Workshops and Tutorials at PACT 2026

Chameleon: An Experimental Testbed for Parallel, Heterogeneous, and AI-Accelerated

Scheduling: Monday, October 19 (afternoon)

Tutorial Presenters:

Kate Keahey

Argonne National Laboratory / University of Chicago

Marc Richardson

University of Chicago

Abstract

This tutorial introduces Chameleon (chameleoncloud.org), a publicly available NSF-funded experimental testbed that has supported a community of over 14,000 users across more than 1,300 research and education projects since 2015, who have reported over 1,000 publications from their work on the testbed. Chameleon is purpose-built for deep reconfigurability and provides access to diverse, state-of-the-art hardware hosted across sites at the University of Chicago, TACC, and NCAR—including NVIDIA H100 GPU nodes, Liqid and GigaIO disaggregated hardware, FPGAs, and high-bandwidth interconnects—all reconfigurable at the bare metal level. Beyond bare metal, Chameleon supports virtual machine provisioning via KVM@TACC and edge-based container experiments via CHI@Edge, enabling research across the full compute continuum. This flexibility, combined with support for custom kernels, power control, and serial console access, makes Chameleon uniquely suited for low-level systems research: compiler and runtime evaluation, architecture exploration, performance variability analysis, and power management.

The tutorial will walk attendees through the full experimental lifecycle on Chameleon: from browsing the resource catalog and provisioning hardware, to constructing complex experimental topologies such as GPU clusters and multi-node HPC environments, to snapshotting, packaging, and sharing reproducible artifacts via Trovi, a platform-agnostic artifact repository for reproducible research. Throughout, we will ground the discussion in use cases directly relevant to experiments in parallel computing, heterogeneous workloads, and AI/ML system benchmarking. Attendees will gain hands-on experience with Chameleon Cloud and leave with reusable experiment patterns they can immediately apply to their own research on the system.

Bios

Kate Keahey is a senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and senior fellow at the University of Chicago’s Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering (CASE). She received her Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University and joined Argonne in 2001. One of the pioneers of infrastructure cloud computing, she created and led the development of the Nimbus project—recognized as the first open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service implementation—and has spent her career advancing the use of cloud computing concepts in scientific research. Her current research interests focus on cloud computing, resource management, and reproducibility. She is the PI and founder of the Chameleon testbed project, an NSF-funded reconfigurable experimental platform available since 2015. She is also co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the SoftwareX journal, which won the PROSE Award for innovation in journal publishing in 2016. Keahey has presented Chameleon tutorials at SC, ACM REP, IC2E, and numerous workshops and user meetings, and has given keynotes and invited talks at major venues including IEEE CLUSTER.

Marc Richardson is a Technical Project Manager for Kate Keahey’s Nimbus Group at the University of Chicago, which leads the widely used Chameleon Cloud testbed and several other NSF-funded projects including FLOTO, REPETO, and FOUNT. In this role, Marc oversees user engagement, community outreach, event coordination, and educational initiatives for the Chameleon community. With expertise spanning cloud computing, systems research, and research cyberinfrastructure, Marc develops training materials, organizes tutorials and webinars, and mentors students and early-career researchers as they learn to work with large-scale experimental platforms. He regularly coordinates tutorials and workshops for the Chameleon community—including at Chameleon User Meetings and as part of NSF-funded reproducibility and education initiatives—and is passionate about making advanced computing infrastructure accessible to researchers at all career stages.

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