DesignSafe Portal: A Smarter, User-Centered Dashboard for Natural Hazards Research - BYOP

As part of the SGX3 Internship Program at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), we partnered with the DesignSafe team to reimagine and modernize their researcher dashboard. DesignSafe is a science gateway supporting natural hazards engineering research by providing access to HPC systems, curated data, and collaborative tools.The redesigned dashboard prioritizes usability, efficiency, and real-time awareness. Key features include:Recent Jobs: Displays the user’s latest job submissions along with status updates, helping researchers monitor and manage their HPC tasks quickly.Favorite Apps: Allows users to pin their most-used applications for fast, personalized access, streamlining repetitive workflows.Recently Accessed Tools: Offers quick navigation to tools used in prior sessions, reducing the need to re-search through complex menus.Allocations Panel: Gives a clear, at-a-glance view of the user’s compute and storage allocations, improving planning and resource tracking.System Status Indicators: Shows live system load and availability through the Tapis API, enabling users to time their job submissions for better efficiency.Beyond the interface, we introduced two intelligent backend features:A machine learning-based job failure prediction tool that analyzes submission parameters and job logs to predict potential failures before they occur, saving time and compute resources.A smart storage analyzer that scans user directories for duplicates or outdated files and suggests cleanup actions using an Isolation Forest ML model.These improvements make the dashboard not just cleaner, but also smarter and more responsive to the needs of researchers. Our goal was to reduce friction in daily workflows and provide a more productive, guided experience for users of the DesignSafe portal.