Welcome to Chameleon

What is Chameleon?

Chameleon is an NSF-funded testbed system for Computer Science experimentation. It provides researchers with deeply reconfigurable cloud infrastructure for systems, networking, distributed computing, and security research. Unlike traditional cloud services, Chameleon offers both bare metal access to physical hardware and traditional virtual machines, giving you full control over the software stack and enabling reproducible experimental research.

Key Features

Hardware Access

  • Bare metal instances: Full control over physical servers without virtualization overhead

  • Virtual machines: Traditional OpenStack KVM instances for development and testing

  • Diverse hardware: Intel/AMD CPUs (with ROCm support), ARM ThunderX2, GPUs, FPGAs, Atom processors, high-memory nodes

  • Storage options: NVMe SSDs, traditional spinning disks, shared file systems

  • High-performance networking: InfiniBand, 25/100 Gigabit Ethernet

Experimental Capabilities

  • Resource isolation: Dedicated hardware reservations for reproducible experiments

  • Custom images: Create and share disk images with your experimental software

  • Power monitoring: Measure energy consumption at the node and application level

  • Performance metrics: Built-in monitoring and data collection tools

Advanced Networking

  • Isolated networks: Create private Layer-2 VLANs for multi-node experiments

  • Multi-site Layer-3: Direct routing between Chameleon sites via FABRIC (FabnetV4)

  • WAN connectivity: Connect to external networks and other testbeds via FABRIC

  • Flexible topologies: Advanced routing and network configuration

Collaboration & Reproducibility

  • Trovi sharing portal: Package and share complete experimental environments

  • Jupyter integration: Interactive development and data analysis environment

  • Multi-site deployment: Experiments across geographically distributed sites

Getting Started

New to Chameleon?

Start with our getting-started guide to create an account, join a project, and launch your first instance.

Need access to the testbed?

Learn about PI eligibility and project management.

Ready to use the testbed?

Choose your interface:

Quick Navigation

Core Workflow

  1. Discover resources - Find the right hardware for your experiment

  2. Make reservations - Reserve nodes and networks

  3. Launch instances - Deploy your experimental environment

  4. Monitor and collect data - Measure performance and energy usage

Advanced Features
Data & Storage
Getting Help

About the Testbed

Chameleon operates multiple sites providing different capabilities:

Core Sites:

  • CHI@TACC (Texas): Large-scale bare metal cloud with diverse Intel/AMD hardware including GigaIO nodes

  • CHI@UC (Chicago): Networking-focused site with specialized hardware and GPU/FPGA resources

  • CHI@NCAR (Colorado): ARM ThunderX2 nodes for edge computing and atmospheric science research

  • CHI@Edge: Distributed edge computing with Raspberry Pi devices (including Raspberry Pi 5)

  • KVM@TACC (Texas): Traditional OpenStack cloud

Associate Sites:

  • CHI@NRP: National Research Platform integration

  • CHI@NU: Northwestern University integration

  • CHI@EVL: Electronic Visualization Laboratory (UIC) integration

The testbed serves hundreds of research projects annually, supporting publications in systems, networking, distributed computing, cybersecurity, edge computing, and atmospheric sciences.

Learn more about Chameleon and join the community at https://www.chameleoncloud.org.