Not sure whether to use bare metal or KVM for your next Chameleon experiment? You're not alone. With KVM's recent addition of H100 GPUs and advance reservations, the choice isn't always obvious. This comprehensive comparison walks you through the practical trade-offs: when you need the isolation of bare metal for accurate benchmarking, when KVM's 6-month leases and resource sharing make more sense, and how to navigate the different storage and networking options. Make informed infrastructure decisions that accelerate your research.

This month we have some exciting updates to Trovi’s dashboard, support for 4xGPU instances on KVM@TACC, improvements to cc-snapshot, and a new webinar series!

New H100 hardware on KVM@TACC, and good news about KVM lease limits, quotas, and SU cost. Additionally, we have SU changes for baremetal, an improved the resource browser, and are announcing the deprecation of TACC login.

This month, we have a significant change to KVM@TACC: as per our announcement last month, all KVM instance launches will now require an advance reservation step in the allocation workflow (with the “advance” potentially being once second from now, i.e., on demand). Also, we have cool new hardware on CHI@Edge, and improvements to the “message of the day” on Chameleon-supported base images

This month we have changes to KVM@TACC that allow you to launch any VM flavor from a reservation, which soon will be required. In a few months, we’ll shut down VMs that aren’t from a lease, so make sure to check out the details! We’ve extended python-chi with better support for KVM, adding methods for flavor reservation, managing security groups, and volumes.

This month, we have new H100 GPU nodes on KVM@TACC! Today, you can launch VM instances with 1 full H100 GPU. This hardware comes with a brand new workflow for reserving VMs. It’s important to note that this reservation workflow will be rolled out to the rest of KVM later in the summer. Additionally, we have refreshed our documentation. Lastly, CHI-in-a-box comes with a new image deploy tool for associate sites.
 

This month, we have new OS images with AMD ROCm and Ubuntu 24 on ARM. Additionally, we have improvements to mounting object store buckets using rclone, a new message-of-the-day, and we’ve fixed the firewall confusion on KVM@TACC.
 

Learn how to leverage Trovi's new GitHub integration to easily create and update reproducible research artifacts. This step-by-step guide shows you how to configure your GitHub repository with RO-crate metadata and import it directly into Trovi, enabling better collaboration and adherence to FAIR principles for your experiments.

This month, we have reminders for KVM@TACC and CHI@Edge outages later this month. Additionally, we have version 1.1 of python-chi, and improvements to reservations!
 

This month, we are excited to announce new updates to the Trovi dashboard, and the launch of the Chameleon User Forums. Additionally, please note our new data policies, as these will take effect soon!