From FutureGrid to NSFCloud

Yesterday, the National Science Foundation announced the NSFCloud awards. FutureGrid partners, University of Chicago and TACC won one of them to build an experimental testbed called Chameleon. We are excited to be able to continue serving the FutureGrid community through this new project!

The FutureGrid resources at University of Chicago and TACC, Hotel and Alamo, will continue to be operated during the first year of the Chameleon project. We will provide documentation and tools as necessary to streamline user transition from FutureGrid to Chameleon so that FutureGrid users can keep their data and access these resources easily. We will also make every effort to ensure that the resource availability under the new project overlaps with FutureGrid.

Initially the resources will be operated in roughly the same way as they are now operated in FutureGrid with the exception that the "HPC partitions" will not be supported. We will continue the process of transitioning users to the OpenStack clouds. In Spring of 2015, we expect to introduce additional capabilities allowing users to work with bare metal reconfiguration while continuing to operate OpenStack clouds for research and educational projects as before. In the Fall of 2015, the existing Hotel and Alamo resources will be supplanted by new hardware consisting of over 650 multi-core nodes equipped with OpenFlow switches and a total of 5 PB of storage. The operational model of the resources will remain the same in the essentials but will be progressively refined to support increasingly more experiments.

To find out more, please visit our website, www.chameleoncloud.org. We will also post regular updates as the project gets underway.