Collaborative Research: Chameleon: A Large-Scale, Reconfigurable Experimental Environment for Cloud Research

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

One of two NSFCloud mid-scale experimental computing research infrastructures, Chameleon is a deeply reconfigurable cloud computing testbed supporting large-scale Computer Science experimentation. Located at the University of Chicago and the Texas Advanced Computing Center, it is composed of over 600 compute nodes and a total of 5 petabytes of storage supporting data-intensive science. Since its public availability in July 2015, Chameleon has attracted a community of over 1,300 users working on over 200 education and research projects. In Phase 2 of the NSFCloud program, this project will expand Chameleon capabilities and capacity, and will fulfill its mission of serving as a testbed that is used extensively by the research community by: 1) broadening the set of supported experiments through the addition of new hardware and software supporting high bandwidth and Software Defined Networking (SDN) 2) providing operational sustainability by streamlining operations, packaging the testbed as open source software that can be leveraged by others, and developing a process for adding resources to the testbed 3) provide support for managing, understanding, comparing and reproducing Computer Science experiments, and 4) focusing effort on building an engaged community around the testbed via both traditional outreach including targeted training and education efforts, and direct personalized outreach to experimenters.