Chameleon

What is Chameleon?

The Chameleon project is a configurable experimental environment for large-scale cloud research based on a OpenStack KVM Cloud. With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), it provides a large-scale platform to the open research community allowing them explore transformative concepts in deeply programmable cloud services, design, and core technologies. The Chameleon testbed, is deployed at the University of Chicago and the Texas Advanced Computing Center and consists of 650 multi-core cloud nodes, 5PB of total disk space, and leverage 100 Gbps connection between the sites.

The project is led by the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and partners from the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University, the Ohio State University, and University of Texas at San Antoni, comprising a highly qualified and experienced team. The team includes members from the NSF supported FutureGrid project and from the GENI community, both forerunners of the NSFCloud solicitation under which this project is funded. Chameleon will also sets of partnerships with commercial and academic clouds, such as Rackspace, CERN and Open Science Data Cloud (OSDC).

For more information please check https://www.chameleoncloud.org/ .

Execution in Chameleon

Currently, COMPSs can only handle the Chameleon infrastructure as a cluster (deployed inside a lease). Next, we provide the steps needed to execute COMPSs applications at Chameleon:

  • Make a lease reservation with 1 minimum node (for the COMPSs master instance) and a maximum number of nodes equal to the number of COMPSs workers needed plus one
  • Instantiate the master image (based on the published image COMPSs__CC-CentOS7)
  • Attach a public IP and login to the master instance (the instance is correctly contextualized for COMPSs executions if you see a COMPSs login banner)
  • Set the instance as COMPSs master by running /etc/init.d/chameleon_init start
  • Copy your CH file (API credentials) to the Master and source it
  • Run the chameleon_cluster_setup script and fill the information when prompted (you will be asked for the name of the master instance, the reservation id and number of workers). This scripts may take several minutes since it sets up the all cluster.
  • Execute your COMPSs applications normally using the runcompss script

As an example you can check this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrQ6anPHjAU performing a full setup and execution of a COMPSs application at Chameleon.