Teaching with Datahub and PARASOL

This page is for instructors and TAs teaching a course on Datahub and PARASOL (formerly DSMLP). Most course tasks need only a browser; course-specific customization needs a shell.

Course Timeline¶

Requesting a Course¶

Request Datahub and PARASOL access for a course through the Specialized Instructional Computing Course Request form. Instructors, TAs, and departmental staff can submit it. Submission opens in the 2nd week of the previous term. For Summer and Fall classes, submission opens in the 2nd week of Spring.

The request is due 4 weeks before the start of instruction. Where the course needs a Technical Point of Contact (TPOC), name one in the request. See Technical Point of Contact. A late request gets lower priority and is reviewed as time permits. Setup time and the date your students get access depend on the complexity of the course and on the overall request load. After a late request, your students may not get access until as late as 4th week.

Course Setup and Instructor Access¶

Course setup and instructor access open 4-5 weeks before the start of instruction. You can request earlier setup. During this period, you and the other course staff test features, validate assignments, and make customizations. 1:1 Consultation for customization is limited in the final weeks of each term. See 1:1 Consultation.

Student Access¶

Student access follows TSS course rosters. TSS is the system formerly called TritonLink. Students Enrolled in a Course gives when rosters load and when add and drop changes take effect. Auditors and observers are not on the roster, and their access is managed through Canvas. Concurrent Enrollment students get access through Extended Studies staff.

Access After the Term¶

You and your students keep access for one additional quarter beyond the instructional term, ignoring Summer for Spring courses. See One Additional Quarter. The instructor can request that individual accounts stay active longer, for Incomplete grade resolution, academic integrity proceedings, course development or hand-off, or similar circumstances. See Extending Access for an Individual.

Course environments are purged one quarter after account deactivation, that is, two quarters after the course, excluding Summer. The purge skips two things: individual accounts extended on request, and instructor and course-wide files archived on request. Ask ITS to archive files, to revive a previously archived class environment, or to make an archive available for download. See Archiving on Request.

Independent Study and Research¶

Students in for-credit independent study, capstones, and similar projects request ongoing access through the Independent Study Request form. Direct those students to Projects & Independent Study. For non-credit research, Research IT connects faculty, staff, and student researchers with compute platforms.

Standard Features & Standard Software Images¶

Datahub offers a set of curated software environments that are sufficient for many courses and use cases. These environments, with the session resources, course file distribution, grading tools, and individual customization support that accompany them, are the standard features. IT Services gives priority support for questions, configuration help, malfunctions, and errors in the standard features. Support & Technical Consultation lists the routes.

Standard Software Images¶

You and your students can use the standard software images through web-based Jupyter notebooks and from the command line. Standard Images describes them. The rstudio-notebook image derives from datascience-notebook and is not GPU-enabled.

Session Resources¶

CPU, memory, and NVIDIA GPU allocations are flexible, beginning at 2 CPU cores and 4GB RAM dedicated to each student session. Upper limits depend on class size, demand, and capacity. See The Browser Session.

Course Files and Storage¶

Course-specific file and dataset distribution is available. Asking for a Dataset to Be Staged gives the size limits. Workspace and Personal Quotas gives the storage each student gets, and Workspaces & Storage covers course storage in general. Tell ITS when assignments generate significant output for each student.

Grading Tools¶

Grading covers the tools for distributing, collecting, and grading assignments, including roster integration with Canvas.

Individual Customizations¶

Minor customizations that individuals make within the standard software images get limited support. See Customizing an Environment.

Course-Specific Customization¶

The instructor can supplement the standard software images to meet the needs of a course: add language modules (for example, Python or R libraries), add system-level packages (compilers, utilities, and similar), or make more extensive modifications. Building & Publishing a Custom Image gives the procedure.

Highly complex use cases, such as clustered services like Spark or Postgres, or software not derived from the standard images, are in regular use on Datahub and PARASOL. They need substantially more time and expertise from the instructor or TPOC than ordinary customizations. See Complex Customizations & Experimental Features.

Technical Point of Contact¶

The instructor, a designated Technical Point of Contact (TPOC), or both must lead the installation, configuration, and student use of course-specific features. ITS technical staff support customization through 1:1 Consultation.

The instructor or TPOC needs basic familiarity with Unix commands such as ssh, mkdir, and chmod, and proficiency with the intended core platform (for example, Python or R) in a desktop Mac or PC setting. ITS gives guidance and basic training on the Datahub and PARASOL environment and on system-specific procedures.

Pinning an Image¶

You can ask ITS to pin a specific image for your course, so that an image update partway through a project does not move your students. See Pinning a Workspace.

Support & Technical Consultation¶

IT Services gives priority support for standard features and functionality through the Datahub & PARASOL Documentation, the IT Service Desk, and 1:1 Consultation. Send questions and feedback about Datahub and PARASOL to parasol@ucsd.edu.

IT Service Desk¶

Contact the IT Service Desk by phone, web, or email for the following.

Effort is prioritized by the number of courses and students affected and by the overall impact on instruction. Say in the ticket when an issue affects a whole class or falls on an exam. Students route functionality concerns through you. Take in-depth questions to 1:1 Consultation.

Response Targets gives the response targets, including the incident tier for instructors. You can escalate urgent problems that arise outside business hours through the Service Desk.

