Cloud enabling educational platforms with corc

Abstract

In this paper, it is shown how teaching platforms at educational institutions can utilize cloud platforms to scale a particular service, or gain access to compute instances with accelerator capability such as GPUs. Specifically at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH), it is demonstrated how the internal JupyterHub service, named Data Analysis Gateway (DAG), could utilize compute resources in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This is achieved by utilizing the introduced Cloud Orchestrator (corc) framework, in conjunction with the novel JupyterHub spawner named MultipleSpawner. Through this combination, we are able to dynamically orchestrate, authenticate, configure, and access interactive Jupyter Notebooks in the OCI with user defined hardware capabilities. These capabilities include settings such as the minimum amount of CPU cores, memory and GPUs the particular orchestrated resources must have. This enables teachers and students at educational institutions such as UCPH to gain easy access to the required capabilities for a particular course. In addition, we lay out how this groundwork, will enable us to establish a Grid of Clouds between multiple trusted institutions. This enables the exchange of surplus computational resources that could be employed across their organisational boundaries.