SC25 in St. Louis (November 16–21, 2025) was a busy week for our team. At the EduHPC 2025 workshop, Kate Keahey presented “The Cost of Teaching Operational ML” (Fraida Fund, Kate Keahey, Cody Hammock, Marc Richardson, Mark Powers, and Michael Sherman), a FOUNT showcase that reports on running Fraida Fund’s large-scale “ML Systems Engineering and Operations” course for ~191 students on Chameleon — nearly 187,000 compute-instance hours, at a fraction of the equivalent commercial-cloud cost. Read the FOUNT announcement, the full paper (PDF) (DOI 10.1145/3731599.3767385), or the course materials and recording now online through FOUNT.
Three of our students also brought their work to the ACM Student Research Competition poster session:
- Hudson Reynolds and Alex Tuecke — an autonomous bioacoustic monitoring system for wildlife conservation, built on CHI@Edge.
- Zahra Temori — performance optimizations to the CC-snapshot tool, cutting snapshot creation time by roughly 80%.
- Saieda Ali Zada — an AI-powered documentation assistant that uses retrieval-augmented generation to help users navigate Chameleon resources.
You can read the full recap, including the student spotlights, on the Chameleon at SC25 blog post. Congratulations to everyone who presented!
Header photo: America’s Center, St. Louis (SC25 venue) by Chris, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.