Cloud Setup

Launch Environments

Various cloud-based Jupyter server environments have been configured to work with QuantEcon Data Science.

These environments provide a Jupyter interface which displays in your browser, but the code is hosted and run on the cloud.

This allows you to interact with this lecture material without requiring you to install Python or any other required software on your own computer.

The Launch Notebook button opens a new tab in your browser where a Jupyter notebook version of the current lecture page will be opened with the selected cloud service.

The settings icon allows you to change your cloud environment from the default. To use click the over the settings icon on the bottom right of the page (see image).

Making a selection will open a new tab in your browser where a Jupyter notebook version of the current lecture page will be opened with the selected cloud service.

We discuss each of the options below.

Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences: syzygy

This cloud service is provided by the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) at UBC.

A major benefit of this environment is that we have worked with PIMS to install all of the software that shows up in our lectures.

Additionally, they are serving an unaltered version of Jupyter so it will be easy to find help online, and it will feel very similar to a local installation if you have one configured.

Finally, it is the only service that has persistent storage. Note: PIMS is providing the hub “as is”, and may be turned off at any time, so backup your notebooks. Storage used by accounts with more than 30 days of inactivity may be recycled.

This is the service that we typically recommend.

Launching on pims.syzygy.ca

As pims.syzygy.ca is the default hub, you will not need to change your configuration. However, if you chose a different hub, select the settings icon on the launchbar to select the PIMS hub.

1. Click the Launch Notebook button.

2. After you have done this, you will be brought to a screen that looks like the following

Once you reach this page, you should click the red home button and sign in with your Google account.

The server will create an account for you associated with that Google account and you will have access to all files that you have worked on anytime you log in with that Google account.

3. After you sign in with your Google account, then you will see something similar to the following picture

File Management on syzygy

By default, syzygy will open the notebook that you clicked “Launch” from, but it downloads the other notebooks as well.

You can navigate to these other notebooks in the left bar (the JupyterLab file explorer).

You can also create new notebooks and text files.

We recommend spending some time playing with the environment and working through some of the Help menu at the top.

If you have made changes to one of the notebooks and decide that you want to reset them (and put the notebook back to the original state), then follow these steps:

• Delete the notebook and close the browser tab with syzygy instance.
• Click Launch Notebook again from the website.

Once you’ve done this, syzygy will restore the notebook back to what the original lecture material.

As a reminder, while the PIMS syzygy will maintain persistent files between sessions, you should backup your files as the service is provided “as is”, and inactive accounts may have their storage recycled.

Google Colab

Google Colab is a cloud service hosted by Google.

With this environment, you can potentially use GPUs and other specialized computational platforms.

This won’t make a difference at first, but having access to a GPU or TPU could improve performance.

We recommend starting with the other cloud options because the environment provided isn’t quite the same as what you would get on your computer because Google has made their own modifications to underlying Jupyter software.

Launching Colab

To launch course material through Google Colab:

1. Choose the settings icon on the launch bar to change the backend hub

You will need to select choose google colab from the public options.

2. Click on the Launch Notebook button.

3. You will be asked to sign in with your Google account and you will see something similar to the following picture.

4. Once you have launched a Colab notebook, you will need to make sure that any software missing from Colab gets installed — this step isn’t required for all notebooks.

For lectures where this step is required, we have provided a script that automatically configures missing software.

To run this script, you will need to uncomment the code at the top of the notebook and execute the cell — when we say “uncomment”, all we mean is to remove the # that precedes the ! in the code that follows.

See the code below to see what we mean:

# Uncomment following line to install on colab
#! pip install qeds

5. To navigate sections within a Colab notebook, click on the little arrow at the top left corner of the page,

Then, “table of contents” will pop up. You can click on sections or subsections for different parts of the notebook.

File Management on Colab

By default, Colab will erase any work that you have done after you have exited a notebook.

If you would like to store your work, you can save it onto your Google Drive by clicking the Copy to Drive button.

You can create a new notebook by clicking File on the menubar and selecting New Python 3 notebook.