Play

Neurodesk Play provides access to our neuroimaging analysis environment directly through your web browser. This service allows you to:

• Start using Neurodesk without any local installation.
• Access a wide range of pre-installed neuroimaging tools.
• Try out the platform before setting up a local installation.
• Collaborate with colleagues using a consistent environment.

Note

Neurodesk Play is free but comes with resource limits. For more intensive workloads, consider installing Neurodesk locally or using one of our other hosting options.

Launch Neurodesk Play

The tool below automatically detects the fastest server for your location. Click the Recommended card to start.

🇺🇸 US

Login: GitHub

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Waiting…🇪🇺 Europe

Login: GitHub

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Waiting…🇦🇺 Australia

Login: AAF

— ms

Waiting…

Re-test latency

First-time access requires approval

The US and Europe Play servers use your GitHub account to sign in. On your first login attempt, you will automatically be shown a registration form if your account has not yet been authorized. Submit the form; the average authorization time is 24 hours. Once approved, return and sign in with the same GitHub account.

Usage acknowledgments

When using these services for research, please include the appropriate acknowledgment:

🇺🇸 US (Jetstream2 / NSF)

“This research was supported by Jetstream2 (NSF award #2005506), which is supported by the National Science Foundation. Jetstream2 is a cloud computing resource managed by the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute and part of the ACCESS project.”

🇪🇺 Europe (EGI / CESNET-MCC)

“Enabled through services and resources provided by the EGI Federation with the dedicated support of CESNET-MCC. Computational resources were provided by the e-INFRA CZ project (ID:90254), supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic.”

🇦🇺 Australia (ARDC / Nectar)

“This research was supported by use of the Nectar Research Cloud, a collaborative Australian research platform supported by the NCRIS-funded Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).”

Data transfer

We provide several methods to transfer your files in and out of Neurodesk Play, including drag-and-drop and cloud storage integration. View Data Transfer Documentation →

Shared directories for courses and workshops

Neurodesk Play can provide shared directories for educational use. These directories are mounted inside Play sessions under /data/groups/<group-name> or /data/teaching/<educator-github-username> and can be configured for different teaching and project needs.

• Educator-managed course material: educators can write to a directory under /data/teaching/<educator-github-username>, while all other users have read-only access.
• Project groups: a defined group of users can share a directory where every group member has read+write access under /data/groups/<group-name>.
• Teaching teams: multiple educators can have write access to a shared directory under /data/groups/<group-name>, while everyone else has read-only access.

This is useful for distributing workshop datasets, notebooks, examples, or course material without asking every participant to copy files into their own home directory. It also makes it very easy to provide the solutions of a previous session to all users so learners can catch up to the rest of the class.

If you need such a setup, please reach out to mail.neurodesk@gmail.com with information on when your course runs and how much storage you need.

SSH connection

It is possible to connect to Play instances using SSH, including from VS Code Remote SSH. Neurodesk Play uses jupyter-sshd-proxy to proxy SSH over the authenticated JupyterHub connection.

1. Install websocat on your local computer.

   The SSH client connects through a WebSocket proxy, so websocat must be available on the computer where you run ssh.

   On macOS:

   brew install websocat

   For Linux and Windows, install websocat from your package manager or download a binary from the websocat releases.

2. Start your Neurodesk Play session.

   Launch one of the Play servers above and wait until JupyterLab has started. Keep this browser session running while you use SSH.

   You will need three values:

   • Play domain: for example play-america.neurodesk.org, play-europe.neurodesk.org, or play.neurodesk.cloud.edu.au.
   • JupyterHub username: copy this from the browser URL. In a URL like https://play-america.neurodesk.org/user/myname/lab, the username is myname. If the URL contains encoded characters such as %40, use the URL value exactly as shown.

3. Create a JupyterHub token.

   In JupyterLab, open File → Hub Control Panel, then select Token and create a new token.

   Treat this token like a password to your Play instance. Set an expiry date for best practice and note the expiry date in your calendar.

4. Add your SSH public key inside Play.

   Open a terminal in JupyterLab and add the public key that matches the private key on your local computer. If your public keys are available from GitHub, you can use:

   mkdir -p ~/.ssh
   wget https://github.com/<YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME>.keys -O ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
   chmod 700 ~/.ssh
   chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

   Replace <YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME> with your GitHub username.

5. Configure SSH on your local computer.

   Add an entry like this to ~/.ssh/config on your local computer:

   Host neurodesk-play
       HostName <PLAY-DOMAIN>
       User jovyan
       IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
       IdentitiesOnly yes
       ProxyCommand websocat --binary -H="Authorization: token <JUPYTERHUB-TOKEN>" asyncstdio: wss://%h/user/<JUPYTERHUB-USERNAME>/sshd/

   Replace:

   • <PLAY-DOMAIN> with the server you are using, for example play-america.neurodesk.org.
   • <JUPYTERHUB-TOKEN> with the token you created.
   • <JUPYTERHUB-USERNAME> with the username from your JupyterHub URL.
   • ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 with the private key that matches the public key you added to authorized_keys.

6. Connect.

   From your local terminal:

   ssh neurodesk-play

   You can use the same SSH host in VS Code Remote SSH by connecting to neurodesk-play.

   You can also copy files with scp or sftp, for example:

   scp local-file.txt neurodesk-play:~/
   sftp neurodesk-play