News from Jupyter-JSC

Jupyter-JSC was first launched four years ago and continues to grow at JSC with new functions and tasks. Today, it is part of the Helmholtz Cloud (https://cloud.helmholtz.de) and enables the use of the HPC systems at JSC. It also allows for the use of the HDF Cloud in everyday work entirely in the web browser and with just a few clicks via https://jupyter-jsc.fz-juelich.de.

JupyterLab’s modern user interface is a highly functional, highly flexible intuitive web application that offers direct access to the login and compute nodes of our HPC systems. While the classic terminal remains in the interface, the main advantage of JupyterLab is its modern access to data analysis. The short paths in JupyterLab from simulation to data analysis to visualization in the remote desktop have impressed many users over the course of four years. Today, about 500 JupyterLab sessions are initiated by around 100 different users via Jupyter-JSC each week.

As the number of users has grown, so too have the demands on Jupyter-JSC. The backend of the service was therefore fundamentally revised this year and made fit for further challenges. Kubernetes, in combination with Rancher, was chosen to ensure that the growing number of containers are stable, scalable, and easy to administer, and thus to significantly increase resilience.

Of course, these changes are not immediately visible to the user. More obvious is the possibility to now use JupyterLab 3 in addition to JupyterLab 2 via Juypter-JSC. The highlights of JupyterLab 3 include the integration of a debugger frontend (currently for Python) and the simplified method of extending your own JupyterLab with prebuilt extensions.

As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions and invite our HPC users to use Jupyter-JSC.

Contact: Tim Kreuzer, Alice Grosch, Jens Henrik Göbbert, jupyter.jsc@fz-juelich.de

from JSC News No. 284, 15 November 2021