CEDE Expands Interactive Learning with GNoto Service
© 2026 EPFL
The Center for Digital Education (CEDE) continues to strengthen its digital education ecosystem with GNoto, an enhanced version of its centralised JupyterLab platform designed to support interactive teaching and learning.
Built on the foundation of EPFL’s “noto” service, GNoto provides students and instructors with seamless, browser-based access to Jupyter notebooks—without the need for any local installation or configuration. This one-click approach enables users to immediately create, run, and modify notebooks in a secure and fully managed environment, lowering technical barriers and accelerating adoption in the classroom.
Jupyter notebooks, widely used in science and engineering education, combine code, text, equations, and visualizations into a single interactive document. At EPFL, they play a key role in fostering computational thinking across disciplines, from data science to physics and beyond.
GNoto builds on this pedagogical foundation by extending capabilities to more demanding computational workloads. Through a collaboration with the Research Computing Platform (RCP), the service now integrates GPU resources, enabling more advanced applications such as machine learning and data-intensive simulations.
Like noto, GNoto is designed with scalability and accessibility in mind. The platform relies on a centralized JupyterHub architecture connected to multiple back-end environments, allowing it to support large cohorts of users simultaneously. It is accessible not only to the EPFL community but also to users across Swiss universities via the SWITCH academic network.
Beyond its technical infrastructure, GNoto supports a wide range of teaching scenarios, including interactive textbooks, assignments, virtual labs, and classroom demonstrations. By providing a standardized and ready-to-use environment, it simplifies course deployment and ensures consistency across student experiences.
With GNoto, EPFL reinforces its commitment to innovative, data-driven education—empowering instructors to design richer learning experiences while giving students immediate access to powerful computational tools.
On the evolution of GNoto:
GNoto has grown quite organically over a relatively short period of time. The first version was released in February 2025, initially supporting two classes and around 400 students. At that stage, we were relying on an infrastructure very similar to noto, with a centralized JupyterHub architecture connected to multiple back-end environments.
A major milestone came in February 2026, when we migrated to a new infrastructure based on Kubernetes. This transition significantly improved our ability to scale and manage resources more efficiently. During the Spring semester 2026, GNoto was already being used by six classes, reaching more than 600 students.
We also had the opportunity to test the platform in a more intensive, real-world context during the Lemanic Life Science Hackathon 2026, where 130 participants relied on GNoto. It was a great validation of the platform’s robustness and flexibility, and it confirmed that we are on the right track to support both teaching and larger collaborative events.
More info and support here: https://www.epfl.ch/education/educational-initiatives/cede/teaching-interactively/jupyter-notebooks-for-education/one-click-access-to-jupyter-notebooks-online-with-noto/