November 2023


The ACCESS Advance is a monthly newsletter produced by the NSF's ACCESS 

(Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support) program.

It contains science stories enabled by ACCESS, program news and opportunities for users.

Science Stories

enabled by ACCESS

Insights Into Tiny Marine Life

Spelman College team uses multiple ACCESS supercomputers to examine marine amoeba.


Read the full story here.

15 Colors to Rule Them All

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University use supercomputers to prove the Packing Chromatic Number Problem


Read the full story here

Creating Tiny Models With CryoSPARC

Anvil adds CryoSPARC to its impressive catalog of software applications, empowering bioscience research.


Read the full story here.

Understanding Cancer With Big Data

ACCESS resource Anvil aids researchers in a yearly training workshop



Read the full story here.

ACCESS: Highlights From Year One

ACCESS celebrates its first year in action with highlights of the ACCESS service team’s accomplishments.


Read the full story here.

Tell Us About Your Research!

If ACCESS has helped you accomplish groundbreaking research, our communications team wants to hear about it!

Tell Us About Your Research

ACCESS Program News


Science Gateways Conference in Pittsburgh


The Science Gateways 2023 Annual Conference took place Oct. 30 – Nov. 1 in Pittsburgh. The conference provides an opportunity for participants to engage with developers and user communities on diverse applications and approaches, and across academic interests that help build and maintain gateways for scientific applications. At an event Tuesday night (Oct. 31), ACCESS Allocations team member Agbeli (Ag) Ameko received the "2023 Rising Star Award" for his role as a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) facilitator for ACCESS. For more information on the conference, including links to conference proceedings, visit the Science Gateways 2023 website.

Je'aime Powell of the Texas Advanced Computing Center and Linda Hayden, Ph.D., of the Science Gateways Community Institute, accept the award for Ag Ameko, who was participating in an event at Howard University.

Save the Dates for PEARC24


The PEARC24 Executive Committee is pleased to announce the tentative dates for PEARC24 to be July 21—25, 2024 with the theme "Human Powered Computing." Details on location, conference events and more will be coming soon.

Making it Easier to Get Started

In response to feedback from the field, the access-ci.org homepage has been updated with clearer directions to information and helpful "Get Started" links to other areas of the ACCESS web presence. Follow the Get Started link to learn more.

Have News? Let Us Know!


ACCESS can help get your news out to the broader community! Send us information about your training events, workshops, RFPS, internships, job postings, hackathons, conferences, etc. by visiting this page. You can also click through to sign up for the ACCESS Support Digest to get these news items sent to your email inbox.

ACCESS Allocation News

New Resources in the ACCESS Ecosystem

If you've browsed through the list of available resources on the ACCESS Allocations web page lately, you’ve probably noticed that the list is growing. Several resources supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) have recently been added but are not yet available through ACCESS Allocations. They are: 

  • Voyager at the San Diego Supercomputer Center
  • Neocortex at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center
  • HIVE at the Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Stampede3 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Researchers are encouraged to view the resource catalog entries and contact the appropriate site directly if they are interested in using these new architectures. In addition, PSC Anton2, a specialized molecular dynamics resource made possible by the National Institutes of Health, is also now available to interested investigators. Stay tuned for more updates on these and additional resources.


Acknowledging ACCESS in your Publications


If your use of ACCESS resources is leading toward preparing a publication, remember to cite ACCESS and the resources utilized! To ensure continued support for the NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure ecosystem, researchers are required to properly acknowledge the contribution of ACCESS in their papers, presentations and other published works. Work enabled by ACCESS should acknowledge the program’s contributions by citing this publication:

ACCESS: Advancing Innovation: NSF’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support. Timothy J. Boerner, Stephen Deems, Thomas R. Furlani, Shelley L. Knuth, and John Towns. 2023. In “Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC23), July 23–27, 2023, Portland, OR, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3569951.3597559.


In addition, please include the name of the resource(s) and the following acknowledgment: This work used [resource-name] at [resource provider] through allocation [allocation number] from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296. If you have questions, please submit a ticket and a staff member will get back to you.

ACCESS Operations News

Student Interns Assist Operations Team

The ACCESS Operations Student Training and Engagement Program (STEP) has entered its STEP-3 phase with two students involved in a part-time internship program that will continue through the 2023-2024 academic year. One of the students is embedded with the cybersecurity team assisting with Qualys reorganization, which will better streamline ACCESS vulnerability management. This restructuring also will ensure precise access to resources without the need for global administrative privileges, a feature that will safeguard resources while maintaining seamless accessibility. The other student intern works with the operational support team to improve accessibility to ACCESS resource information for researchers. The work targets the AI chatbot and includes writing programs to generate AI-friendly documents from ACCESS database content.

ACCESS Metrics News

XDMoD 10.5 Release

A new major version of ACCESS XDMoD was released on July 18 and the corresponding version of Open XDMoD 10.5 was released on Sept. 11. The release notes for the new version are available in the About XDMoD tab for either Open XDMoD or ACCESS XDMoD. Major new features include:

  • An improved data analytics framework, which provides programmatic access to the data in the XDMoD database via a Python API. Self-directed tutorials are available for new API users and interactive training sessions were presented at PEARC23. Sessions also are planned for the University of Buffalo booth at the SC23 conference in Denver.
  • Support for installation on the Rocky/RHEL 8 operating system
  • Enhanced reporting of cloud virtual machine usage

The XDMoD cloud realm now includes non-active virtual machines (VMs) in its statistics and a “VM State” dimension that allows grouping of data by its VM status (active, shelved, etc). In prior versions of XDMoD, the statistics in the cloud realm only included data about active VMs. For further details, see the Open XDMoD website or contact the ACCESS Metrics team via the ACCESS Ticketing System.


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ACCESS is supported by the

National Science Foundation.

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