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Use Case | 27.1.2025

Course environments for educational use

A university organizes a course related to machine learning. For the exercises, the teacher wants to create a ready-made course environment for working with data. The environment needs to be identical for each student.

Such a course environment could be set up in different ways using CSC services:

1

Create a CSC user account

Start by creating a CSC user account in My CSC, unless you already have one.

How to create a new CSC user account Link to My CSC
2

Option 1: Noppe

With Noppe a teacher can set up easy-to-use environments based on applications such as Jupyter Notebooks or RStudio for their course. Course participants can easily login to the ready-made environment without a need to install any tools themselves, leaving more time to focus on the course content. Noppe can be accessed with Haka credentials, so the students do not need CSC accounts themselves.

Read more about Noppe Noppe user guide
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Option 2: CSC supercomputers

If a course needs considerable computing resources, hosting it on Puhti or Mahti is also possible. The Puhti and Mahti web interfaces are particularly useful, as they provide easy browser-based access to the computing environment. Besides command-line use, it is possible to create Jupyter environments tailored for courses and run other applications that require a graphical user interface. Using CSC supercomputers for courses requires a CSC course project. Each student also needs to create their own personal CSC user account, which the teacher can then add to the project.

Read more about Puhti Read more about Mahti How to create a course project How to create a Jupyter course environment
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Option 3: CSC cloud services

Using cPouta or Rahti cloud services for courses provides some flexibility over Noppe and CSC supercomputers. In cPouta, a teacher can create virtual machines for the students and deploy customized computing environments for their course needs. Although this avoids certain limitations set by, for example, the queuing system on CSC supercomputers, setting up and managing a cloud environment requires some experience.

Read more about cPouta Read more about Rahti CSC cloud service user guides