Hi everyone!
My name is Aidan, and I’m an undergraduate student at MIT. This summer, I’m working at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics, and we’re looking for a way to make one of the exoplanet modeling softwares we use, called Allesfitter, available as a high school classroom tool.
In my search for a suitable web service, I came across JupyterHub (and specifically TLJH) and thought that it suited this project really well. I really don’t know too much about cloud computing, so please excuse me if I make poor use of terminology, but I just have a couple of very quick questions that I wanted to ask!
I’ll first just briefly describe what we’re hoping to do. Allesfitter is a python script, and we also have it as a Jupyter Notebook (to make it more accessible to set up the exoplanet parameters with the GUI). We’re hoping to basically have the Notebook based in a cloud that 20 or so students would be able to access and use from their own laptops on a web browser without having to install Anaconda (or anything else). There would be some sort of login, and the students would each run their own Allesfitter Notebooks (not one shared Notebook they all edit) so that they could individually use Allesfitter with their own data/exoplanet parameters.
To achieve this vision, obviously a cloud service is required, so my first question is: does Project Jupyter offer its own cloud services, or would I have to use something like AWS or Google Cloud? My second question is just to confirm that TLJH could in fact provide the sort of experience we’re hoping for, where there is basically one Jupyter Notebook (Allesfitter) of which each student would access a copy (so that they’re not editing each other’s Notebooks) through a web browser. My third question is just about where the results from running the software could be stored. Would it be possible for the results graphs that Allesfitter produces to be stored on the students’ computers’ hard drives, or would they have to be stored in the cloud (meaning they would lose access to them when we turn off the Jupyter Hub)?
This ended up being longer than I intended, so I really do appreciate any sort of response!
Sincerely,
Aidan