A web workspace over a folder of documents. It indexes the folder, including the text inside PDFs, office files, and images, and puts a chat assistant over it that answers from those files and links its sources, alongside search, browsing, and structured queries. It runs anywhere Node and GUFI run, with any OpenAI-compatible model. On the Parallel Works ACTIVATE platform it can also run workflows and agents on connected HPC and cloud systems.
On ACTIVATE: run the workflow in deploy/workflow.yaml on a connected resource and set its "Knowledge Base Directory" to your folder. It builds the index and opens the Studio as a session. The platform's models work with no setup.
On your own machine (Linux or macOS, with Node 26 and pnpm):
git clone https://github.com/parallelworks/activate-studio && cd activate-studio
pnpm install && pnpm build
indexer/setup_gufi.sh # once: builds the GUFI index engine
export KB_ROOT=/path/to/your/folder
export OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://api.openai.com/v1 OPENAI_API_KEY=<your key>
indexer/reindex.sh # indexes the folder
pnpm start # then open http://localhost:4080
Without KB_ROOT, it opens a small sample folder. Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint works in place of OpenAI's. On a Mac, see docs/MACOS.md.
- Chat answers from your files and links each source.
- Search finds exact words, related meaning, and file names in one box.
- Library browses and views documents, images, PDFs, office files, and 3D models.
- Query answers structured questions about the files, such as the largest or newest, or runs read-only SQL.
- Workflows, on ACTIVATE, runs chosen platform workflows from their own forms, and opens the sessions they start.
- Agents take the parts of a larger request in parallel; you can watch them, approve what they ask to do, and steer them.
- Other tools, such as pw code, can search the same knowledge base over MCP or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
The in-app Help is the user guide: docs/HELP.md, with the details in docs/REFERENCE.md.
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
docs/HELP.md |
the user guide, shown in the app and read by the assistant |
docs/REFERENCE.md |
the details behind the user guide, part by part |
docs/DEPLOY.md |
running it on ACTIVATE, in a container, or as a plain server, and connecting models |
docs/CUSTOMIZATION.md |
settings, branding, identity, and the assistant's tools |
docs/LIBRARIES.md |
several indexes at once, building an index on a cluster, and which parts of the app appear |
docs/WORKFLOWS.md |
the Workflows tab |
docs/AGENTS.md |
delegated agents |
docs/MULTI-USER.md |
several people on one deployment |
docs/MACOS.md |
running on macOS |
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md |
how the index, retrieval, and server work |
- GUFI (Los Alamos National Laboratory): the metadata, full-text, and vector index.
- sqlite-vec and sqlite-lembed: vector storage and embedding with a local model.
- @parallelworks/ui: the chat interface and the platform's workflow forms.
- Streamdown, three.js, occt-import-js, Tesseract, Fastify, React, and Vite.
Contributions are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md covers setup, the repository layout, tests, pull requests, and releases. Report security issues through SECURITY.md.