JupyterHub gives users access to Jupyter Notebook environments (computational environments and resources) virtually. Instructors can make individual workspaces (e.g., "Hubs") available to students using shared resources, managed by system administrators.
Get JupyterHub for Your Course
Instructors can request to have a JupyterHub environment set up for one or more of their classes by submitting a BCWorks support request (select JupyterHub as the service).
- Requests must be made at least 4 weeks prior to the start of the semester. Minimum class size is 12 students.
- Please include the following in the ticket:
- Instructor username (if different from requestor)
- TA username(s)
- Course ID and section number(s)
- Specific package requirements
- Base image (see base image example)
- Billing contact (Departments are billed for GCP consumption associated with each course)
- Hubs will be provisioned and available one to three weeks before the start of the semester for which they are requested.
- Hubs can currently only be requested by active Boston College faculty for academic purposes.
JupyterHub Support
- A specific hub with a unique DNS name will be configured for each course/section. Instructors and students in that course will automatically have access. We can also add teaching assistants upon request. Instructors will have ‘administrative’ access to their instance, which will allow them to view/control their students’ notebooks. We can provide this same access to teaching assistants upon request.
- Instructors and teaching assistants should be the main point of contact for students who have questions or issues with JupyterHub. Instructors and teaching assistants can contact itsstaff.JupyterHub.Support@bc.edu with questions or to report problems. The support team will respond to all inquiries during business hours (9-5) and will make every effort to respond to off-hours requests in a timely manner.
- Support requests should include as much detail as possible, including screenshots, error messages, etc.
- The JupyterHub service is available 24x7 and is monitored by ITS staff. Issues specific to Boston College will be addressed promptly. Outages related to issues within Google’s infrastructure will be reported to Google directly.
FAQ - About JupyterHub @ BC
Faculty at Boston College can request a “Hub” for one or more courses. Access to a given Hub is restricted to registered members of the course(s) the Hub has been requested for. The Faculty member who requested the Hub will have access to students’ environments for their Hub. Faculty members can request this access for course TAs as well. Students cannot access other student environments.
Starting with the Spring 2023 semester, departments will be billed directly for GCP consumption associated with student/faculty usage (per course).
Jupyter Notebooks on the hosted JupyterHub system provides a browser based notebook IDE, with a consistent environment for all users. As there are no local dependencies, complications arising from students using a variety of platforms are significantly reduced.
This depends on your specific requirements. Currently there is support for Python and R kernels. Many images include well-known data science and analytics packages like pandas and numpy for Python and the tidyverse for R by default. See selecting an image for more information on what comes preinstalled on the base images.
Extra extensions are available as well, such as a MariaDB kernel and RStudio Server.
GPUs are not provided by default. If you are interested in GPUs for your class, please contact itsstaff.JupyterHub.Support@bc.edu.
JupyterHub for Teaching instances will be maintained for at least 2 weeks after their associated course has completed. Announcements will be sent to instructors to warn them 2 weeks prior to deletion.
FAQ - Using JupyterHub @ BC
See JupyterHub FAQs for faculty and students (BC sign-in required for BC Wiki).
Please contact itsstaff.JupyterHub.Support@bc.edu to get access to the test environment.
Yes. A JupyterHub extension called nbgitpuller can be used to automatically distribute content to your class via Git. The extension can be configured so that each time a student authenticates to a new session, the latest version of a Git repository can be pulled without requiring the student to take any action. If you’re interested in this functionality, please indicate so in your request for a new Hub and provide the URL to the repository along with the branch name you wish to be cloned.Files can also be uploaded by users. It is recommended that these files be zipped. Students can then extract these files within their server.
No, files in JupyterHub are not backed up. Users should regularly commit their code to GitHub or save it to their BC Google Drive.
We cannot restore files that live in the JupyterHub File Browser. Users should regularly commit their code to GitHub or save it to their BC Google Drive.