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:
Web Interface - Point-and-click access to all features
Command Line - Programmatic access and automation
Jupyter Environment - Interactive notebooks and data analysis
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.