Welcome to the 6th Chameleon User Meeting!

WHEN: April 15th to 16th, 2026
WHERE: National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO
REGISTER:Coming soon!

Join us in Boulder, Colorado for the 6th Chameleon User Meeting from April 15-16th, 2026!

The Chameleon User Meeting is an in-person forum held over two days for users to discuss their research and education projects, share experiences of working with the Chameleon testbed, solve challenges together, and propose new features that will make their experiments and education projects easier. The User Meeting will have features to interest Chameleon newbies as well as veterans, end-users and operators, and researchers and educators. For our sixth meeting, we are grateful to co-host with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at its main campus in Boulder, CO. NCAR recently moved from an associate site to join as an official Chameleon site and partner as part of Chameleon Phase 4.

Please note, as the logistics and agenda for the User Meeting are still in progress, the information below is subject to change.

The 6th Chameleon User Meeting will include two days of programming. This year's meeting focuses on infrastructure, services, and tools for AI and machine learning research. The first day is primarily devoted to keynote speakers and lightening talks from Chameleon users that dive into the particulars and lessons learned from their projects on the testbed. The second day features live tutorials given by Chameleon staff and mini-symposia on special topics, including ones from previous years such as teaching with testbeds, edge computing, and reproducibility.

We will release a call for presentations with specific instructions for how you can submit a proposal to present at the meeting. The top ten proposals will receive travel support and waived registration fees. More details to come in the Call.

We will charge a registration fee for general attendance. Take advantage of the early bird pricing once registration is open to get a discount!

Please check back here for more updates as they arrive.

To see our previous user meetings, check out our archive here.

Call for Presentations: Chameleon User Meeting 2026

The Sixth Chameleon User Meeting will be held April 15-16, 2026 at the NCAR Mesa Lab in Boulder, Colorado. This year's meeting's theme focuses on computer science research and education in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The objective of the meeting is to create a community discussion on AI research, approaches to education, and most importantly what platform you need – or may need in the future – to solve the hard problems and train the workforce of the future. We invite researchers and educators using Chameleon to submit presentation proposals sharing their experiences. Come to network with scientists working on similar topics, share tips on how to muster resources and data for hard-to-get experiments, and find materials and digital artifacts to teach AI classes!

As in previous years, we will reimburse travel expenses of up to $1,500 for the presenting authors of the top 10 selected abstracts (one author per abstract).

Important Dates

Submission deadline: February 6, 2026 at 11:59 PM (any time zone on Earth)
Acceptance notification: February 11, 2026
Submit by sending mail to: presentations@chameleoncloud.org

Submission Instructions

Email your final submissions to presentations@chameleoncloud.org before the deadline.

Presentation proposals should be submitted as PDF documents, 2 pages in length, and include:

Presentation title
Author/Presenter name(s) and affiliation(s)
Chameleon project ID(s) under which work was carried out
Contact email
If your presentation gets accepted, would you be interested in submitting a full paper? (Please put a statement, e.g., "Interested in full paper submission")

We are particularly interested in presentations that address AI and ML research on cloud testbeds. While we expect you to explain enough about your research or education projects to make the platform requirements clear, we also want you to save the important results for sharing at high ranking research conferences – your submissions here should focus on infrastructure requirements (hardware, configuration, etc.), experimental apparatus, challenges, and lessons learned.

Your proposal should address the following:

1. Project Overview. Briefly describe your research project or educational activity. What problem are you addressing? What is your approach?

2. Infrastructure Requirements & Usage. What specific Chameleon capabilities did you leverage? This might include:

Hardware configurations (GPU types, accelerators, bare metal access)
Networking and storage requirements
Software stack control and customization
Reproducibility features
Heterogeneous resources and their management

3. Challenges & Insights. What worked well and what didn't? Where did you encounter bottlenecks or limitations -- whether in hardware availability, configuration complexity, software maturity, or experimental workflow? What was particularly valuable (and we should do more of) and features or capabilities are missing? How did Chameleon's capabilities compare to other public clouds and/or commercial cloud platforms for your specific needs?

4. Services, Tools & Workflow Support. What services or tools (beyond raw infrastructure) were critical to your work? This might include orchestration platforms, experiment management systems, data pipelines, reproducibility frameworks, or user interfaces. Where did existing tooling fall short? What gaps exist between infrastructure capabilities and researcher-friendly workflows?

We especially encourage submissions that:

Provide detailed, specific insights about infrastructure requirements for AI/ML workloads
Discuss challenges unique to AI research and education
Represent diverse AI/ML domains (robustness/safety, sustainability, systems optimization, federated learning, education, etc.)
Offer concrete recommendations for testbed evolution

Review & Selection

Submissions will be reviewed and ranked by a program committee to be announced soon. Selection will be based on the depth of infrastructure insights, relevance to the AI/ML research community, potential to inform testbed development, and contribution to productive discussion.

Travel Support

For the top 10 selected abstracts, we will reimburse travel expenses of up to $1,500 for one presenting author per abstract. Submitting a presentation proposal serves as your travel support application. Reimbursement covers transportation, lodging, and meals for attendance at the User Meeting.

What to Expect After Acceptance

Accepted presenters will be expected to:

Attend the User Meeting in person
Deliver a ~15-minute presentation on the morning or afternoon of April 15th
Participate in a panel discussion following the presentation sessions
Contribute insights to a post-meeting community report documenting infrastructure requirements, challenges, and recommendations for advancing AI research testbeds

This report will be published and shared with the research community to guide future development of Chameleon and similar cyberinfrastructure.

Questions?

We look forward to learning from your experiences and working together to build better infrastructure for AI research!

The program for the 6th Chameleon User Meeting will follow the general schedule below. Information is subject to change. We will fill in more specifics in the near future.

Day 1 (April 15th, 2026)

8 AM: Welcome Reception/Doors Open

9 AM: Opening Keynote

10 AM: Presentation Panel I

11:30 AM: Panel Discussion I

12:00 PM: Break for Lunch

1:00 PM: Afternoon Keynote

2:00 PM: Presentation Panel II

3:30 PM: Panel Discussion II

4:00 PM: Closing Remarks

Day 2 (April 16th, 2026)

8 AM: Doors Open

9 AM: Opening Remarks

9:15 AM: Morning Tutorials & Mini-Symposia

12:00 PM: Break for Lunch

1:00 PM: Afternoon Tutorials & Mini-Symposia

2:30 PM: Closing Remarks

Coming soon!

Coming soon!

Please send your questions regarding the Chameleon User Meeting to contact AT chameleoncloud.org.