November 2025

The ACCESS Advance is a monthly newsletter produced by the U.S. National Science Foundation's ACCESS (Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support) program. It contains science stories enabled by ACCESS, program news and opportunities for users.

In this Issue

ACCESS Eligibility Policy Changes on Institutional Affiliation and Email Address
Celebrating 15 years of XDMoD
ACCESS User Restrictions
Spotlight: ACCESS Introduces a New Project Search Tool

Opportunities

Events and Trainings

Community Announcements

Science Stories

enabled by ACCESS

The Separation of Substances

A research team from North Carolina State University used Bridges-2 at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to develop a simulation tool that promises to simplify the design of materials needed for chemical separations. Their work could mean less expensive and vastly more efficient chemical recovery and purification.

Read the full story here

ACCESS Assists with Potential Staph Infection Breakthrough

Auburn University biophysicists used Delta at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to uncover new details on the bacterial grip strength of Staphylococcus aureus on human skin – and found it to be “one of the strongest noncovalent biomolecular interactions ever recorded.”

Read the full story here

Predicting Vision Loss Risk in Astronauts

To better understand the loss of vision caused by space flight, researchers at the University of California, San Diego used Expanse at the San Diego Supercomputer Center to predict who is most at risk for developing eyesight issues – before liftoff. The research team used AI trained on high-resolution eye scans to predict individuals at the highest risk.

Read the full story here

What's New?

Important Update: ACCESS Eligibility Policy Changes on Institutional Affiliation and Email Address

The Allocations team wants everyone to know about policy changes regarding institutional affiliation and email address requirements for principal investigators (PIs) and users. These changes align with National Science Foundation (NSF) guidance that ensures compliance with federal funding requirements. ACCESS resources are available to PIs affiliated with U.S.-based institutions. For both PIs and users, institutional email addresses are required to match your listed institutional affiliation; for example, gmail.com and yahoo.com email domains are prohibited. ACCESS is not retroactively canceling any existing allocations at this time. However, new requests – including supplements, transfers and extensions – will not be processed for PIs and users who do not align with this policy. Current users are strongly recommended to prepare for these changes by updating their institutional affiliation and email address. For more detailed information, please refer to the Eligibility section of the ACCESS Allocations Policies, the NSF web page on research security and NSF guidance on who may submit proposals. For questions regarding these policy changes, please complete our Feedback Form.

Celebrating 15 years of XDMoD

HPC efficiency is vital for the U.S. NSF ACCESS program and its users. The widely used tool XDMoD (XD Metrics on Demand) provides detailed metrics on HPC resource usage, helping researchers, administrators and the NSF optimize performance and resource utilization. This year, we’re celebrating 15 years of XDMoD. You can learn more about this handy application and read a short interview with Metrics PI Tom Furlani here.

ACCESS User Restrictions

To comply with updated NSF policy, ACCESS users must not be associated with any of the following:

State sponsors of terrorism list
Export Administration Regulations (EAR) entity list (15 CFR Part 744, Supp. No. 4)
Executive Order 14032 of June 3, 2021
Department of Defense 1260H list annually published as mandated by Section 1260H of the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 116-283)
Department of Defense 1286 list published as mandated by Section 1286 of the Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 115-232)

Some Resource Providers may have additional restrictions on international collaborators.

Spotlight

ACCESS Introduces a New Project Search Tool

The ACCESS website recently introduced a tool that sheds light on the vast and formidable world of ACCESS research. The Current Projects Search offers a robust, multifactor search across all projects using ACCESS resources. Website visitors can search by researcher organization, project type, ACCESS computing resource and field of study. With almost 100 fields of study listed – from biophysics to engineering to politics to literature – the results can be very precise.

ACCESS Research Software Engineer Rebecca Eveland – a self-described “gigantic nerd with humanistic qualities” – designed the tool in JavaScript using a back-end powered by Ruby on Rails.

“It was a request,” she revealed, referring to the prominent feedback form that invites site visitors to submit any and all thoughts on ACCESS. “[A site visitor] said, ‘Can we have something that would show all of our projects?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great idea. Let’s run with that.’"