Well I figure eight hours is enough time trying to fix this on my own, so I'll just ask folks:
I am running tensorflow-gpu 1.1.0 just fine in my virtual environment named 'tensorflow' outside of jupyterhub and Jupyter notebook. That is, I can import tensorflow and run scripts with it using the gpu.
When I'm inside my tensorflow virtualenv and using jupyterhub, Jupyter can not seem to 'see' tensorflow. I get the following error:
ImportError: libcublas.so.8.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
1) This is a common seen error message indicating tensorflow install problems, yet my paths and environment variables seem fine. After all, I can use tensorflow-gpu just fine outside of Jupyter.
2) Typing 'which jupyter' shows ~/anaconda3/envs/hub/bin/jupyter, so I believe that I am referencing jupyter inside my virtualenv.
3) Pip freeze shows that I have jupyterhub and tensorflow-gpu. I even did a pip3 freeze and it shows both packages as well.
Any ideas? Can tensorflow-gpu be run from Jupyter notebooks?