Darkroom is CamCEAD's cloud-based scientific analysis platform, giving researchers on-demand computational resources and streamlined access to data — without needing to manage their own infrastructure.

What Darkroom provides

Built on cloud principles, Darkroom gives scientists a self-service dashboard for launching and managing their own compute environments, running data-processing pipelines, and tracking jobs — all backed by CamCEAD's storage and compute infrastructure.

Key features

• Interactive environments — JupyterLab notebooks, RStudio, Visual Studio Code and full remote desktop sessions, launched on request.
• Pipelines & batch jobs — submit and monitor long-running data-processing jobs from the dashboard.
• Flexible compute — request custom resource allocations sized to the task, including Kubernetes access and the ability to run custom Docker images.
• Data access — S3-compatible storage, remote directory synchronisation and remote data access for moving data in and out of the platform.

Getting started

Access is by registration and administrator approval. Once logged in, the dashboard shows a summary of storage usage, running Jupyter servers and job status, with links to every part of the platform. Full documentation is available at darkroom.ast.cam.ac.uk/docs.