Our workflow for this course

Author

Marie-Hélène Burle

We are providing a virtual training cluster for this course, but it only contains Polars for CPU (see the previous section about RAPIDS on the Alliance clusters). I will demo Polars cuDF on my machine.

Get the info

During the course, we will give you 4 pieces of information:

  • a link to a list of usernames,
  • the URL of a JupyterHub for this course,
  • the hostname for the temporary training cluster for this course,
  • the password to access that cluster.

You need to claim a username by adding your first name or a pseudo next to a free username on the list to claim it.

Your username is the name that was already on the list, NOT what you wrote next to it (which doesn’t matter at all and only serves at signalling that this username is now taken).

Your username will look like userxxx—xxx being 3 digits—with no space and no capital letter.

JupyterHub

Log in

Open the JupyterHub URL we gave you in your browser, then use the username you claimed and the password we gave you to log in.

Choose server options

In the Server Options page that opens, select what we tell you for various parts of the course. Please do not request more resources as this would prevent others to get access (remember that this virtual cluster runs on limited resources just for this course).

If you would like to make a change to the information you entered on the server option page after you have pressed start, log out (click on File in the top menu and select Log out at the very bottom), log back in, edit the server options, and press start again.

Start a Python notebook

To start a Jupyter notebook with the Python kernel, click on the button Python 3 in the Notebook section (top row of buttons).

The Jupyter interface

In a fashion Vi users will be familiar with, Jupyter notebooks come with two modes: edit mode in which you can type text as usual and command mode in which many keys are shortcuts to specific actions.

Here are some useful key bindings to navigate a Jupyter notebook:

Enter            enter edit mode
Esc              enter command mode

# in edit mode
Tab              code completion

# in command mode
up               navigate up
down             navigate up
Shift+up         select multiple cells up
Shift+down       select multiple cells down
a                insert a new blank cell above
b                insert a new blank cell below
c                copy the current or selected cells
x                cut the current or selected cells
v                paste the copied or cut cells
m                turn the cell into a markdown cell
y                turn the cell into a code cell
Shift+m          merge selected cells

# in either mode
Ctl+Enter        run the current cell
Shift+Enter      run the current cell and move to a new cell below

Log out

When you are done with a session in the JupyterHub, please log out. This will release the resources and make them available to use via SSH.

To log out, click on File in the top menu and select Log out at the very bottom.