Category – Tips and Tricks

Understanding the New FABRIC Layer 3 Connection

Multi-site experiments with FABRIC: Sometimes Layer 3 is all you need

Discover how Chameleon's testbed capabilities have been enhanced with the introduction of the FABRIC Layer 3 connection in our new blog post. Learn about the powerful and flexible networking options it offers, how it simplifies the process of routing to FABRIC resources, and how it enables low-latency and high-bandwidth traffic routing between CHI@UC and CHI@TACC.

Tickets of the Year on Chameleon (2023)

Read our tips and tricks for some common issues that users faced in 2023

Get the inside scoop on Chameleon Cloud’s common user issues and smart fixes in our latest 'Tips and Tricks' blog, highlighting a year of learning and problem-solving.

Running experiments inside a Jupyter Notebook

Chameleon’s JupyterHub is a great way to organize your experiments for practical reproducibility. To overcome its resource limitations, we describe how to extend the Jupyter Server Trovi artifact so that you can run your full experiment inside a Jupyter notebook.
 

Using Terraform with Chameleon

Declarative Orchestration Examples

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 …

Chameleon Images Overview

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!

How to Port your experiments between Chameleon Sites

Best practices for using resources across multiple sites

Chameleon's resources are distributed across multiple sites. If you'd like to move your work between sites, say to take advantage of different hardware, or to find available nodes, good news! It's pretty easy, and this post spells out the details.

The Practical Reproducibility Opportunity

In today’s Tips & Tricks post we explore the idea of practical reproducibility: how to make experiments not only reproducible but reproducible in a practical way, i.e. making it as natural to play with science as it is today to read about it via publications. To make this happen we need your help – your experiments packaged in a way that will allow others to easily build upon them by extending them. Let us know what you think!

Experiment Pattern: Bastion Host

The easiest way to deploy a secure cluster for scientific research

We go over the benefits of using a bastion host to administer your cluster. It's the easiest way to deploy a secure cluster of hosts for your experiments, and it also helps to save resources!

Tickets of the Year: 2022

As has become holiday tradition, we review some of our most common tickets of 2022, and provide answers and context that we hope is a helpful gift for all of our experimenters in the coming year.

Haswells are Back: an Interview with the UIC Associate Site

Today's Tips&Tricks blog spotlights one of the Chameleon Associate Sites: the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago. Learn about the hardware availability at the site, the motivation behind creating it, and some hands on insights gained in the process of deploying CHI in a Box on the site!