Simon Willison’s Weblog

At Harvard we’ve built out an infrastructure to allow us to deploy JupyterHub to courses with authentication managed by Canvas. It has allowed us to easily deploy complex set-ups to students so they can do really cool stuff without having to spend hours walking them through setup. Instructors are writing their lectures as IPython notebooks, and distributing them to students, who then work through them in their JupyterHub environment. Our most ambitious so far has been setting up each student in the course with a p2.xlarge machine with cuda and TensorFlow so they could do deep learning work for their final projects. We supported 15 courses last year, and got deployment time for an implementation down to only 2-3 hours.

— Chris Rogers