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. Detailed account registration instructions can be found here.

  1. Request a user account
  2. You will be redirected to the TACC account registration page.
    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.
  3. You will first be asked to verify your identity via a 3rd party provider.
  4. On the account registration form we highly recommend you provide the email address provided by your Institution or Company.
  5. Once you have an account, set up multi-factor authentication.
  6. You will then be able to log in to DesignSafe.

Please note: A DesignSafe account is a TACC user account, so you will sometimes see emails from TACC and URLs that take you to the TACC domain tacc.utexas.edu.

Documentation Overview

Data Depot: The Data Depot section provides documentation on managing your data including various methods to transfer your data to DesignSafe, guidance for including DesignSafe in your NSF Data Management Plan, and a checklist for data curation when working with a NHERI Experimental Facility. There is extensive guidance for curating and publishing your datasets for reuse by others including working with protected/regulated/sensitive data.

Tools and Apps: This section contains user guides for how to utilize our many offerings in data analytics, GIS and mapping, visualization, and our Jupyter Hub interacting with the data you bring to DesignSafe or that you discover in our Published datasets.

Simulation Applications: We host a wide array of open source and licensed software applications commonly used in natural hazards research.

Use Cases: To help users fully embrace DesignSafe functionalities, we have developed a suite of Use Cases that demonstrate how DesignSafe is being used to advance natural hazards research. Practical products, examples, and scripts developed as part of these Use Cases are provided at the links below. The different simulation codes, tools, and DesignSafe resources used in each Use Case are also indicated.

Advanced Topics: This section of the user guide provides information for how to request an HPC allocation to gain access to TACC's high performance computing resources when your research needs larger scale computation than the our portal applications provide. For researchers who develop their own software tools, a guide to how to use our API to access your data and run applications is provided.