Integrating Jupyter into Research Computing Ecosystems: Challenges and Successes in Architecting JupyterHub for Collaborative Research Computing Ecosystems

Beginning with the initial release of the DesignSafe JupyterHub in late 2015, TACC has been building and maintaining custom JupyterHub clusters for research groups across different domains of science and engineering. Today, TACC maintains five production JupyterHub systems utilizing over half a terabyte of memory and hundreds of CPU cores supporting nearly 1,600 unique users combined. In this paper, we describe our approach to utilizing JupyterHub in these cyberinfrastructure projects and our collaborative approach to integrating Jupyter into different research communities. For two such groups, we present an in-depth discussion of the science use cases and technical drivers that informed and evolved the design of our offering, and our outreach and engagement efforts to promote adoption. We discuss the implementation of custom features we have added to better integrate JupyterHub into other components of the cyberinfrastructure platforms, and we conclude with a description of our plans for future architecture and usage of JupyterHub at TACC.