JupyterHub

Introduction

PIC offers a service for running Jupyter notebooks on CPU or GPU resources. This service is primarily thought for code developing rather than massive data processing. The usage is similar to running notebooks on your personal computer but offers the advantage of developing and testing your code on different hardware configurations.

Since the service is strictly thought for development and small scale testing tasks, there is a shutdown policy in place: 1) Your session will be closed and removed after 2 hours of idle keyboard. 2) The maximum duration for a session (idle or active) is limited to 48h. In practice that means that you should estimate the test data volume that you work with during a session to be able to be processed in less than 48 hours.

How to connect to the service

Got to jupyter01.pic.es to see your login screen.

Sign in with your PIC user credentials. This will prompt you to the following screen.

Here you can choose the hardware configuration for your job that will be running the Jupyter notebook. After choosing a configuration and pressing start the next screen will show you the progress of the notebook initialisation. Keep in mind that your job is sent to the HTCondor queuing system and waiting for available resources before being started. This can take up to a minute.

In the next screen you can choose a Python notebook, a Python console or a terminal for your work.

Your environments should appear under Notebook and Console. In a later section we will show you how to create a new environment and to remove an existing one.

Terminate your session and logout

It is important that before you log out you terminate your job. In order to do so, go to the top page menu "File -> Hub Control Panel" and you will see the following screen.

Here click on the Stop My Server button. After that you can log out by clicking the logout button in the right upper corner.

Create a new virtual environment with conda

In your jupyter session, click on the terminal button on the right board to open a terminal. Then create your environment:

[neissner@td110 ~]$ <path_to_anaconda>/bin/conda create -n <your_env> python=3 anaconda

Activate the base environment:

[neissner@td110 ~]$ eval "$(<path_to_anaconda>/bin/conda shell.bash hook)"

Initialize conda:

(base) [neissner@td110 ~]$ conda init

This actually changes the .bashrc file in your home directory in order to activate the base environment on login. To avoid that the conda base environment is activated everytime you log on to a node, run:

(base) [neissner@td110 ~]$ conda config --set auto_activate_base false

Activate your environment:

(base) [neissner@td110 ~]$ conda activate <your_env>
(<your_env>) [neissner@td110 ~]$

Install the ipykernel package and link it to the environment (it might already be installed):

(<your_env>) [neissner@td110 ~]$ conda install -n <your_env> ipykernel
Collecting package metadata (current_repodata.json): done
Solving environment: done

# All requested packages already installed.

(<your_env>) [neissner@td110 ~]$ ipython kernel install --user --name=<your_env>
Installed kernelspec <your_env> in /nfs/pic.es/user/n/neissner/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/<your_env>

Deactivate your environment:

(<your_env>) [neissner@td110 ~]$ conda deactivate

Now you can exit the terminal. After refreshing the Jupyter page your new environments/kernels appear in the board.