James Munroe | 2i2c

Giving CCAD more control over data science infrastructure via a Catalyst Project hardware exchange

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2i2c has successfully completed a hardware exchange with Universidad Nacional de Córdoba’s Centro de Computación de Alto Desempeño (CCAD) through funding from the Catalyst Project. CCAD used funding to purchase new on-prem computing infrastructure, significantly expanding their computing capabilities.

This exchange reduces CCAD’s reliance on ongoing cloud funding while giving them direct control over their infrastructure. The new hardware will support a scalable JupyterHub deployment and provide valuable training opportunities for researchers who may work with local computing resources.

Learn more #

Acknowledgements #

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for their Catalyst Project award
CCAD for their collaboration on this hardware exchange

Open infrastructure for collaborative geoscience with Project Pythia: Learning how to deploy a BinderHub on Jetstream2

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Project Pythia and the “Jupyter notebook obsolescence” problem #

Project Pythia provides educational resources for essential software tools that enable open, reproducible and scalable geoscience, such as the Pangeo stack of packages (Xarray, Dask, Jupyter). Their Cookbooks are crowdsourced, community-curated, and open-source collections of Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how to use these tools for cloud-native, geoscientific workflows (see our Project Pythia Cookoff blog post). However, “Jupyter notebook obsolescence” is a common problem: tutorials that were created a few years ago may no longer work due to changes in the software ecosystem and hampers the reproducibility of scientific results. A reproducible execution environment and the infrastructure to support it are essential for the long-term sustainability of these educational resources.

Leveraging NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure for BinderHub #

A BinderHub allows users to dynamically create custom computing environments from Binder-ready repositories containing computational notebooks and configuration files that describe the software environment required to run them. A public Binder service exists at mybinder.org (see our blog post about joining the mybinder federation 🎉) and is a successful example of how open cloud infrastructure can accommodate reproducible execution environments.

The resources available on such a public service are limited therefore 2i2c, together with Project Pythia, have been exploring how to deploy a BinderHub backed by larger resources from the NSF-funded cloud computing platform Jetstream2. This allows for larger simultaneous user loads, such as at workshops, as well as access to more powerful distributed and parallelized workflows required to process large geoscientific datasets, under a persistent resource allocation.

Learning how to deploy on OpenStack #

Jetstream2 uses OpenStack in order to manage pools of compute, storage and networking resources, and for our purposes we specifically make use of OpenStack Magnum Cluster API driver to manage Kubernetes for our deployment.

Cluster API needs a CAPI management cluster in order to manage other Kubernetes clusters, called workload clusters. On Jetstream2, this management cluster is gracefully created and operated by the Jetstream2 team, which means that the only task to worry about is creating and configuring the workload cluster.

For the workload cluster we used the Openstack Terraform provider to define the cluster template, the cluster itself and the node groups in a reproducible way.

After the cluster infrastructure was successfully created on Jetstream2, thanks to the 2i2c hub infrastructure being cloud agnostic as well, deploying BinderHub to Jetstream2, was a seamless experience and it was no different than on other cloud providers that we already supported.

We also learnt about some limitations of the Openstack Magnum driver project, which were expected given it being a relatively recent project, slowly being adopted, but they were all reported upstream and hopefully will soon be fixed.

Acknowledgements #

Jetstream2: Explore ACCESS allocation and Julian Pistorius for technical support
Thanks to Project Pythia for funding and collaborating with us on this work.
Andrea Zonca for preliminary work on Kubernetes deployments on Jetstream 2

Enabling neuroscience in the cloud with HHMI Spyglass and MySQL on JupyterHub

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The HHMI Spyglass tutorial

Spyglass #

Spyglass is a framework for reproducible and shareable neuroscience research produced by Loren Frank’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco. Check out our blog post about the release of their preprint to read more about the methods.

This post focuses on the complex data storage needed for the project, which can be difficult to set up locally or at scale in the cloud. In particular, the analysis needed a MySQL database for reproducibility. This is a fairly common task across many fields. The aim of 2i2c is to enable researchers to focus on the essential complexity of what they were doing, i.e. the science, without managing the accidental complexity of how to do it – in this case, setting up databases.

We describe how you can do this too for your own JupyterHubs. Since 2i2c commits to running our infrastructure in line with open-source values as much as possible, you can also directly see the configuration for the hub referenced in the paper.

What is a “sidecar container”? #

The Kubernetes definition of a sidecar container is

Sidecar containers are the secondary containers that run along with the main application container within the same Pod. These containers are used to enhance or to extend the functionality of the primary app container by providing additional services, or functionality such as logging, monitoring, security, or data synchronization, without directly altering the primary application code.

In this case, the primary app container is the JupyterLab instance where people are interactively running code and doing science. We want to provide a MySQL database as a sidecar so that each user server gets their own independent MySQL server instance (that is not accessible to anyone else). We can then run code such as

%%bash
mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -u root --password=tutorial < path-to-sql-file-with-data

to load data into the database. Note the IP address 127.0.0.1 - the MySQL server is listening on localhost, even though it is not running in the same container! Thanks to the magic of Linux Network Namespaces, the sidecar and main app container can share 127.0.0.1. This allows you to write code that works in the exact same way on a user’s local computers as on the JupyterHub, making transitions and replication easier.

