Getting started on Chameleon: sign in, join a project and launch your first bare-metal node

UCR faculty, research staff and students doing computer-systems, cloud, networking or hardware research, and instructors planning hands-on systems classes

Chameleon is a national testbed for computer science. You reserve whole physical servers (or VMs) for up to a week at a time, with root access and your own operating system image, at sites in Chicago, Austin and Boulder. See the Chameleon service page for what fits and what does not.

Chameleon is Non-sensitive only (P1; no protected data).

Getting started takes four steps: sign in, get into a project, reserve a node, and launch an instance on it. Research Computing can help at any step; contact us.

1. Before you start

Use your UCR login. Chameleon uses federated sign-in, so you sign in with your NetID and Duo by choosing University of California, Riverside.
Have an SSH key pair. You will connect to your machines with SSH. If you do not have a key, Chameleon can generate one for you when you launch an instance, or see its FAQ on creating key pairs.
Know who your project will be. Nothing runs outside a project. Students and postdocs join their advisor's project; faculty and research staff can lead their own.

Go to chameleoncloud.org and click Log in.
On the sign-in page, choose University of California, Riverside and sign in with your NetID and Duo.
The first time, Chameleon asks you to accept its terms of use.
You land on your Dashboard, which shows your active projects, open help-desk tickets and any outages.

Your account is created at first sign-in. You are also subscribed to Chameleon's users and outage mailing lists, which you can change under Profile > Manage Email Subscriptions.

3. Get into a project

Until you are in a project, Projects shows "You don't have any projects!" and you cannot reserve anything.

Students and postdocs. Ask your PI to add you to their project, giving them your Chameleon username (your sign-in email). Students, including PhD students and paid research assistants, are not eligible to be PIs (NSF Graduate Research Fellows are the exception).

Faculty and research staff: request PI eligibility.

Go to Profile and click Edit Profile.
Fill in your institution, department, phone, position/title and country. For research staff the matching title is "University Research Staff (excluding postdoctorates)"; faculty choose "Faculty".
Tick Request PI Eligibility. A Department directory link field appears and is required: give the address of your public UCR profile, for example your https://profiles.ucr.edu/<your.name> page or your department's people page.
Click Save Profile. Your profile now shows PI Eligibility: Requested. Chameleon says requests are usually reviewed within one business day.

Create a project (after approval). Go to Projects and click Create a Project. The form asks for:

a title and a short nickname used across Chameleon's sites;
a research-area tag (choose the closest);
a public abstract of about 200 words covering your objectives, planned activities and why the work matters;
a private resource justification: roughly how much hardware you will use and for how long, which Chameleon reviewers use to size the allocation (a simple estimate such as "about 15 one-day bare-metal leases and 4 GPU leases" is fine);
whether the work is grant-funded, and agreement to Chameleon's acceptable use policies.

The project appears straight away, but its allocation shows Pending until Chameleon staff review it, so you cannot reserve hardware until then. Once approved, the project receives a startup allocation of service units for six months (see Chameleon's FAQ for the current amount). PIs and managers can add members, set per-member budgets, and request extensions or recharges from the project page.

4. Reserve a node

Physical machines must be reserved (leased) before you can use them.

Find hardware on Hardware Discovery. Note which site has it (CHI@UC, CHI@TACC or CHI@NCAR); hardware is per site.
From the portal's Experiment menu, choose that site. Check that your project is selected in the menu at the top left.
Go to Reservations > Leases and click Host Calendar. Filter by Node Type and click a free node's name.
In the Create Lease form, name the lease, keep "start now" for an on-demand lease or choose a later start, and set the length (up to 7 days for bare metal and GPUs).
Under Networks, tick Reserve Floating IP so you will have a public address for SSH.
Click Create. The lease shows PENDING, then ACTIVE.

Chameleon charges the reserved time whether you use it or not, so cancel a lease you no longer need before it starts. Do not stack back-to-back leases to get around the 7-day limit; save your work with a snapshot and make a new lease instead.

5. Launch an instance and connect

On the site, go to Compute > Instances and click Launch Instance.
Choose your reservation, an image (Chameleon's supported Ubuntu and CentOS images are a good start), the sharednet1 network, and your SSH key pair.
Click Launch. Building a bare-metal instance often takes 10 to 20 minutes.
When it is running, use the instance's menu to Associate Floating IP.
Connect: ssh cc@<floating-ip> (the default user on Chameleon images is cc).

6. Next steps

Save your work. Before a lease ends, save the machine's state as an image with Chameleon's cc-snapshot tool, and copy data you need elsewhere.
Script it. Chameleon's JupyterHub and the python-chi library can reserve, launch and configure an experiment from a notebook; see the Jupyter and python-chi guide.
Start from a template. Trovi has shared experiment patterns you can launch and adapt.
Get help. Chameleon's documentation, forum and help desk cover the testbed itself; questions about whether it fits your research go to Research Computing: contact us.
Acknowledge Chameleon in publications, as described in its FAQ.

Owner: Research Computing Reviewed: 5 Nov 2026