Category – Tips and Tricks

How to Maintain Your Sanity When Deploying 20+ Nodes

Many things can go wrong when deploying a large cluster of nodes. We thought it would be helpful for some of you to include some useful tips and tricks for deploying 20+ node clusters when some of the nodes may cause you problems.

Where Do I Put My Data in Chameleon?

Have you ever lost your data after your instance failed, or are your instances failing to launch with a custom image? You may be handling your data incorrectly in the cloud. Read on to learn how to keep your data persistent and your custom images small.

Save the Planet, Use Fewer IPs

IPv4 address exhaustion, along with natural resources depletion and global warming, has long been recognized as one of the greatest environmental threats facing humanity. Read on to learn how to keep floating IPs afloat! 

Power to People: Monitoring Power Consumption of Low Power Nodes

 

Did you ever wonder how much power was consumed by executing a program? The Chameleon team recently implemented a feature that automatically collects power usage data on all low power nodes in the system. Instantaneous power usage data (in watts) are collected through the IPMI interface on the chassis controller for the nodes. This “out-of-band” approach does not consume additional power on the node itself and runs even when the node is powered off. Low power nodes for which power usage data are now being collected include all Intel Atoms, low power Xeons, and ARM64s. In this blog post we …

How to Make the Most of your Seven Day Lease

Did you ever find yourself spending half of your 7 day lease iterating on the environment configuration for your experiment and worried that the remaining 4 days are not enough to run it? If so read on: we are aware that configuring your experimental environment can be a bit of a journey and have packed the system with tools and features that will make it smoother.

Metrics using Gnocchi

One of Chameleon's newest features is metrics using Gnocchi. In this post, we will cover how to quickly get started with Gnocchi, including how to access collected metrics and customize which metrics are reported from your Chameleon instances.

Orchestrating and Deploying Complex Appliances

If you are a distributed systems, networking or HPC researcher, you may be interested in Chameleon's Orchestration capabilities. Orchestration allows you to perform "one click" deployment of Complex Appliances - clusters of bare metal machines with user defined networking.

Making Instance Snapshots on Chameleon

Now that you have successfully launched a Chameleon instance, you may want to take a snapshot of it. Snapshots are a great way of saving your work in progress, especially if you have done a lot of configuration to your bare metal instance and you need to preserve the work beyond your lease.