What is FAS OnDemand?

FAS OnDemand gives Harvard students access to Jupyter Notebooks and RStudio, and can be launched directly from Canvas. It is hosted by Harvard’s FAS Research Computing group (FAS RC) and collaboratively supported by both FAS RC and FAS Academic Technology.

Why are we using FAS OnDemand for DataFest?

It can sometimes be challenging in large courses to get every student’s personal computer set-up with the necessary software. For this DataFest bootcamp, you will need an up to date R or Python environment with a suite of non-default packages/modules installed. FAS OnDemand provides you access to an environment that has been curated specifically for DataFest2021, so you can focus on learning skills, rather than debugging your software installation. In addition, you can access FAS OnDemand directly from within the DataFest2021 course on Canvas.

When using the FAS OnDemand environment, you will have access to resources that include:

  • 8 cores
  • 16Gb RAM
  • 20Gb storage
  • 10Tb scratch storage (shared between all users on the course)

Of course, if you prefer to use your own local R or Python environment on your personal computer that is perfectly fine, but we will not be able to provide assistance to you if you encounter problems setting that up correctly.

The FAS OnDemand DataFest2021 Jupyter Notebooks installation comes with a Python 3 jupyter kernel, common data science packages such as numpy, scipy, seaborn, pandas, bokeh, and matplotlib, as well as many specialized modules we’ll use during DataFest.

The FAS OnDemand DataFest2021 RStudio installation is available for R 4.0.3 and comes preinstalled with common packages such as devtools, learnr, and the complete tidyverse collection of R packages, as well as many specialized packages we’ll use during DataFest.

FAS OnDemand documentation

This Quick-Start Guide is designed to get you up and running in a few minutes. More extensive information about FAS OnDemand can be found in the main Documentation.