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Onboarding Guide

Getting started with the KBase BER Data Lakehouse (K-BERDL)

This guide walks new users, tenants, and BER program teams through the steps to get up and running on the K-BERDL platform — from account setup to data ingestion and analysis.

Who Is This Guide For?

  • New users accessing the platform for the first time
  • BER program teams onboarding as a new tenant
  • Developers integrating external systems or building on the K-BERDL APIs

Step 1: Request Access

Contact the K-BERDL platform team to request access. You will need to provide:

  • Your name, institution, and DOE program affiliation
  • The type of access required (user, tenant admin, developer)
  • A brief description of your intended use case

Once approved, you will receive credentials and be assigned to the appropriate tenant.

Step 2: Set Up Your Account

After receiving your credentials:

  1. Log in to the K-BERDL portal
  2. Complete your user profile and institutional affiliation
  3. Review and accept the platform data use policy
  4. Configure multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Step 3: Explore the Data Catalog

The unified BER-wide metadata catalog allows you to discover datasets across all tenants you have access to.

  • Browse datasets by program, data type, or keyword
  • View metadata, lineage, and access policies for each dataset
  • Request access to embargoed or restricted datasets through the catalog UI

Step 4: Ingest Your Data

Use the KBase Data Transfer Server (DTS) to bring your data into the platform:

# Authenticate
kbase-dts auth login

# Upload data to your tenant bucket
kbase-dts cp -r /path/to/data dts://my-bucket/my-project/

Refer to the K-BERDL Data Ingestion guide for supported formats, batch ingestion, and streaming options.

Step 5: Run Your First Analysis

Once your data is ingested:

  • Launch a JupyterLab workspace from the platform portal to explore your data interactively
  • Submit a Spark job for large-scale processing
  • Use a KBase Narrative to build and share reproducible analysis workflows

Tenant Onboarding (BER Programs)

If you are onboarding a BER program as a new tenant, the following additional steps apply:

  1. Tenant Registration — Define administrative contacts and resource requirements
  2. Policy Configuration — Set default access policies (Public / Private / Embargoed)
  3. Schema Definition — Work with the platform team to define your metadata models and table schemas
  4. Data Migration — Batch ingest historical data via DTS
  5. API Integration — Connect existing program APIs to the Lakehouse ingestion endpoints

See the Tenant Model documentation for full details.

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