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Interactive Data Analytics Service Documentation

Interactive Data Analytics Service Documentation

Owned by Kang Lee
Last updated: Jun 19, 2025 by Giang Rudderham

This documentation covers the campus shared Interactive Data Analytics Service (IDAS), provided by ITS-RS (Information Technology Services - Research Services). IDAS supports large-scale and collaborative data analytics using interactive tools such as RStudio, JupyterLab, and VS Code. The programming languages that are currently available on IDAS are Python, R, and Julia. Users will benefit from high-performance computing resources while performing their interactive data analytic tasks.

Get started today!

Request an IDAS account for research use

Request to use IDAS for teaching a course

Request to use IDAS for teaching a workshop

Read IDAS documentation on the UIowa Wiki 

Stay up-to-date with IDAS maintenance and alerts

IDAS plans for the future

  • Enable access to Argon investor queues

  • Deploy IDAS resources on the cloud to meet remote demand

Milestones

This section provides a summary of the improvements and updates that may be the most visible to IDAS users. For a complete list of service updates, please visit our https://uiowa.atlassian.net/wiki/x/cIaPB.

2025

  • January 9, 2025 - IDAS moved to a new data center networking, which is expected to provide better performance. Updates made to JupyterHub, infrastructure nodes, and all worker nodes. Databases relocated to dedicated hosts, resulting in performance improvements.

2024

  • November 26, 2024 - Added 16 GPUs to IDAS. These are NVIDIA L40S, each with 48GB GPU memory.

  • August 14, 2024 - Updated NVIDIA GPU drivers to support the latest CUDA versions

  • May 22, 2024 - Updated the Server Options form in the Research instance. The form will auto-populate information from the user’s last IDAS session.

  • March 23, 2024 - Added new GPUs: 8 NVIDIA A30 and 12 NVIDIA L4. Added 5 new-generation compute nodes with faster CPU.

 

For updates made before 2024, please click the sections below to expand and view.

User trends

The graphs below show the number of IDAS users since the service’s beginning.

  • IDAS was launched in the Fall of 2019.

  • A research account is deactivated when the user leaves the University of Iowa.

  • An educational account is deactivated at the end of the semester.

  • IDAS accounts are available to University of Iowa faculty, staff, and students. For more information about requesting IDAS accounts for research or teaching, please see Requesting An IDAS Account.

IDAS-research-users-trend
Figure 1: IDAS research users

 

IDAS-total-users-trend
Figure 2: IDAS total users - including research and teaching

Contact

Please contact the ITS Research Services team at research-computing@uiowa.edu. Support is generally available Monday - Friday, 8 AM - 5 PM, excluding University holidays. To find specific dates for University holidays, please see the Academic Calendar.