CoCalc News

You can now use compute servers very easily with CoCalc's course management system. This video shows how to create a compute server associated to an assignment in a CoCalc course, then make private copies of that compute server available to all students in the class. You can easily set idle timeout, spend limits and a shutdown time for all student compute servers. You can also very easily control some or all servers in a class or install custom software on all servers.

This new functionality is the result of extensive discussions with many teachers who are already using CoCalc in the courses, and want to expand their classes to gives students real experience involving AI, deep learning and more using state of the art GPU's.

https://youtu.be/ikktaiw14Tw?si=_a6HxTRgDeN2NrVg

There are now four new compute server automatic shutdown and health check strategies: idle timeout, shutdown time, spending limit, and generic health check. Each can give you better insight into how your compute servers are used and save you substantial money. This video describes each in detail:

https://youtu.be/Kx_47fs_xcI?si=99Ex4yNQ14IVzkmD

Join Us at JMM for an Exclusive Meet & Greet and Live Demo with William Stein!

We are thrilled to announce a special opportunity to meet William Stein, the CEO and Founder of CoCalc, at the JMM meeting in Seattle, WA.

Don't miss this chance to engage with William as he presents a live demo of CoCalc! With numerous publications under his belt, William previously served as a tenured professor at the University of Washington until 2019, at which point he committed full-time to growing the CoCalc Platform.

William has made significant contributions to the field of Computational Algebraic Number Theory and is the creator of the Computer Algebra System Sage.

Come find us at booth 507 in the Exhibit Hall during the Grand Opening Reception.

SageMath, Inc. is pleased to announce successfully passing the SOC 2 Type II audit!

Service Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2) is a framework that is governed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). With a SOC 2 audit, an independent service auditor reviewed our policies, procedures, and evidence to determine if the controls are designed and operating effectively. A SOC 2 report communicates our commitment to data security and protection of our customers information.

Request access to the report and view the current status of controls at https://trust.cocalc.com/

Come Visit CoCalc's Exhibition at INFORMS 2024

We wanted to send out this quick message to let everyone know that CoCalc will be hosting booth (#208) at INFORMS 2024 in Seattle, WA!

We will live demo our platform in the exhibit hall all week and present a Technology Showcase on Tuesday, Oct. 22nd, at 2:15 p.m. PT.

As a short aside, you might also be interested to know that accessing on-demand H100 GPUs starts at $1.98 per hour via our compute server functionality. (It is all metered per second.) Other more budget-friendly options are available as well.

We are excited to announce that CoCalc has launched a brand-new "How-To" tutorial series on our YouTube Channel! These tutorials are designed to help you get the most out of our platform by providing quick, two-minute videos that cover everything from navigating the CoCalc UI to auto-generating LaTeX/Markdown documents and Jupyter Notebooks.

Our goal is to make your experience with CoCalc as smooth and efficient as possible. To ensure you stay up-to-date with the latest tips and tricks, we highly encourage you to subscribe! That way, you'll never miss a new tutorial and can always access the latest content right as it's released.

Please let us know what you want to see next! For more in-depth information, don't forget to visit our detailed Documentation.

Also, if you have any questions or want to chat with us directly, don't hesitate to book a video chat with our team.

Our most recent update to the LaTeX editor allows you to see more information about a running build process. It also gives you the opportunity to stop it, if it takes too long or causes problems. The build frame now shows memory and CPU usage, as well as the tail of the log while the job is running.

Under the hood, this is accomplished by an improved /api/v2/exec endpoint. The parameter async_call returns an ID, which you can use to monitor and control the underlying process. See /api/v2/exec for more details.

SageMath 10.4 is now available in all CoCalc projects and via the SageMath compute server images.

• Release Tour Sage 10.4

• Examples from the tour

Older versions of Sage remain available. For Sage Worksheets and on the terminal, you can configure the version of sage in your project by running sage_select ... in a Terminal. Regarding Jupyter, you can switch to the newer kernel any time!

You can now use MermaidJS, which is a diagramming and charting tool that renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create diagrams dynamically, anywhere you use Markdown in CoCalc: text between code cells in Jupyter notebooks, whiteboards, slideshows, Markdown files, etc. Just put the mermaid diagram description in a fenced code block, like this:

```mermaid
block-beta
columns 1
  db(("DB"))
  blockArrowId6<["&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"]>(down)
  block:ID
    A
    B["A wide one in the middle"]
    C
  end
  space
  D
  ID --> D
  C --> D
  style B fill:#969,stroke:#333,stroke-width:4px
```

and it will get rendered like this:

Using Mermaid in exactly this way is also fully supported in JupyterLab and on GitHub. Moreover, if you publish documents on the CoCalc share server, Mermaid also gets rendered properly, e.g., see these examples:

• https://cocalc.com/wstein/dev/mermaid

CoCalc's Jupyter notebooks now have the latest version of IPyWidgets, and vastly improved support for custom widgets! We spent much of July doing a complete rewrite of the IPyWidgets implementation in CoCalc's Jupyter notebook to fully support the latest version of widgets, and also support using arbitrary custom widgets. This is done and now live, and is a major improvement. All widget layouts should now be exactly the same as upstream, and custom widgets work as long as they are hosted on the jsdelivr CDN. Before this, almost no custom widgets were supported (basically, only K3d), and now almost all custom widgets work, including ipyvolume, ipympl, newest k3d, bqplot, and much more.

Widgets in CoCalc work almost the same as the latest official upstream version. The main difference is that widgets support realtime collaboration and the full state of widgets is stored on the backend server. This means that if multiple people use a notebook at once (or you open the same notebook in multiple browsers), then state of widgets are sync'd. Also you don't have to re-evaluate code for widgets to appear if you refresh your browser.

• An open source library that came out of this project: https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc-widgets

• Upstream IPyWidgets, now all examples are supported: https://ipywidgets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

• CoCalc Widget docs: https://doc.cocalc.com/jupyter-enhancements.html#widgets-in-cocalc