To better support user-maintained Python environments and unify the user experience across terminal and JupyterHub sessions, CISL now provides Python support via the conda package manager. Cheyenne and Casper users – either new to conda or more experienced – can take advantage of our new conda module, which can be used to activate environments without any shell initialization. The module also provides access to our NCAR Python Library (NPL) environments, which will be deployed using conda from this point forward (replacing the now-deprecated python modules).

Both the conda installation itself and the NPL will be updated at the start of every month. The default NPL version is also available as a kernel within JupyterHub. The kernel provides access to a Python 3.7 environment with a wide array of commonly used packages pre-installed.

For more details on using both the conda module and the NPL, see Using conda environments for Python access on the Advanced Research Computing portal.