Setting up sidecars in JupyterHub on Kubernetes #

We’re leveraging multiple tools from the open-source ecosystem - JupyterHub, Kubernetes, Linux as well as MySQL itself.

Since this is a Kubernetes feature, we can pass through config to it. There are two layers here, which are

singleuser.extraContainers in z2jh configuration
KubeSpawner.extra_containers in KubeSpawner configuration

The hub configuration looks like

 singleuser:
 extraContainers:
 - name: mysql
 image: datajoint/mysql:8.0 # following the spyglass tutorial at https://lorenfranklab.github.io/spyglass/latest/notebooks/00_Setup/#existing-database
 ports:
 - name: mysql
 containerPort: 3306
 resources:
 limits:
 # Best effort only. No more than 1 CPU, and if mysql uses more than 4G, restart it
 memory: 4Gi
 cpu: 1.0
 requests:
 # If we don't set requests, k8s sets requests == limits!
 # So we set something tiny
 memory: 64Mi
 cpu: 0.01
 env:
 # Configured using the env vars documented in https://lorenfranklab.github.io/spyglass/latest/notebooks/00_Setup/#existing-database
 - name: MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD
 value: "tutorial"

By setting this up, we allow users to insert the code snippet above

%%bash
mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -u root --password=tutorial < path-to-sql-file-with-data

into their Jupyter Notebooks, which gives access to their MySQL database in the hub!

However, this configuration does not include permanently store the database itself between hub server sessions. Thanks to a pilot in a prior collaboration with University of Texas, Austin, we do have some documentation on how you can enable that as well!

Acknowledgements #

Howard Hughes Medical Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), grant number RF1MH130623
kubespawner
zero-to-jupyterhub-k8s and the JupyterHub community

Hacking the Project Pythia Cook-off with MyST Markdown

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Photo courtesy of Dr Debanjana Das

What is Project Pythia? #

Project Pythia is the education working group for Pangeo, a community platform for Big Data geoscience in which 2i2c operates a cloud hub. The core aim of Project Pythia is to spearhead the creation and curation of community-driven, open-source documentation, in the form of “cookbooks”, to enable the adoption of open, scalable and reproducible workflows for geoscientists.

What did 2i2c do? #

Jenny, James and Angus from the 2i2c team participated in the annual Project Pythia Cook-off 2024, a hackathon where cookbook authors and collaborators can spend dedicated time on creating and maintaining their content using Jupyter Book and deploying their cookbooks with GitHub actions.

2i2c teamed up with the infrastructure breakout group during the hackathon, led by Katelyn FitzGerald ( UCAR) and Kevin Tyle ( University at Albany), and members of the Curvenote team also joined the group.

Day 1 #

2i2c deployed and demonstrated a dedicated BinderHub service for Project Pythia that allowed hackathon participants to “self-serve” images of their software environment, which were specified by including a list of packages in an environment.yml file placed in their GitHub cookbook repository. Participants could then pull the image from a container registry into their 2i2c hub (or indeed, any other JupyterHub server) to share and reproduce their computational environments with ease.

Day 2 #

During the first half of the day, we quickly identified a number of issues that were proving to be a maintenance headache for the Project Pythia infrastructure group:

Configuration files for each cookbook were difficult to update at scale. Project Pythia currently have a gallery of over 30 cookbooks!
Changes to Sphinx-based themes inherited from upstream were prone to breaking custom Project Pythia branding downstream.
Executable content was not able to run on the Project Pythia’s dedicated BinderHub hosted on JetStream2 (operated by NSF).
Cookbooks frequently cross-referenced materials from other cookbooks to build upon pre-existing knowledge, but this was not easy to author and the reader experience was not as smooth as it could be.

Following the announcement that Jupyter Book 2.0 will use MyST last month, Rowan (Curvenote) and Angus (2i2c) delivered a compelling demonstration of the MyST ecosystem centered around modern web-first technologies (JavaScript/TypeScript) that offers improved interactivity and accessibility.

In the second half of the day, we decided to use the hackathon to explore migrating the Pythia cookbooks from using a Sphinx-based to a MyST-based document structure and engine. Within one afternoon, the group migrated four cookbooks to use MyST MD

This moment was palpably exciting! It was evident that MyST MD supported backwards compatible content out of the box, which alleviated fears of sunk cost into existing Sphinx-based cookbooks. The migration workflow was as simple as executing the following commands

conda install mystmd

myst.

Day 3 #

We spent this day tackling support for managing a gallery of Project Pythia cookbooks at scale. See the Executable Books blog post for technical details on how we

Centralized configuration
Prototyped a gallery plugin in Python
Fixed a number of bugs related to integrated computation with Binder and JupyterLite
Embraced the referencing and reuse of content with simple markdown syntax for hover-references.

