Jupyterhub service description

Jupyterhub provides jupyter notebooks that are launched on cluster nodes of merlin and can be accessed through a web portal.

Accessing Jupyterhub and launching a session

The service is available inside of PSI (or through a VPN connection) at

https://merlin7-jupyter01.psi.ch:8000/hub/

  1. Login: You will be presented with a Login web page for authenticating with your PSI account.
  2. Spawn job: The Spawner Options page allows you to specify the properties (Slurm partition, running time,…) of the batch jobs that will be running your jupyter notebook. Once you click on the Spawn button, your job will be sent to the Slurm batch system. If the cluster is not currently overloaded and the resources you requested are available, your job will usually start within 30 seconds.

Running on the merlin7 cluster and using the interactive partition would in general guarantee fast access to resources. Keep in mind, that this partition has a limit of 12 hours.

Requesting additional resources

The Spawner Options page covers the most common options. These are used to create a submission script for the jupyterhub job and submit it to the slurm queue. Additional customization can be implemented using the ‘Optional user defined line to be added to the batch launcher script’ option. This line is added to the submission script at the end of other #SBATCH lines. Parameters can be passed to SLURM by starting the line with #SBATCH, like in Running Slurm Scripts. Some ideas:

Request additional memory

#SBATCH --mem=100G

Request multiple GPUs (gpu partition only)

#SBATCH --gpus=2

Log additional information

hostname; date; echo $USER

Output is found in ~/jupyterhub_batchspawner_<jobid>.log.

Contact

In case of problems or requests, please either submit a PSI Service Now incident containing “Merlin Jupyterhub” as part of the subject, or contact us by mail through merlin-admins@lists.psi.ch.