Two-part onboarding material introducing VITAL students and community partners to the Texas Advanced Computing Center and the services operated by TACC's Decision Support Office.
DECK 1 is a conceptual orientation: What TACC is, what the Decision Support Office does, and a tour of the six services VITAL work runs on.
1) the DataX science gateway,
2) the CKAN data registry,
3) the UpStream sensor data service,
4) WebODM drone imagery processing,
5) the DYNAMO/MINT model catalog, and
6) TACC advanced computing (high-performance CPU, GPU, on premise Cloud, and I/O computing).
It closes with a three-step account setup path and the project's data governance ground rules.
DECK 2 is a hands-on walkthrough for students: TACC account creation and multi-factor authentication, allocations, the $HOME/$WORK/$SCRATCH filesystems and the Corral and Ranch storage tiers, computational cookbook conventions and Jupyter sessions, interactive and batch jobs on TACC systems, registering and publishing a CKAN dataset, UpStream campaign structure, WebODM processing, and reading a model's requirements from the semantic model catalog.
Each deck is provided as an interactive HTML presentation, an editable PowerPoint file with speaker notes, and a PDF.
Prepared September 2026 for the NASA MUREP ESSR VITAL project.