1:1 Consultation¶

Instructors, TAs, and TPOCs can book 1:1 Consultation appointments with ITS technical experts for real-time guidance or help with standard features, course-specific customizations, and complex or experimental features. Topics include:

• In-depth questions about the configuration or usage of standard and core features
• Discussion not well suited to ticket-based interaction
• Functional or technical issues outside the standard and core features
• First-time use of a custom container derived from a standard software image
• Customization options and the selection of additional packages and tools
• Functional or technical issues with course-specific features, such as build errors and version conflicts
• Questions and training on the customization process, such as the use of git, GitHub, tags, and Actions, or the installation of language and system packages
• Maintenance following updates to the standard software images

At Spring 2026 staffing levels, each course can request up to 6 hours of 1:1 Consultation per term. Availability is reduced in the final weeks of each term.

Complex Customizations & Experimental Features¶

The compute clusters underlying Datahub and PARASOL can host complex or novel customizations that fall outside the normal bounds of ITS support. A customization falls outside those bounds when, for example, installing or integrating it may exercise untested or seldom-used features of Kubernetes, Docker, or Linux, or when student use of it may need sophisticated technical expertise or extensive assistance.

Available capabilities considered complex or experimental include:

• Instructor or TA containers not derived from a standard software image
• Student-built customized containers, of any derivation
• Background batch processing and analysis pipelines
• MATLAB (Jupyter kernels or web UI), GNU Octave, or similar complex applications
• Spark clusters
• ArcGIS integration
• Postgres and other persistent services

Incorporating these or similar features into coursework takes significant time from the instructor or TPOC before and during instruction: first to become independently familiar with the underlying technologies, and then to serve as primary support for students' use of them.

ITS gives technical guidance for these features but, without advance agreement, is not responsible for implementation or usage. Schedule a 1:1 Consultation at least one full quarter before the planned use to discuss feasibility.

Visual Studio Code¶

Visual Studio Code is not among the complex or experimental features. It is supported and widely used. The supported configuration is Remote-SSH over a ProxyCommand. See Remote Editor Setup.

GPU Access for a Course¶

From Fall 2026, a reservation system manages GPU access. See GPU Access. Its web app is at reserve.dsmlp.ucsd.edu.

Quotas and Service Unit Budgets¶

A course holds a GPU quota, the number of GPUs of each class it may hold at once. Its students hold Service Unit (SU) budgets, which divide that capacity across the roster. The instructor can request, by ticket, a change to the course workspace's defaults, including its weekly budget, its booking horizon, and its length cap. See Quotas, Cohorts & Availability and Service Units & Budgets.

Deadlines and the Quarterly Survey¶

Quotas are date-aware, so a course's share can rise for the span of a project deadline and revert afterward. See Date-Based Quota Changes. The quarterly survey asks you about assignment scope, GPU sizes, and deadlines. Your responses allow a course's quota to rise in advance, for example for week 9. Report assignment deadlines in the survey. Workloads by GPU Class gives examples of course work at each GPU size.

Course Calendar¶

As a workspace manager, you see every reservation in the course on the reservation app's Group Reservations page. You can book on a student's behalf, cancel a student's booking, and waive penalties. See Managing a Group. In a course whose roster is loaded automatically, the instructor, TAs, and graders are all workspace managers.

Assisting a Student at the Service Unit Limit¶

Request a budget change by ticket to parasol@ucsd.edu. The change itself is an administrative action. Students normally book their own windows. The other route is to book on the student's behalf. Your booking goes through even when the student's budget is spent, though not past the group pool or the workspace length cap.

See Service Units & Budgets and Administrative Requests.

Waiving a Cancellation Charge¶

A student who misses a booked window is assessed a cancellation charge. You can waive the charge where warranted, on the Group Reservations page, when cancelling or afterwards. See Having a Charge Waived.

Manager Reports¶

Manager reports cover reservations by group, peak simultaneous use by class, reserved hours, and effective limits. See What the Reports Cover. Three of the four reports display cluster-wide data rather than data for your course alone.

Reservation Events¶

The reservation system reports on each student's GPU session with Kubernetes events. Datahub shows them while a session starts, and kubectl describe pod shows them from the command line. A student's question often quotes one. Reservation Events defines each one:

• While a session waits: WaitingForReservation, ReservationFull, ReservationTooSmall, OnDemandLeaseDenied, OnDemandLeaseRejected, OnDemandAdmissionPaused, UnknownGpuClass, NoReservation, NoGpuRequest, AnnotationIgnored, NoMatchingNode, WaitingForNode.
• When it is admitted: RuntimeGuaranteed, ReservationRelinked, OverstayRelinked, BestEffortAdmitted.
• When it is stopped: Preempted, ReservationCancelled, ReservationReassigned.

Advising Students¶

Two conditions account for most of the student questions that reach you. Launching a GPU session draws on the student's budget, even if no calendar is opened. See On-Demand Lease Charges. A GPU session that stops using its GPU is reclaimed. See What Counts as Idle. For students, Using Datahub in a Course covers both for browser users, and Working from the Command Line covers them for work that requires a terminal.

Maintenance and Policy¶

Under the University of California classification levels, highly sensitive P4 data, such as clinical records or export-controlled information, is prohibited on Datahub and PARASOL. Legally or contractually protected P3 data may be permitted after review. See Data Classification.

Datahub may be unavailable during scheduled maintenance for time-sensitive updates or security patches. Quarterly maintenance ends every running job. Scheduled Maintenance gives the schedule.

Policy gives the other conditions of use, covering shared compute resources, availability and reliability, and appropriate use. It also covers Self-Supporting Programs.

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