New ARDC Jupyter Notebook Service Goes Live

The ARDC’s new Jupyter Notebook Service, hosted on the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud, is now available to all Australian researchers.

Jupyter Notebooks is an international open-source interactive web tool. It is one of the popular ways for researchers to develop and share software and to combine software code, computational output, explanatory text and multimedia resources in a single location.

The new service is available via a simple web interface, giving researchers access to compute and storage resources, provided by the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud. The new national service is hosted in the cloud, so multiple researchers can develop and serve Jupyter Notebooks with centralised monitoring, logging and reporting. 

The new service also supports launching Jupyter Notebooks within a pre-configured computing environment without the need for users to install any software packages. 

Carmel Walsh, Director of eResearch Infrastructure and Services at the ARDC, said, “Our new Jupyter Notebook Service is a simple new way for Australian researchers to use a powerful research software collaboration tool. Alongside our Virtual Desktop Service, the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud is now being used by more Australian researchers, from novice to expert, who need access to cloud computing for their research.”

As it is a managed service, the new service significantly reduces the technical barriers faced by the researchers in using Jupyter Notebooks. For example, it can take extensive technical knowledge to set up an environment to use Jupyter Notebooks.

Accelerating Research with Reusable Notebooks

The ARDC Jupyter Notebook Service will also reduce the significant effort around the development, maintenance and duplication of work by users for multiple domain-specific research platforms, many of which are co-invested by ARDC.

Dr Elisa Bayraktarov is the Program Manager for the ARDC-supported research platform, EcoCommons. 

“EcoCommons, the new platform for ecological modelling and analysis, is launching next week on 29 November 2022! Following the launch, we have plans to collaborate with the ARDC to fully integrate the ARDC’s new Jupyter Notebook Service to fuel our Coding Cloud. We’re thrilled the ARDC could provide this new managed service to help us build a command-line environment for the ecological research community” she said. 

“Jupyter Notebooks are a simple way to share code and accelerate the research that will help us protect and restore our environment. Check out several Notebooks that we have made available.”

All Australian researchers with an Australian Access Federation (AAF) account can access the service at no cost thanks to investment by the Australian Government in the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).

Users creating and running Jupyter Notebooks on the new service will be provided with a capacity of up to 4 vCPU and 7.5 GB RAM with 10GB disk space. However, any user wishing to access more power to run their notebooks can request a project allocation on the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud and use the Jupyter application in the Nectar application catalogue to run Jupyter Notebooks on larger scale cloud resources. 

Learn more about the ARDC Jupyter Notebook Service, request further information or log in to the ARDC Jupyter Notebook Service now.

The ARDC is funded through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support national digital research infrastructure for Australian researchers.