What is the ThinkChicago Workbench?
The ThinkChicago Workbench is a cloud-based service with a set of general-purpose development and data analysis environments to help you to explore your ideas with the ThinkChicago data. All applications run as Docker containers on a system hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
What data is available?
The ThinkChicago workbench provides access to five datasets from the City of Chicago. These datasets are also available via the City of Chicago Data Portal.
Dataset | API | Size (CSV) | Description |
---|---|---|---|
2FM Tech Challenge | 534M | ||
REST API | 1.4G CSV; 2.9G JSON | ||
REST API | 2.4G CSV; 4.0G JSON | ||
REST API | 9.4G CSV; 19G JSON | ||
REST API | 8.0GB; CSV |
Each of these datasets is available in the /shared directory of any running application in Workbench.
Note that some of these files are large and you will not be able to read the entire file into memory. Please prepare accordingly. (See resource limits below)
What applications are available?
- Cloud9 development environments for popular languages including Python, Java, PHP, and Node.js
- Data analysis environments including Jupyter Notebooks and RStudio
- Database and data management software including MySQL, PostgresSQL, and MongoDB
Resource limits
Each account is limited to 4 cores, 8GB RAM memory, and 10GB storage. This means that you will not be able to read entire datasets into memory or start many different applications.
Getting getting data on/off Workbench
- Github: We strongly encourage you to use Github (or similar service) to store all of your source code and data.
- File Manager: The Workbench File Manager application can be used to upload/download data.
/home and /shared
Along with the /shared directory described above, your /home directory is available in every running application. Just look under /home/<userid>.
Where can I get help?
- Join the ThinkChicago Slack team https://thinkchicago.slack.com/ and post a message to the #workbench channel
- Send an email to ndslabs-support@nationaldataservice.org