ASCEND: Personal AI Agents for Autonomous Scientific Computing Across HPC Clusters and GPU Workstations

J. Paul Liu, Uthpala Herath, Andrew Petersen

Traditional scientific computing requires researchers to translate intent into environment configuration, resource requests, and executable jobs, then diagnose failures from scheduler and application logs. We present ASCEND (Autonomous Scientific Computing Engine and Novel Discovery), an AI-powered agent system, operated through a command-line or a local web chat interface, that runs the agent on the researcher's own laptop, reaching Slurm clusters and a GPU workstation over multiplexed authenticated SSH, with site-specific execution policies checked by locally executed tools. The language-model agent (Claude Code or Codex, chosen at each launch) is hosted remotely and holds no credentials; an account on each resource suffices, and a public installer links additional clusters or workstations. We report four recorded cases: (1) the agent closed a failure-recovery loop on a planted tensor-device fault, submitting, diagnosing, repairing, and resubmitting it; (2) it reproduced the published evaluation of a weather-forecasting model, recovering an incompletely stated evaluation protocol and agreeing with the published curves to 2.1% (z500) and 2.4% (t850), while identifying two…