A team of institutions led by the University of Chicago (UChicago) has received $10 million in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue development activities for a large-scale cloud computing testbed called Chameleon.
The four-year grant enables UChicago, Northwestern University, Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to install modifications to Chameleon including internet of things (IoT) elements, networking experiments, reproducibility concepts and graphics processing unit (GPU) computations, RENCI said Monday.
NSF’s grant will support upcoming development activities involving projects such as the Chameleon Infrastructure, OpenStack open-source project and RENCI’s software-defined networking approach.
Deepankar Medhi, program director at NSF's computer and information sciences and engineering directorate (CISE), said the new funding will also help the team enable Chameleon’s more than 4,000 users to accelerate cloud computing research.
“The planned additions to Chameleon will allow academic researchers to experiment with advanced programmable networks in a large-scale cloud environment,” said Paul Ruth, assistant director of network research and infrastructure at RENCI.
Since 2015, Chameleon has supported projects in various topic areas including virtualization, power management, operating systems, security, networking, high-performance computing (HPC) and machine learning.