Logging in

You need NCSA Kerberos credentials to log into the LSST Science Platform Notebook Aspect. Members of LSST receive an NCSA Kerberos account as part of your onboarding. If you haven’t onboarded into LSST yet, talk to your T/CAM or sponsor.

Step 1: Use the NCSA VPN with Cisco AnyConnect

As a development deployment, the Notebook Aspect is not yet directly accessible from the internet. For now, you’ll use NCSA’s VPN, through Cisco AnyConnect, to log into the Notebook Aspect.

Tip

If you are on an approved network, like NOAO, you can skip the VPN and log in directly.

To use the NCSA VPN, open vpn.ncsa.illinois.edu in your web browser. Select ncsa-vpn-default from the GROUP menu and enter your NCSA Kerberos username and password (if you’ve forgotten your password, visit https://identity.ncsa.illinois.edu/reset).

The page installs and starts the Cisco AnyConnect application for you.

Warning

In most browsers, the Java-based VPN installation will fail. Wait for the direct-download fallback to become available and install the AnyConnect client that way.

The certificate expiration of the macOS client download is a known issue.

Tip

In the future, you can open the AnyConnect application and enter vpn.ncsa.illinois.edu to get connected. There’s no need to go back to the vpn.ncsa.illinois.edu website.

Step 2: Log in

Open lsst-lspdev.ncsa.illinois.edu/nb in your web browser. Click the Sign in with CILogon button, then enter your NCSA Kerberos credentials on the NCSA CILogon page.

If you’ve forgotten your password, you can reset it at https://identity.ncsa.illinois.edu/reset.

Once authentication is complete, you’ll be redirected to the Notebook Aspect’s Spawner page.

Step 3: Select a machine image and size

The Spawner options page lets you select the machine image and size that you’ll work in.

Image

The machine images are based on LSST Science Pipelines Docker images, which are built on the CentOS 7 Linux operating system.

You can choose which version of the LSST Science Pipelines to run:

  • Daily releases (YYYY-MM-DD)
  • Weekly releases (YYYY-WW)
  • Supported releases

For scientific analyses, we recommend a supported or weekly release. If you are developing with the LSST Science Pipelines, opting for the latest daily release might make sense.

Only the most recent releases are shown by default. You can select older releases from the image tag drop-down menu.

Size

You can also choose your machine size from the Spawner options page. Try to use the smallest machine possible so that resources are available to other users.

For small-scale analyses, the Tiny and Small images will be just fine.

For running image processing tasks with the LSST Science Pipelines, choose the Medium or Large images to ensure that datasets fit in RAM.

Next, click Spawn and you’ll be launched into the Notebook Aspect.

Next steps