Computer simulations offer tremendous opportunities for studying plasmas, both for research and education.  In order to use research codes, however, users must often navigate sophisticated codes and software libraries, determine how to best set up desired simulations, wrangle output into meaningful plots, and sometimes confront a significant cyberinfrastructure.  We have integrated plasma physics codes with Jupyter notebooks as a way to document research and to instruct students.  The Jupyter notebook is an excellent way to document science with its combination of text, simulation, and analysis, and we have built a repository of notebooks that reproduce results from classic research articles and that provide external users with the option to analyze results from current research.  In addition, we have configured a JupyterHub and written educational notebooks for students to run kinetic plasma software and analyze results inside a Web-based environment without needing to learn or manage the underlying software and computing cyberinfrastructure.  We envision that this work could be beneficial to many different communities of students and scientists and easily extendible to other research software.

Authors: B. J. Winjum¹, F. S. Tsung¹, H. Wen², K. Miller¹, S. Chase¹, R. Lee¹, Y. Zhao¹, W. An³, J. Vieira⁴, R. Fonseca⁴, W. B. Mori¹

¹University of California Los Angeles, ²University of Rochester, ³Beijing National University, ⁴Instituto Superior Tecnico