Easily customisable, flexible, scalable and portable. Users are walking away with the open-source project JupyterHub.
‘Class is so much faster now. Students generally finish three times faster than in previous years, with few questions for teachers. We can now focus more on the content, rather than the technical part.’ VU researcher Arthur Avramiea (Integrative Neurophysiology) is overwhelmingly enthusiastic about JupyterHub. But what is it really?
When you work with data, you used to have to set up complicated tools to manipulate that data yourself. That caused a lot of frustration. Those tools are now ready: JupyterHub gives users access to (preconfigured) computing environments and resources without burdening them with installation and maintenance tasks.
The latter was a thorn in the side of teachers, students, researchers and data scientists at VU University in particular, who spent a lot of time on data configuration. With Jupyter, they can now do their work in their own workspaces on shared resources efficiently managed by system administrators.
Completely open-source
JupyterHub can be used for different environments and is flexible; it can be configured with authentication to grant access to a subset of users. JupyterHub can be deployed with modern container technology, making it scalable. It can handle up to several hundred users. Finally, JupyterHub is fully open-source and designed to run on different infrastructures.
Simple and unified environment
‘The VU JupyterHub plays a central role in our education,’ says lecturer Ronald Vlaming. ‘It allows students to work directly on instructions in a simple and uniform environment, without having to spend time installing a programming language and downloading packages. All students need is a web browser, a link and a login. This service is fantastic and so are the staff who support it!’
Those staff are in the IT department's specialist Linux team. That team - made up of former VU students - is proud, as are lecturers and researchers, of the end result and the impact it has been able to make with this innovation. ‘By ensuring that our information technology meets an urgent need, we have been able to make a difference for many VU colleagues,’ said one of the IT colleagues.
http://hub.compute.vu.nl