June 2026

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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

Neocortex SDF proposals due June 7
How should future AI help scientists?
Share your experience with the Variable Marketplace

Opportunities

Events & Trainings

Community Announcements

Science Stories

enabled by ACCESS

Training Program Fuses AI, HPC and Materials Science

ACES utilized to power Texas A&M’s CMS³-FAST summer school.

Read the full story here

Learning Through Play

Researchers use their ACCESS allocation on DeltaAI to train AI agents more effectively by pitting them against each other in competition.

Read the full story here

Probing New Sodium Battery Materials

SDSC’s Expanse helps researchers better understand next-gen batteries.

Read the full story here

What's New?

What Should AI Tools do for Scientists that Current Tools Can't?

To get at this, Ai2 is running a 15-minute survey for scientists and experts who support scientific work to understand where AI could be useful in real research work, such as:

reading papers
analyzing data
writing code
using scientific software
working with datasets
planning experiments

or anything else that matters in your field.

They hope to hear from a broad and diverse range of research communities, from AI power users to novices. Take the survey here.

Take a Survey on Your ACCESS Allocations Marketplace Experience

A research team from Harvard University is conducting a short voluntary survey to better understand and improve users’ experiences with ACCESS computing resources available through the ACCESS allocations variable marketplace. The survey takes about five minutes to complete. As part of the study, survey responses will be linked to your publicly available user-level allocation data, including information such as:

institution
number of active projects
usage of computing resources to date
allocated computing resources to date
number of jobs
maximum job size
minimum job size
average wait time on the platform

Your decision to participate or not participate will not affect your relationship with ACCESS or your standing with ACCESS in any way. Only summary statistics and aggregated findings from the study may be shared with ACCESS. Individual survey responses and linked individual-level data will not be shared back with ACCESS. If you have questions about the study, please contact the research team at kmyers@hbs.edu. You can access the survey here.

15 Students Begin STEP Workshop

The ACCESS Student Training & Engagement Program workshop kicked off on May 26 with 15 students coming together at Florida International University in Miami. For two weeks, they'll learn from skilled professionals about careers in cyberinfrastructure, including networking, cybersecurity and software engineering for high-performance computing systems.

Register for the Annual Gateways Conference

The annual Gateways conference (September 23–25, in Washington, DC) focuses on the web-based platforms that make advanced cyberinfrastructure accessible to researchers. Science gateways serve as the crucial "last mile" of research computing, translating raw compute power and complex datasets into intuitive tools across scientific disciplines. The event provides a venue to explore the integration of these interfaces with backend resources, discuss interoperability challenges, and connect directly with the developers building these environments. Register here.

Spotlight

PSC Announces Call for Proposals on its Neocortex HPE Superdome Flex Through June 7

ACCESS awardee Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is looking for collaborators on scientific projects that take advantage of the unique capabilities of its Neocortex Superdome Flex (SDF) resource.

With 24 TiB of shared memory accessible to a single process, the SDF is well-suited to an important class of problems that are difficult or impossible to run on conventional distributed-memory clusters. Use cases include:

analyses on very large graphs that must remain resident in memory
large-scale bioinformatics pipelines
irregular or sparse computations

It's also a strong fit for in-memory AI-readiness preparation of very large datasets for downstream use on the Neocortex CS-3 or on Bridges-2. Successful applicants will be paired with a Neocortex collaborator who will help them set up their working environment and run their project on the system.

Applications will be accepted via Easychair on a rolling basis through June 7. You can find more information and submit your proposal on the PSC website. To ask questions and discuss the details, contact the Neocortex team at neocortex@psc.edu.

ACCESS Website

Events & Trainings

Community Announcements

ACCESS is supported by the

U.S. National Science Foundation.