Notebooks

The more you go in data analysis, the more you understand that the most suitable tool for coding and visualizing is not a pure code, or SQL IDE, or even simplified data manipulation diagrams (aka workflows or jobs). From some point you realize that you need a mix of these all – that’s what “notebook” platforms are, with Jupyter being the most popular notebook software out there.

Notebooks is an 'as a Service' environment based on the Jupyter technology, offering a browser-based, scalable tool for interactive data analysis. The Notebooks environment provides users with notebooks where they can combine text, mathematics, computations and rich media output. EGI Notebooks is a multi-user service and can scale to multiple servers based on the EGI Cloud service.

EGI Notebooks Unique Features

EGI Notebooks provides the well-known Jupyter interface for notebooks with the following added features:

• Integration with EGI Check-in for authentication, login with any EduGAIN or social accounts (e.g. Google, Facebook)
• Persistent storage associated with each user, available in the notebooks environment.
• Customisable with new notebook environments, expose any existing notebook to your users.
• Runs on EGI e-Infrastructure so can easily use EGI compute and storage from your notebooks.

Service Modes

We offer different service modes depending on your needs:

• Individual users can use the centrally operated service from EGI. Users can login, write and play and re-play notebooks by:

  1. creating an EGI account
  2. enrolling to the vo.notebooks.egi.eu VO
  3. accessing https://notebooks.egi.eu/

  This instance has limits on the amount of resources available for each user (2 CPU core, 4 GB RAM and 20 GB of storage). It will also kill inactive sessions after 1 hour.

• User communities can have their customised EGI Notebooks service instance. EGI offers consultancy, support, and can operate the setup as well. A community specific setup allows the community to use the community's own Virtual Organisation (i.e. federated compute and storage sites) for Jupyter, add custom libraries into Jupyter (e.g. discipline-specific analysis libraries) or have fine grained control on who can access the instance (based on the information available to the EGI Check-in AAI service).