What?

LC's single instance of JupyterHub per center will be retired.  To replace this capability, a JupyterHub instance will hosted on each cluster.  We're introducing a new application for interacting with these JupyterHub instances called Orbit.  

Orbit is a federation of JupyterHubs across LC clusters.

Why?

The existing JupyterHub instance has limitations with regards to how it spawns notebooks over SSH. Additionally, it is dependent on our previous authentication stack using Crowd which is being retired at the beginning of May.

Orbit will support the same operating mode of launching a notebook locally on a login node and additionally enable launching in an allocation.

When?

The existing JupyterHub hosted at /jupyter will be shut down May 1st.

Orbit is currently available on the OCF and will be available on the SCF shortly. Currently, Orbit is only configured to launch in an allocation, but updates to support launching locally on a login node will roll out over the next week.

How?

There will be minimal user effort required to migrate.

Starting May 1st, requests to /jupyter will be redirected to /orbit. Since notebook configuration (e.g. custom kernels) exist in your home directory, there's no migration action.

When you access Orbit through the /orbit URL (now) or the /jupyter URL (after May 1st), you will see the Orbit application which allows you to select which cluster's JupyterHub to interact with.  Once you are in a JupyterHub instance, the experience will be very similar to today's.

Orbit documentation can be found here: https://lc.llnl.gov/confluence/x/Bw43Lg