User Interfaces
WorkPackage Report - B. Ragan-Kelley
1st reporting period
### User Interfaces for OpenDreamKit
**Goal:** Provide unified interfaces for OpenDreamKit VREs
Broad categories of work:
- Notebook interfaces
- Interactive documentation
- Applications of notebooks
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### Background: Jupyter Notebooks
### Why Jupyter?
- popular in research and education
- language agnostic
- fits well into OpenDreamKit architecture
- open source
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### Background: Jupyter Notebooks
Document with code, prose, maths, visualisation
<img src="../wp4-notebook.png", style="border: 1px solid #aaa;">
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### Background: Jupyter Notebooks
Web-based interactive computing environment
<img src="../jupyter-diagram.png", style="height: 400px;">
Language-agnostic protocol for computation
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### Background: JupyterHub
Extensible VRE built around Jupyter
<img src="../jupyterhub-diagram.png", style="height: 500px;">
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### Background: tmpnb
VRE for anonymous, ephemeral environments
<img src="../tmpnb-diagram.png", style="height: 400px;">
Also: mybinder.org, SageMathCloud, more
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## Notebook Interfaces
T4.1: Uniform notebook interface for all interactive components
- Jupyter kernels for ODK components **Delivered: D4.4**
- Unify SageMath/Jupyter notebooks for sustainability **Delivered: D4.5**
Now 87 Jupyter kernels, (49 when ODK started)
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### Highlight: ODK component integration
- Migration tools for SageMath → Jupyter notebooks
- Collaboration with Jupyter on interactive widgets
<img src="../interact-jupyter.png", style="margin-top: -20px; border-right: 1px solid #aaa;">
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### Highlight: ODK component integration
Jupyter kernels for GAP, PARI, SageMath, Singular (**D4.4**)
<img src="../pari-jupyter.png", style="border: 1px solid #aaa;">
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### Highlight: PARI
T4.12: Python/Cython bindings for PARI
- Challenging project to separate Python PARI interface from SageMath due to deep integration
- Closed 50 tickets on SageMath
Results:
- New package CyPari2 can be installed in a standard Python environment (**Delivered: D4.1**)
- New package `cysignals` used by CyPari2 and SageMath,
already adopted by other Python wrappers of C libraries as a good example
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## Notebook Interfaces
T4.2: Notebook improvements for collaboration
- High latency (diff & merge) **Delivered: D4.6**
- Real-time (GDocs-style, already in SageMathCloud)
T4.3: Reproducible notebooks
- Notebook validation for reproducibility **Delivered: D4.8**
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### Highlight: Notebook collaboration
New package: **nbdime**: comparing notebooks (**D4.6**)
<img src="../nbdiff-before.png", style="max-width: 90%; border: 1px solid #aaa;">
<img src="../nbdiff-web.png", class="fragment" style=" border: 1px solid #aaa; margin-top: -1000px;">
<div class="fragment",>
conda package manager: 6k installs in 3 months
</div>
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### Highlight: Reproducible notebooks
New package: **nbval**: validating notebooks (**D4.8**)
<img src="../nbval.png", style="border: 1px solid #aaa;">
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### Interactive Documentation
T4.4 Refactor SageMath's Sphinx documentation system
Significant progress towards sustainability of SageMath documentation
by refactoring to reduce the amount of custom software
Highlights:
- Already improved Cython support in Sphinx documentation system itself
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### Interactive Documentation
T4.6: Structured Documents
- Report on active documents state of the art **Delivered: D4.2**
- In-place computation of active documents **Delivered: D4.9**
T4.7: Active Documents Portal (MathHub)
- Collaborative, versioned editing **Delivered: D4.3**
- Active Documents with Notebooks
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### Highlight: Active Documents
MathHub.info portal for active mathematical documents
Versioned, collaborative editing via GitLab (**D4.3**)
<img src="../gitlab-edit.png", style="border: 1px solid #aaa;">
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### Highlight: Active Documents
in-place computation added to MathHub.info (**D4.9**)
<img src="../compman.png", style="height: 55vh;">
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## Applications
- Fluid dynamics notebook visualisation (T4.9)
- Micromagnetics:
- Notebook examples (T4.11, T4.13)
- VRE for micromagnetics non-notebook web application (T4.14)
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### Highlight: Micromagnetics
JOOMMF: Micromagnetic simulation in Jupyter
<img src="../joommf-screenshot.png", style="border: 1px solid #aaa;">
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## Upcoming work
- Interactive 3D visualisation in notebooks (T4.8)
- Workshop on live structured documents (T4.6)
- Micromagnetics applications
