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Chameleon Cloud Provider

Chameleon Cloud is a testbed for cloud research, offering both bare-metal and virtualized resources via OpenStack.

Configuration

chameleon:
  flavour: c1.small
  image: rocky-linux-8
  auth: /path/to/chameleon/auth.yaml
  project_name: CH-XXXXXX
  site: CHI@TACC

Usage Notes

  • Hardware Reservations: Unlike standard clouds, Chameleon allows you to reserve specific hardware (e.g., specific CPU architectures) for a set period.
  • Creating a Reservation: You can use the reservation command to create a lease.

Reservation Examples

Example: 2-day lease for a Skylake node

cmx vm reservation --name my-research-lease --node-type compute_skylake --count 1 --duration 2

Example: Explicit dates

cmx vm reservation --name my-lease --node-type compute_skylake --count 1 --start "2026-10-01 08:00" --end "2026-10-03 08:00"

Examples

cmx vm set chameleon
cmx vm start

Security and SSH

Chameleon uses the OpenStack provider implementation for SSH keys, security groups, and VM access.

See the OpenStack Security and SSH Guide for examples covering:

  • SSH public-key upload and management
  • Security-group creation and rules
  • Restricting SSH access by CIDR
  • Associating security groups with VMs
  • VM login, SSH, and remote command execution