Day 4 #

Looking to the future, we spent time reflecting on our experiences and discussing the potential, transformative impact MyST MD tooling could have in the hands of the scientific community at large, including the communities served by 2i2c. Knowledge-sharing based on static figures and PDFs would fall obsolete and give way to a dynamic, web-first approach to sharing interactive narratives backed by compute from a Jupyter server.

Throughout the course of the hackathon, the rate of iterated development for both end users of the community cookbook and the developers of the open-source tooling was astounding. For example, we were able to quickly expose small bugs ( e.g. support for HTML video tags) in the MyST MD tooling, which were immediately fixed upstream and released within minutes. The feedback loop that connected the user experience with the software tooling was incredibly synergistic, with immediate impact both upstream and downstream that 2i2c hopes to continue replicating across many facets of their operations.

Beyond the Project Pythia Cook-off, the breakout group will continue conversations around strengthening their community of practice and hopefully advocating for wider adoption of MyST MD amongst the scientific community (say hello to some of our group members at SciPy 2024 in July!).

Acknowledgements #

University at Albany (NSF award 2324302): Led the funding acquisition, helped organize and facilitate the event
UCAR (NSF award 2324303): Led the planning and logistics for the event
Project Pythia for organizing this workshop.
Jupyter Book for providing development and collaboration at this workshop.
2i2c / Code for Science and Society (NSF award 2324304): Provided tailored compute services and on-site support
Curvenote: Contributed engineering cycles to MyST MD development.

Technical Content Specialist

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2i2c manages, supports, and builds community-centric infrastructure for interactive computing in the cloud with partner communities in research and education.

We’re looking for a Technical Content Specialist that will create and curate documentation that supports interactive computing and cloud based open science. It intersects job titles such as “technical writer” and “content creator” while emphasizing previous experience working with open source science and related tools and a desire to share that knowledge.

❌❌❌
This posting is closed to new applications.
See the jobs page for our open positions.
❌❌❌

About the position

Salary: $75,000 - $85,000
Location: Fully remote
Deadline: We will begin reviewing applications around August 2, 2023, and will accept them on a rolling basis until the position is filled.

Major duties

Create documentation for cloud-based interactive computing.
Curate documentation and resources from open source and open science projects.

For more general information about 2i2c, see the links below:

Click here to Apply

If you’re interested in advancing your career at an impact-driven non-profit that is dedicated to open communities and public knowledge, then read on…

About you… #

Below are several skills that will make somebody well-suited for this role. You should apply even if you do not have all of these skills. We expect any new hires to learn and grow into this role over time. If you aren’t sure whether you have the right skills for this job, you should just apply! This is a fully remote role with a preference for working hours that overlap timezones with the existing team (currently distributed from UTC-7 through UTC+3).

Necessary qualities #

Demonstrated excellence in communicating complex technical information to learners with a different levels of background and experience
Demonstrated experience in using open-science tools (e.g. Python or R) in a scientific or scholarly domain
Willingness to continually learn and share emerging technologies and techniques in the interactive computing and open science ecosystems

Useful qualities #

Experience with open source workflows, research and educational contexts, and an understanding of the value that cloud-based infrastructure provides
Experience with the Jupyter ecosystem and other tools for interactive computing
Experience working with distributed service teams that use asynchronous methods of communication
Experience collaborating and coordinating work via online platforms and distributed revision control
Ability to communicate in Spanish, Portuguese, or French

What you’ll do… #

As a Technical Content Specialist, you’ll be responsible for…

Working as part of the 2i2c Partnerships Team towards Community Success
Creating documentation (tutorials, how-tos, explainers, and reference materials) that are shared across our communities using cloud-based interactive computing
Curating documentation resources from open source and open science projects
Developing training materials for communities such as
- Version control for collaborative cloud-based workflows
- Environment management for hub administrators
- Best practices for analysis-ready cloud optimized data
Assisting the 2i2c Engineering Team by editing technical documentation and documenting solutions from our support desk
Authoring content for 2i2c for use in marketing, blog posts, and website copy.

Our benefits and compensation #

We believe it is important for mission-driven non-profits to also provide competitive benefits and compensation packages. See our compensation philosophy page for more information about our compensation and benefits.

How to apply #

2i2c is committed to hiring processes that are inclusive of people with many lived experiences and qualities. We try to structure our hiring process so that it is predictable, doesn’t take too long, and doesn’t take too much effort.

If you’d like to apply for this position, please upload your resume and cover letter using this application form. We will begin reviewing applications after August 2, 2023 and will fill this position on a rolling basis once we find a candidate with the right fit for the job.

James Munroe

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

James is Senior Product Manager, Open Science Enablement for 2i2c. Coming from a background as an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography at Memorial University of Newfoundland, he is a strong advocate for enabling scientists and students to be efficient and effective in their computational workflows. Building on previous work in big data oceanography with links to the Pangeo project, COSIMA: Consortium for Ocean-Sea Ice Modelling in Australia, and CIOOS: Canadian Integrated Ocean Observing System, James wants to bring the strength of the Jupyter ecosystem to users across a broad range of educational and research domains.