprecation of CentOS7 and CentOS8, the latter of which is already end-of-life, the former of which hasn't enjoyed some updates that power some of CHI's capabilities.