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Draft

This documentation is in draft and under active review. Figures for the Fall 2026 GPU reservation system are not yet published, and some pages describe behaviour that has not been verified against a primary source. Check with us before relying on anything here.

Datahub in the Browser

datahub.ucsd.edu provides browser-based access to course environments. It requires a browser, UCSD campus credentials and Duo. No local installation or command-line experience is needed.

Signing In

  1. Open datahub.ucsd.edu.
  2. Sign in through UCSD single sign-on, with campus credentials.
  3. Approve the Duo prompt.

This is the standard campus sign-on, the same one used by other UCSD services — there is nothing Datahub-specific to enter. An account that cannot get past the campus sign-in page has a credential problem rather than a Datahub one, and the ITS Service Desk handles it.

The Active Directory username matters at a different prompt — ssh to the login node, where the full address is not accepted. → Connecting over SSH

Selecting a Course & Environment

Sign-in is followed by a list of the courses available to the account and, within a course, the environments configured for it.

Course. Each Datahub course appears separately and holds its own files. Students and instructors enrolled in more than one course select among them here. → Belonging to Several Workspaces

Environment. The options in this menu are set by the course instructor — commonly one CPU option, and a GPU option in courses that use them. Environments not present in the menu are added by the instructor. → What a Workspace Is

An environment takes one to two minutes to start, and longer while the cluster is busy. → The Status Page

The Browser Session

A browser session starts with 2 CPU cores and 4GB of RAM. This is the course spawn configuration, set per course. The defaults applied by the command-line launch scripts are a separate figure describing a different object; the two are not reconciled. → Working from the Command Line

A session provides JupyterLab: notebooks, a file browser, a text editor and a terminal. Files persist between sessions. Software installation within an environment, and the conditions under which an installation persists, are covered separately. → Customizing an Environment

One Datahub Session

A member may have one Datahub session running at a time. The limit is on Datahub itself, and it is a limit of one session — not of one environment, and not of one course. Working in a different course environment means stopping the running session first.

The limit does not extend to work launched from a shell. SSH sessions, VS Code containers and batch jobs run alongside a Datahub session, and alongside each other, in any number. Launching a container from dsmlp-login while a browser session is open is ordinary use, not a conflict.

The ceiling that does apply is an aggregate one. Total CPU, memory and GPU across everything a member has running must fit within the Kubernetes limits set on their namespace and, where GPUs are involved, within the reservation system's limits. A launch is refused when the total would exceed them, whatever mix of sessions makes up that total. → Running Several Jobs at Once

Stopping a Session

Signing out does not stop a session, and neither does closing the browser tab. The container continues to run, holding its CPU, its memory, and its GPU where one is attached.

To stop a session, use File → Hub Control Panel → Stop My Server. The interface may take a short time to reflect the change.

Where the browser session cannot be reached at all — a stale profile, a page that will not load — the manual-resetter under the services dropdown at datahub.ucsd.edu stops any running servers and resets the profile, leaving files untouched. → Sign-In & Session Problems

Status & Quota Pages

Page Location Contents
Disk usage datahub.ucsd.edu/hub/spawn → Services tab → disk-quota-service Storage in use against the account quota
Cluster status datahub.ucsd.edu/hub/status Cluster nodes, the GPU models on them, and free GPU counts

A full quota prevents a session from starting, and produces no error message.

→ Directories, Quotas & Cleaning Up · The Status Page

Sign-In Failures

Most failures to reach a session resolve to one of three conditions:

  • The course does not appear in the course list.
  • The disk quota is full.
  • A Datahub session is already running.

→ Sign-In & Session Problems

If you still have questions or need additional assistance, email us at datahub@ucsd.edu or submit a ticket to the ITS Service Desk.

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