The Platform for Interactive Data Analysis in the Cloud
Description
SWAN is a turn-key platform to produce rich notebooks using a simple web interface. Users only have to pick their preferred browser and can immediately start to build their notebooks combining rich text, code, equations, plots, pictures, and videos. SWAN is based Jupyter Notebooks and uses CERNBox as home directory for its users. As a consequence, all files in CERNBox can be seamlessly used in a SWAN notebook while the notebook itself can be shared on the cloud.
Main Features
- Only a web browser needed: Users do not have to take care of any installation or configuration step. The full stack of functionalities provided by SWAN can be accessed via a common web browser.
- Storage based on CERNBox: All the files stored by users in CERNBox are immediately available in SWAN. Conversely, produced notebooks are stored in the cloud and inherit all the advanced sharing functionalities provided by CERNBox. As result, a SWAN user can produce a notebook, share it with her colleagues, and facilitate its dissemination, reuse, and further development.
- Include pictures, videos, and sound: SWAN notebooks allow the use of Markdown and HTML markup languages to produce formatted text enriched by hyperlinks, pictures, and videos.
- Support for multiple programming languages: SWAN comes out-of-the-box with kernels for Python, ROOT C++, and R. Additional kernels for other programming languages (e.g., Julia, Matlab, Wolfram, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, Go) can be installed on the back-end and made directly available to users.
- Storage and computations are offloaded to the cloud: Users do not need to reserve storage or computational power on their machine. Both types of resources are demanded to the cloud and users can take advantage of them via a simple web interface.
- Availability of scientific libraries: SWAN automatically retrieves software packages from CVMFS, a software distribution system used by the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. This constitutes an interface to potentially access widely-adopted scientific libraries being constantly maintained and updated.
The innovation action leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 732049 - Up2U 