2026 is in full swing now. The Chameleon team in Chicago is struggling to keep warm, but the cold isn’t slowing down our momentum as we enter a new year. This newsletter brings upcoming changes to Trovi and the appliance catalog, with announcements about open registration for the 6th Chameleon User Meeting (Boulder, CO, April 15-16), a reminder to submit to the call for presentations, and upcoming webinars (next up: How to Use CHI@Edge to Enable Edge to Cloud Experimentation on Feb. 17th).

Registration is now open for the 6th Chameleon User Meeting (April 15-16, 2026) at NCAR Mesa Lab in Boulder, CO!

Register now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/6th-chameleon-user-meeting-tickets-1982009337282

Early pricing ends Feb. 28.

A survey of 300+ HPC users reveals that fewer than 30% are aware of their energy consumption. This research introduces Energy-Based and Carbon-Based Accounting models that tie computing costs to environmental impact, demonstrating through real experiments and simulations that such incentives can dramatically reduce energy use while maintaining scientific productivity.

We’re excited to shine a spotlight on the recently refreshed hardware discovery browser on Chameleon! Launched a little while ago, this upgrade makes it easier and faster to pinpoint the exact hardware you need for your experiments, connecting you directly to real-time scheduling and reservations.

As you most likely know, Chameleon offers dedicated, reservable resources. That means your work gets exclusive access to the nodes you choose but navigating hardware specs and reservation calendars together can sometimes be a bit of frustration.

The new resource discovery experience helps you link “what hardware am I getting?” with “when can I actually …

This past month brings 2025 to a close and also exciting updates, including a year in review, Trovi improvements, and a CHI@Edge artifact, along with announcements about upcoming webinars (next up: How to Organize Artifact Evaluations (AEs) with Shared Infrastructure on Jan. 13th), our call for presentations for our sixth user meeting at NCAR’s campus in Boulder, and highlights from our newly appointed reproducibility ambassadors.

Modern networks are growing increasingly complex, and managing them effectively requires sophisticated policy configurations that can adapt in real-time. Languages that enable direct programmability of network data planes, like P4, offer unprecedented control over packet processing, but come at a steep learning cost. This raises a crucial question: can we automate the generation of these complex network policies while ensuring they're correct, efficient, and adaptable? NetPrompt is a novel framework that harnesses the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate and optimize P4 scripts for Software-Defined Networks (SDN). Read more to learn how the research team implement NetPrompt …

As we approach the holiday season, we’d like to thank you once again for being a part of our wonderful Chameleon community!

Please keep in mind the following adjustments in our schedule over the next few weeks:

• The Chameleon Help Desk will be closed from Wednesday, December 24 until January 5th.

• As tradition, between December 19 to the 23rd, we’ll permit you to make 14-day leases for nodes and VMs that typically have 7-day limits.

It's the end of the year, so that means it's time for our annual Tickets of the Year blog! This blog covers some of our most common help desk tickets and provides solutions, so it can hopefully be a helpful reference if you run into any of these problems. If you need more help, the best places to look would be the docs, the FAQ, or submitting a new ticket to the help desk.

The Sixth Chameleon User Meeting will be held April 15-16, 2026 at the NCAR Mesa Lab in Boulder, Colorado. This year's meeting 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 …

Prof. Fraida Fund's (NYU) recent webinar presented her extensive open source materials that she developed and used to teach a large (190+ students) graduate-level course on machine learning operations (MLOps) -- not just how to develop an ML model and code in isolation, but also how to design and implement a full-fledged system to develop and deploy ML models in various environments. The webinar was a great success: we had 100+ registrations, close to 50 participants at the webinar, and extensive Q&A following the presentation. We are excited to announce that the recording of her presentation, along with materials and …