Tambako The Jaguar via Flickr

Dear Chameleon users,

KVM Changes. As we announced last month, starting now you’ll no longer be able to launch on-demand instances at KVM@TACC. In order to launch VMs, you’ll need to create a flavor lease first, similar to what you need to do for baremetal instances. Existing on-demand VMs will stay running until September 1st. On this date, we’ll snapshot and delete all on-demand VMs still running. That means if one of your VM instances is not tied to a reservation by then, it will be deleted. We recommend that before September 1 you follow our process to migrate on-demand instances to a reservable flavor to avoid any interruption in your experiment. If you miss this deadline, don’t worry, you’ll be able to restore your instance from the snapshot.

When you make a lease for a flavor, you’ll now be charged SUs similar to on baremetal reservations. The charge cost is based on the proportion of node hours that your VMs use. For example, our KVM GPU nodes support 4 g1.h100.pci1 instances per host. If you make a 1 hour lease, for 1 instance of this flavor, you’ll be charged for ½ a node hour. For more information, see our FAQs. For any questions about this, please feel free to contact us via the Help Desk.

New Python-chi Widgets. We’ve updated our programmable interface to the testbed, python-chi, with new Jupyter widgets. We hope that the rich UI provided by widgets helps users reproduce experiments easier, and will make it easier for all experimenters to interact with the testbed. The chi.hardware module now includes show_nodes which will display a sortable table table of hosts, so that you can easily compare different nodes. To see this widget in action, see our updated Bare Metal Experiment artifact. Similarly, we’ve added chi.lease.show_leases which lets you compare all of the leases you have made, which we hope will improve the experience of using python-chi for reservations made in advance. These widgets are currently in the pilot stage: we have more widget features planned soon, and as always we’re looking forward to your feedback.

New devices on CHI@Edge. This month we added 5 new CHI@Edge devices with sense hats and cameras! CHI@Edge is our Edge computing site that allows you to run containerized experiments on Raspberry Pis and Nvidia Jetsons. Previously, we o the Chameleon team operated 25 Raspberry Pi 4s, and 11 Jetson Nanos. To that list, we’ve added the following new devices, which each have interesting peripherals to play around with:

• iot-jetson11 - with a Waveshare PiRacer pro board and wide angle camera (OV5647)
• iot-rpi4-picam2 - with a sense hat and Pi camera 2.1
• iot-rpi4-picam3 - with a sense hat and Pi camera 3
• iot-rpi4-ov5647 - with wide angle camera (OV5647)
• iot-rpi5-nvme-01 - with a 1tb PCIe NVMe drive and Pi camera 3

Stay tuned for more hardware coming soon, as we get time to configure and enroll new devices. In addition to the hardware that we operate, users like you have contributed devices via the Bring Your Own Device capability of CHI@Edge. Along with these devices, we also have example Jupyter notebooks that showcase how to use these peripherals and cameras in this Trovi artifact.

Image updates. This month, we’ve published updated versions of our Chameleon support OS images at CHI@UC and CHI@TACC. These updates include patches to the preinstalled software dependencies. Additionally, we brought back the MOTD (message of the day) that shows information about your node and lease expiration on SSH login. We initially released this in April, but it was found to have adverse effects on SSH login time and has since been removed. This month, we fixed the MOTD script to minimize the impact on SSH login (we benchmark this to be around ~1/20th of a second). 

Happy experimenting!