JupyterPIC: Reproducible research and education through the integration of plasma simulation software with Juptyer notebooks

Computer simulations offer tremendous opportunities for studying plasmas, both for research and education. Nevertheless, users must navigate codes and software libraries, determine how to best set up the desired simulation, wrangle output into meaningful plots, and sometimes confront a significant cyberinfrastructure. We have begun using Jupyter notebooks integrated with particle-in-cell codes as a tool to document research and instruct students. The Jupyter notebook is an excellent way to document science with a combination of text, simulation, and analysis, and we envision building 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 plasma software.