To simplify the development of data science and AI models, IBM has launched Elyra, a set of open source AI-centric extensions to Jupyter Notebooks, and, more specifically, the new JupyterLab user interface.

Here’s what the initial release of Elyra includes: Notebook Pipelines visual editor, ability to run notebooks as batch jobs, Hybrid runtime support (based on Jupyter Enterprise Gateway), Python script execution capabilities within the editor, Notebook versioning based on Git integration as well as Reusable configuration for runtimes.

Elyra comes with a visual editor to build Notebook-based AI pipelines. This is to make the conversion of multiple notebooks into batch jobs or workflows simpler, according to IBM’s Luciano Resende. “By leveraging cloud-based resources to run their experiments faster, the data scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI developers are then more productive, allowing them to spend their time using their technical skills,” the post explains.

Besides the integrated support for Git repositories to simplify tracking changes, Elyra also extends the Notebook UI to make the submission of a single Notebook as a batch job easier.

With its ‘shared configuration service,’ Elyra simplifies workspace configuration management enabling things like information around accessing external runtimes to be configured once and shared across multiple components, the post added.