Deploying Jupyter Notebooks at scale on XSEDE resources for Science Gateways and workshops

Abstract

Jupyter Notebooks have become a mainstream tool for interactive computing in every field of science. Jupyter Notebooks are suitable as companion applications for Science Gateways, providing more flexibility and post-processing capability to the users. Moreover they are often used in training events and workshops to provide immediate access to a pre-configured interactive computing environment. The Jupyter team released the JupyterHub web application to provide a platform where multiple users can login and access a Jupyter Notebook environment. When the number of users and memory requirements are low, it is easy to setup JupyterHub on a single server. However, setup becomes more complicated when we need to serve Jupyter Notebooks at scale to tens or hundreds of users. In this paper we will present three strategies for deploying JupyterHub at scale on XSEDE resources. All options share the deployment of JupyterHub on a Virtual Machine on XSEDE Jetstream. In the first scenario, JupyterHub connects to a supercomputer and launches a single node job on behalf of each user and proxies back the Notebook from the computing node back to the user's browser. In the second scenario, implemented in the context of a XSEDE consultation for the IRIS consortium for Seismology, we deploy Docker in Swarm mode to coordinate many XSEDE Jetstream virtual machines to provide Notebooks with persistent storage and quota. In the last scenario we install the Kubernetes containers orchestration framework on Jetstream to provide a fault-tolerant JupyterHub deployment with a distributed filesystem and capability to scale to thousands of users. In the conclusion section we provide a link to step-by-step tutorials complete with all the necessary commands and configuration files to replicate these deployments.