Chameleon

RECONFIGURABLE LARGE-SCALE OPENSTACK CLOUD TESTBED FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE AND NETWORKING RESEARCH

In 2015, in collaboration with the University of Chicago, TACC deployed Chameleon, a reconfigurable computing research instrument for reproducible science. Built on the OpenStack cloud software platform, researchers have access to hundreds of nodes of traditional KVM cloud architecture, as well as highly innovative, reconfigurable bare-metal nodes provisioned via OpenStack Ironic. In addition to a large deployment of Intel Xeon Haswell processors, a wide variety of other hardware offerings are available on the system. In late 2017, Intel Skylake nodes were added at both TACC and the University of Chicago, with Corsa DP2200 and DP2400 Openflow 1.5 compliant switches to enhance the networking research features of Chameleon. Additional partners include Northwestern University and RENCI.

Chameleon is supported by awards from the National Science Foundation: CNS-1419152, CNS-1743354.

 Chameleon Cloud

System Specs:
  • Built on the OpenStack cloud software
  • Access to more than 600 hundred nodes
  • More than 10,000 cores of Intel Xeon Haswell processors
  • Additional Intel/Altera FPGAs; NVIDIA P100-NVLINK, P100, M40 and K80; HP ProLiant ARM, ATOM, and low power Xeon
  • A rack of FDR Infiniband-connected nodes
  • Storage-hierarchy research nodes containing 512 GB RAM, 4 TB NVMe, 6.4 TB SSD's, and 2.4 TB 15K SAS HDDs
  • Provides both reconfigurable bare-metal and traditional KVM capabilities