The 2i2c Hubs

2i2c Hubs are hosted interactive computing environments that run in the cloud and are powered by entirely open-source technology. They are designed to accelerate research, enhance education, and promote collaboration. They are flexible, customizable, powerful, open-source, and can run on a variety of cloud infrastructure.

Want a hub for your research or education community? We will soon be launching pilot projects to support people like you.

An environment for your community

2i2c Hubs provide data environments that have been designed for research and education, and can be customized for your community.

Provide a variety of open source interfaces

Use a variety of user interfaces, including Jupyter Notebook, Jupyter Lab, RStudio, VSCode. If it can be run in a browser, it can run on a 2i2c Hub.

Connect with your own online content

Provide notebooks, text files, and scripts for your hub’s community through links that point to online repositories.

Provide access to scalable computing

2i2c Hubs can provide tools for high-performance data analysis, along with cloud resources to scale your computation.

Streamline access to your community’s data

Use an online hub to provide access to large, complex, or otherwise inaccessible data in the cloud.

Built by the community, for the community

2i2c Hubs are entirely built on open-source infrastructure. No vendor lock-in, no proprietary tools. You have the right to replicate your infrastructure with or without 2i2c.

What is in a 2i2c Hub?

A 2i2c Hub is a collection of open source tools that provide interactive computing environments in the cloud. JupyterHub is the lynch-pin that ties everything together. It handles user accounts, provides the interactive environment, and connects users with computational and data resources.

Every 2i2c Hub is tailored for the community that uses it. 2i2c Hubs can run on almost any kind of cloud infrastructure (or even your own local hardware), provide a customizable environment for your needs, and they are built with 100% open source and community-driven software.

2i2c believes in each user’s Right to Replicate their infrastructure. This means being able to replicate your entire cloud deployment with or without 2i2c.

For more information about the 2i2c Hubs, see the 2i2c Hubs Pilot documentation.

Kinds of hubs

2i2c Hubs are extremely flexible and customizable, and can generally meet most use-cases in research and education. That said, the complexity of a hub will impact how much work it takes to both deploy and maintain.

2i2c broadly has two kinds of hubs that it offers for other communities.

Self-serve 2i2c hubs

These hubs provide a base environment with reasonable defaults, and are relatively easy to setup and configure for a straightforward use-case. They are ideal for use-cases where there are not very complex environment, computing, or data needs for a community. They are a great choice for getting familiar with using JupyterHub infrastructure in the cloud, as well as for doing working with a use-case that is very common, such as data science education. They are meant to serve a large collection of communities.

The 2i2c Hubs for All pilot is an example of these hubs in action.

Bespoke 2i2c hubs

These hubs are hand-tailored for your community. They start with a basic JupyterHub setup, and 2i2c will work with you to hand-craft the infrastructure, environment, etc to your needs. These are best-suited for larger or more diverse communities with more complex needs in their hub environment. For example, if you require access to authenticated data source in the cloud, scalable computing, or if you require your infrastructure to run on a particular vendor’s infrastructure.

If you’re interested in working with 2i2c to create a bespoke hub for your community, send us an email .

Research development hubs

These hubs are designed to drive new open source development in collaboration with a particular research or educational use-case. They tend to be more complex and tailored for a specific use-case, such as a research team with highly-specialized needs. In this case, 2i2c will act as a collaborator with you and your community to drive new development in interactive computing infrastructure in order to better suit your community’s needs, as well as those of the broader research and education communities. This often requires collaboratively writing grants or larger work plans.

If you’re interested in collaborating with 2i2c on a development-focused hub, send us an email .