Case Study
Lightening the load for computational biology courses using Nuvolos
Key Benefits
- Easy and smooth onboarding and coordinating between students, TAs, and course teachers even on very large courses
- Saves enormous amounts of time on configuring, maintaining, and troubleshooting applications for student use, guaranteeing all start from the same baseline
- Wide array of supported tools for computational science in their latest, state-of-the-art configurations, enabling course teaching on virtually any quant topic
“I teach a large and complex course and Nuvolos made all the difference. It has saved me countless hours of work and the headache of managing computational hardware myself. I am already recommending the platform to all my colleagues!”
Summary
At the Department of Computational Biology of the Université de Lausanne, Prof. Nicolas Salamin is responsible for teaching programming to biology students. Large (100+ students) Python courses are not easy to organise, and coordinating with 15-odd teaching assistants is no less challenging. Fortunately, Nuvolos exists to save university teachers valuable time on the implementation and coordination of their courses. Nuvolos is an integral cloud-based platform built by computational researchers for researchers, designed to support the process of teaching and research every step of the way. Thanks to Nuvolos’ integrated SSO support, onboarding new students is easy. In Nuvolos, students can run the relevant applications – and a wide range of options is available – directly in the browser, guaranteeing they start from the same baseline regardless of their preferred device. Finally, sharing, distributing and organising course material is a matter of a few clicks. Prof. Salamin has saved loads of time on configuration, coordination and problem-solving thanks to Nuvolos, allowing him to spend more time getting his students to grasp the basics of Python.
Case Study
Nuvolos provides a complete computational science platform at Sciences Po
Key Benefits
- Massive time savings on system setup administration
- Guarantees scalability on demand
- Painless experience integrating needs of education and research
“The most impressive feature is the support you provide. It is fantastic to have a solution to every problem, as I never managed despite repeated attempts to make you guys fail in solving my issues.”
Summary
The Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Economiques (OFCE) at Sciences Po, one of France’s leading institutions in economic research, forecasting, and evaluation of public policy, uses Nuvolos as its complete computational science platform. Principal Director Xavier Timbeau and his team save countless hours on administrative overhead, and enable easy collaboration and research in a smooth, scalable, and reliable way, by integrating Nuvolos into everything from education to model building. As he expresses it: “Nuvolos will help you unleash the power of modern computing with a reasonable cost. This past year, I would estimate that Nuvolos saved me 50 to 100 hours on system administration. Given my high hourly rate, that saves a fortune!”
Case Study
Nuvolos provides an integrated solution for education and research at the GFRI
Key Benefits
- The integrated platform solution replaces a multitude of tools
- Saves months of work on preparation and overhead
- Makes structuring education and collaboration easy, including remote
“Fast running of your programs and data access from home or everywhere in the world, what else?”
Summary
At the Geneva Finance Research Institute (GFRI), Europe’s second highest ranked academic institution for financial research, Director Prof. Olivier Scaillet and his colleagues needed to replace a plethora of separate tools and save valuable time on the overhead of computation. By using Nuvolos as an integral cloud-native platform for all aspects of the daily work of computational science, everything from coursework teaching to preparing the architecture for financial research has become easy, smooth, and reliable.
Case Study
A climate tech startup realized gains in time and convenience switching from hosted notebooks to Nuvolos
Key Benefits
- Replaced cloud hosted notebooks due to easier onboarding, better support, and more convenient data sharing
- Saves the team time and effort on distributing and enriching large quantities of public server data
- Fast and easy pipeline application setup means minimal overhead on configuration, updating, and maintenance
Summary
At Austrian eco-startup Tree.ly, forest owners are provided with the technological resources to monetize the CO2 capture represented by their tree cover by automating the processes of calculation and certification of carbon capture. When hosted notebooks proved too unwieldy and lacking in support, they turned to Nuvolos, the integrated cloud-based platform for data science applications. For a team such as that of Tree.ly, Nuvolos proves its value by allowing any member to simply log in, run their data pipeline, share results, and scale as needed without unnecessary overhead or interventions. This saves enormous amounts of time on team onboarding and acquiring local copies of data from often very slow public servers. Moreover, it’s easy to set up data pipelines such as those used by Tree.ly since applications can be run directly in the browser using Nuvolos state-of-the-art cloud technology, obviating the need for application maintenance and updating. For Tree.ly, all this time saved with Nuvolos can be dedicated to providing their customers with the right incentives to save the planet.
