HCP-YA 2025 Release: Command-line download access?

[Tasha Kim]

Hello,

I'm a DPhil student at University of Oxford (Parker-Jones Neural Processing Lab, Department of Engineering Science) hoping to work with HCP-YA data on our university HPC cluster (ARC). I've already registered on BALSA and accepted the HCP-YA 2025 Data Use Terms.

I have two quick questions about the 2025 release:

1. Is there a command-line method for downloading data (e.g. Aspera CLI or similar)? Our HPC environment doesn't support browser-based downloads and I have no local storage to use as an intermediary.
2. Are there plans to make the 2025 release available on Amazon S3?

Many thanks for your help and for the updated release.

Best regards,

Tasha Kim

E: tash...@eng.ox.ac.uk

[Elam, Jennifer]

Hi Tasha,

We are working on a plan for implementing one or more alternatives to the Aspera GUI, but they are not yet in place. The HCP does not support command line access via Aspera due the version of Aspera we have.  For now, we recommend mounting some part of your cluster filesystem with adequate space on a machine where you can install Aspera Connect and open a browser with the Aspera Connect plugin. 

For Linux OSs we recommend using Chrome or Chromium plugins. One group reported Debian 11 with Chrome works, but they did not have success with Debian 12 or 13. This incompatibility might be due to the fact that our Aspera server has been in use for ~12 years and is aging. We should be able to get something else in place in the coming months, but we didn't want to hold up data releases when Aspera is still working for most users. 

We don't have definite plans to put the HCP-YA 2025 release on AWS S3. We would need to work it out with the AWS Open Datasets program and we haven't been able to prioritize that as of yet.

Best,

Jenn 

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From: Tasha Kim <tasha....@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2026 2:03 PM
To: HCP-Users <hcp-...@humanconnectome.org>
Cc: Oiwi Parker Jones <oiwi.par...@eng.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: [hcp-users] HCP-YA 2025 Release: Command-line download access?

 

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[Tasha Kim]

Hi Jenn,

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I really appreciate the context.

Understood regarding the current Aspera setup. I’ll look into whether we can temporarily mount part of our ARC filesystem onto a machine where we can install Aspera Connect with a browser, as you suggested. That’s very helpful guidance.

It’s also good to know that alternative access methods are being discussed. We'll keep an eye out for updates (If there’s any beta testing or feedback opportunity for HPC-based workflows in the future, I’d be very happy to help).

Best regards,

Tasha Kim

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