May 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

Updated ACCESS ID Requirements
NAIRR Pilot Classroom Expansion Conferences
Connect AI Assistant to ACCESS

Opportunities

Events & Trainings

Community Announcements

Science Stories

enabled by ACCESS

Turning Animal Speed Into Agile Autonomy

ACCESS allocations power breakthrough study of hummingbird escape maneuver.

Read the full story here

Breaking ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Real Time

UC Riverside researchers use atomic-level simulations on SDSC’s Expanse to reveal how electric charges can destroy stubborn PFAS bonds.

Read the full story here

8 Virtual Arms Better Than 1

Researchers used HPC resources through ACCESS to simulate robotic octopus limbs.

Read the full story here

What's New?

Updated ACCESS ID Requirements

ACCESS is introducing updates to improve the accuracy and completeness of user and organizational information across the ecosystem. Since April 15, all new user accounts and organization requests require additional details, including institutional affiliation information. We also launched a campaign to ensure existing users provide complete profile data, including name, organization, department, institutional email, country of residence and citizenship. Users are encouraged to review and update their profiles as soon as possible. Those with incomplete information by April 30 will be contacted, and a reminder will be sent on May 14 if needed. Maintaining a complete profile is required to remain eligible for ACCESS resources; accounts that remain incomplete after May 21 will be temporarily disabled until updates are made. You may update your profile information using this link. For additional assistance, users can contact the ACCESS Allocations team at allocations@access-ci.org.

NAIRR Pilot Classroom

Expansion Conferences

The Computing Research Association (CRA) has announced its National AI Research Resources (NAIRR) Pilot Classroom Expansion Conferences, a coordinated series of virtual and in-person convenings designed to build instructional capacity, broaden participation and expand access to AI education. Each conference is dedicated to bringing computing faculty together to understand particular challenges and opportunities for their institution type, leveraging faculty expertise and finding ways to utilize the NAIRR Pilot resources. Find out more here.

PEARC26 Registration is Open

Join your friends from ACCESS at PEARC26, to be held July 26-30 in Minneapolis. The ACM Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) Conference Series is a community-driven effort built on the successes of the past, with the aim to grow and increase inclusivity by involving additional local, regional, national, and international cyberinfrastructure and research computing partners spanning academia, government and industry. Register now.

Spotlight

Connect AI Assistant to ACCESS

ACCESS-CI now offers public Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that let AI assistants interact directly with ACCESS services. If you use Claude or another MCP-compatible AI tool, you can connect it to query compute resources, check system status, search software, explore allocations, and more — all through natural conversation.

What Can You Do?

With ACCESS MCP servers connected, you can ask your AI questions like:

"What GPU resources are available on ACCESS-CI and what machine learning software do they have?"
"Are there any current outages or upcoming maintenance on Delta?"
"Show me upcoming workshops on parallel computing."
"What research projects are using allocations on Anvil?"
"What NSF-funded projects are doing work in quantum computing?"

Your AI assistant queries the relevant ACCESS services and gives you a synthesized answer — no need to navigate multiple websites or APIs.

Find out how to enable this function here.

ACCESS Website

Events & Trainings

Community Announcements

ACCESS is supported by the

National Science Foundation.