Case Study
Achieving significant savings in time and effort with Nuvolos on a Swiss macroeconomics research project
Key Benefits
- Fast and easy use of large datasets across multiple computers without worry about time spent on administration or overhead
- Simple onboarding of new research team members through distribution of data, code, and applications in just a few clicks
- Fast and knowledgeable support gives time back to the researchers to focus on their scientific work
“I can recommend Nuvolos to everybody who’s using more data than you store on one single computer. You can work with a big data set, and then you just need your laptop and you’re fine!”
Summary
At the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, a research team led by Prof. Matthias Fengler, Prof. Winfried Koeniger, and other colleagues studies consumption patterns in the Swiss economy. By using Nuvolos, the integrated cloud-based solution for computational research, the researchers have been able to save significant time and effort on the overhead of their scientific work. Using large datasets across multiple computers is easy and lightning fast, while onboarding new students and collaborators is a matter of a few mouse clicks thanks to Nuvolos’ inbuilt support for easy sharing of data, code, and applications. The Nuvolos platform relieves PhD students of the burden of playing IT admin during their research time, and the technical know-how and speed of the Nuvolos support team guarantees configuration problems are never a problem for long. As Professors Fengler and Koeniger put it, reflecting the experience of their PhD students: “I can recommend Nuvolos to everybody who’s using more data than you store on one single computer. You can work with a big data set, and then you just need your laptop and you’re fine!”
Case Study
MATLAB made easy for PhD students using Nuvolos
Key Benefits
- Saving graduate students time and effort on computational software setup and configuration
- Built-in version control support guarantees ease of use for coursework involving both code and data
- Plug and play application deployment in the browser means students can work from anywhere and follow the curriculum at any time without worrying about differences in working environments
“[I recommend it to anyone] who does their teaching using code… for students, you just start it and it works!”
Summary
Using Nuvolos, graduate students at the University of St. Gallen were able to achieve substantial savings in time and effort on their advanced macroeconomics course. Simply running the application from the browser inside the cloud-based platform meant doing their MATLAB exercises was virtually a plug-and-play process and independent of the compute power of their equipment. Version control, course material distribution, scalability, and remote access are all guaranteed, making Nuvolos the ideal one-size-fits all solution for coursework involving both code and data. Less time wasted on setup, coordination, and troubleshooting means more time for students to do their exercises and learn. Peter Kress, a PhD student who experienced Nuvolos first hand on the course, recommends it to anyone “who does their teaching using code… for students, you just start it and it works!”
Case Study
Improved workflow agility using Nuvolos at an influential economic research institution
Key Benefits
- Scientists can access their favourite applications from anywhere on any device, encouraging faster and more efficient experimentation with new ideas
- As an integrated end-to-end platform, Nuvolos saves time and effort on education just like it does for research
- The institute saves on the fixed costs in time, money, and effort associated with university IT administration as well as researcher-specific software configuration
Summary
At a major economic investigative institution, that we cannot identify specifically due to its political prominence, researchers needed a solution that would make their working process more flexible and agile. By using Nuvolos, the integrated cloud platform for computational and data science, they were able to improve their workflow efficiency and operational independence of researchers. In fact, Nuvolos also made the process of setting up and running summer schools and graduate research classes easier, something not even expected by the institution’s management when they decided to adopt the platform! Thanks to Nuvolos’ in-built support for running applications in their latest configuration directly in the browser, the institution’s employees also save substantial time and frustration on maintaining the right setup on the right machine. They can even work from a phone or tablet without any concerns about their working environment. Already the responsible project managers at this institution are recommending Nuvolos to their colleagues faced with similar challenges.
Case Study
Teaching students engineering using CalculiX in Visual Studio Code
Key Benefits
- Saves repeat effort on installation and overhead
- Students can use a familiar development environment
- Guaranteed identical work context for students and scalability for course teacher
Summary
Prof. Martin Kraska needed a cloud-based platform that could enable students to do engineering projects with CalculiX and Dakota in an identical development environment. By using Nuvolos, he did not need to worry about installation overhead or scalability, and the students were guaranteed the same familiar working context. After experiencing Nuvolos, Prof. Kraska recommends it “to all those who want to try out working with CalculiX and Dakota without facing the overhead of installation.”