Getting Started

User Account Registration

Any natural hazards researcher or practitioner that wants an environment to store, analyze, curate, publish, and discover data with a community of peers may register for an account. A DesignSafe account is a University of Texas, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) user account, so you will sometimes see emails from TACC and URLs that take you to the TACC domain tacc.utexas.edu. TACC offers detailed account registration instructions.

  1. Request a user account.
  2. You will be redirected to the TACC account registration page.
  3. On the account registration form it is now required that you use the email address provided by your Institution or Company or Organization. Commercial providers such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc are no longer allowed.
  4. For the Institution field, if your Institution/Company/Organization is not coming up as an option for you to select, then you will be guided to a process to request that it be added to TACC's database.
  5. Set up multi-factor authentication for your account.
  6. Check for an email containing a confirmation and activation link. Once you confirm your email, your account status will update to either "Pending" or "Active".
    1. It's possible that your email provider will either block or mark as spam/junk an email TACC sends with a link to confirm your email address after you submit the registration form. If so, send email to helpATdesignsafe-ci.org letting us know you did not receive the email.
  7. If your account status is "Pending" then your account request will need further review by our User Services team. No action is required and a team member will reach out to you.
  8. Once your account status is "Active", you will then be able to log in to DesignSafe.

Initial Onboarding

When you are ready to begin uploading your own data to the Data Depot or want to begin using some of the Tools & Apps, you will want to initiate the onboarding process. The initial onboarding provides you with private areas for your data and access to Tools & Apps that are hosted on our Virtual Machines such as JupyterHub. Access to HPC-enabled applications requires an additional step.

There are 2 ways to invoke the onboarding:

  1. Navigate to the Data Depot.
  2. Navigate to Tools & Apps, then into any of the apps and find one that uses HPC (such as OpenSeesMP) and click Get Started.

You will be redirected to the Onboarding Setup page, and you will then want to click Request Access. While rare, we occasionally will reach out to you requesting additional information prior to approving onboarding. Approvals typically are processed within 1 business day.

Slack & Email Communications

Upon completion of Initial Onboarding you will be invited to join our Slack team and you will be added to our mail list to receive email announcements. To prevent NHERI email announcements from being filtered as Junk or Spam, please add the following email addresses to your contacts: nheri-nco@nheri-network.org, announcements@nheri-network.org.

Request Allocations

DesignSafe provides many HPC-enabled Tools & Apps that require an allocation of computing time. Upon navigating to one of these (such as OpenSeesMP) and clicking on "Get Started", you will see a banner informing you to submit a ticket requesting an allocation if you don't already have one. Please provide the following information in your allocation request:

  1. Provide a paragraph describing your research topic, including which of the DesignSafe Tools & Apps you anticipate using.
  2. If you are faculty, please provide a link to your web page.
  3. If you are not faculty, please provide the name of your academic advisor and a link to their web page.
  4. If you are a practitioner or other user, please provide a link to your current information such as company web page or LinkedIn.