Happy Birthday to Chameleon – and many happy returns of the day! It is hard to believe it has been 8 years working with our amazing user community, hearing about your research, reading your papers, and generally watching amazing science being done every day. In this month’s blog we have a cake, candles, silly hats, balloons – and a tiny little gift. Welcome to the REPETO project that will help us foster practical reproducibility and interactive science – read the changelog to find out more.

Join us on Tuesday, August 1st at 10 AM CT for a webinar that showcases how to teach machine learning using inexpensive and easy to find self-driving cars. We will present an educational module that allows students to configure an inexpensive off-the-shelf self-driving vehicle, generate training sets by driving the vehicle, and train models based on those driving sets, evaluate the quality of the training by observing the car in practice, and ultimately refine the training and watch the improvements.

The educational module is suitable for both educators and self-learners, open-source, and it can be highly configurable for specific classes …

Terraform is both a command line tool, and a configuration language to build, change, and version resources from various Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers. There are pre-existing providers to integrate with major cloud platforms, both private and open-source.

In particular, since Terraform natively supports Openstack, it will also work with Chameleon :)

If you have a complex configuration, involving multiple nodes and networks, across one or more Chameleon Sites, defining them in a declarative format can be easier than creating them imperatively.

The examples from this post show how to provision instances, networks, and floating IPs across multiple Chameleon …

This month we present an interview with Aniruddha Gokhale, Full Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Vanderbilt University who is using Chameleon to teach classes on cloud computing, computer networks, and distributed systems. Professor Gokhale discusses the challenges of teaching with testbeds, explains how he managed to overcome it in his own teaching, and shares recommendations on how to best leverage the power of testbeds in the classroom.

This month, we ran a reproducibility hackathon at ACM REP ‘23, and focused on reproducibility efforts.

More opportunities for Chameleon Users interested in reproducibility! The Chameleon team will host two Bird-of-Feather (BoF) sessions on Reproducibility at the USENIX ATC/OSDI 2023. The hour long BOFs will be held on Monday, July 10th and  Tuesday, July 11th in the 7-10PM time slot with more specific time and place to be announced at the event. 
 

This month's Tips & Tricks blog is an overview of one of the most critical components to experimentation on Chameleon: images! We explore everything that makes a Chameleon image unique, and how you can build your own images!

Calling all Chameleon users interested in reproducibility! The Chameleon team will host a Practical Reproducibility for Computer Science Hackathon, taking place on June 29, at 11:00 PT, at ACM REP ‘23 at Baskin Engineering 2 - Room E2-599 in UC Santa Cruz.

We hope everybody had a lovely Juneteenth! Our User Experiment Blog is coming out slightly late this month due to the holiday but good things come to those who wait ;-). In this month’s blog we are talking with Jacob Goldverg, a student at University of Buffalo who used Chameleon to investigate how we can efficiently move large amounts of data while minimizing energy consumption.

This month was all about trying to understand better how our users use Chameleon  for research and education. We were delighted to see many of you at University of Chicago for the Chameleon User Meeting and even more wowed when we assembled together all the amazing research papers produced by our community.