Pardon our dust! This month, we have been revising, modernizing, and upgrading to improve Chameleon services. We have updates on the upcoming KVM plans, FPGA changes, and more.

The AutoAppendix project evaluates computational artifact reproducibility across SC24 conference submissions, revealing that most researchers struggle with creating truly replicable experiments despite their importance to scientific validity. By developing one-click reproduction templates for the Chameleon Cloud platform, this research aims to transform how computational scientists share and validate their work, potentially saving countless hours of frustration for both authors and reviewers.

Last year was remarkable for our blog, with over 10,000 views and 5,700 active users. As we kick off this year's tips and tricks series, we wanted to highlight the "evergreen" advice that our community returns to time and again. In this roundup, you'll find our most impactful insights - the strategies and solutions that have stood the test of time - each with a brief description and a direct link to the full article. Let's start the year by building on what works!

Happy New Year! We’ve had a busy 2024 with new hardware and many system improvements! In our changelog today we note a couple of nits that slid under the wire in the last year and propose important changes to our virtualized offering – please, read carefully we are asking for your feedback to make sure that those innovations don’t interfere with your ability to use the system for your experiments. 
 

Processing large-scale genomics data efficiently is a monumental task, often hindered by high costs and resource allocation challenges. This blog dives into an innovative system designed to optimize genomics workflows by minimizing out-of-memory failures—a critical bottleneck in such operations. Through a combination of scalable benchmarking tools and a failure-aware scheduler, researchers are unlocking new possibilities for resource efficiency and reliability. Leveraging insights from Chameleon, this solution paves the way for groundbreaking advancements in genomic data processing.

Facing network issues, floating IP shortages, or login troubles on Chameleon? This blog post highlights the top challenges users encountered over the past year and shares practical tips and tricks to resolve them quickly. Learn how to tackle firewall misconfigurations, manage floating IPs efficiently, troubleshoot login errors, and more. Save time and streamline your Chameleon experience!

Season's Greetings from the Chameleon Team!

As the year draws to a close we want to thank you for another fabulous year of innovative ideas and exciting resaerch. May your holidays be magical and joyful, and the New Year full of exciting adventures! 

As in the years before, the Chameleon Help Desk will be on snooze (make sure to get your tickets in by the 20th!) but we will make up for it by continuing our Chameleon for Christmas "double lease" tradition -- between 19th and 22nd (inclusive) you can make 14 day leases -- and this does include GPUs! …

To provide support to our users, we are piloting by appointment Chameleon Office Hours. The first session will be on December 13, 2024, from 10:00-11:00 am and 2:30-3:30 pm Central time. Office hours appointments can be scheduled for 20 minute intervals, at least 8 hours in advance. To schedule an appointment, see this link.

As always, if you need help outside of this time, please contact our help desk. Additionally, you can find useful information about Chameleon on our blog, in our documentation, and on YouTube.

This month we have presentations from the 5th Chameleon User Meeting on practical reproducibility, and lots of housekeeping on Chameleon. These include improvements to IP availability, and fixes to the core testbed, Trovi, and CHI@Edge.

Learn how researcher Redwan Khan uses Chameleon to develop FedCaSe, an innovative framework that tackles the challenges of distributed machine learning across diverse edge devices. This groundbreaking research demonstrates up to 29x improvement in client participation and 81x better data access efficiency, paving the way for more accessible and efficient AI systems.