April 2026

Inside ACCESS is a monthly newsletter produced for all ACCESS program staff. It contains programwide announcements and updates from each of the program's service areas. Questions or comments? Email us at communi catio ns@access-ci.org.

In this Issue

Updated ID Requirements, Due by May 21
Annual Survey Results
Connect AI Assistant to ACCESS

Opportunities

Events & Trainings

Community Announcements

What's New?

Updated 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.

Update your profile information here. For additional assistance, users can contact the ACCESS Allocations team.

Annual Survey Shows Continued Progress

Each year, the ACCESS Evaluation Standing Committee creates, distributes and analyzes a survey to gauge user satisfaction with the program. This year's responses – more than double last year's, thanks to an abbreviated list of questions – continue to trend toward greater satisfaction. View a presentation on the survey results here.

PEARC26 Registration is Open

This year, the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) conference will be held in Minneapolis, July 26-30. Registration is now open, as are hotel blocks. If you'll be spending time in the ACCESS booth, make sure you look the part with one of the many styles of shirts, jackets or hoodies from the ACCESS merch shop.

Spotlights & Shout Outs

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.

Where in the World is ACCESS?

NAIRR Annual Meeting

Many ACCESS staff members traveled to Washington, D.C. to attend the 2026 NAIRR Annual Meeting, March 10-13. As our programs are aligned, the ACCESS contingency's goals for attending were to understand NAIRR users and how there is overlap in support, allocation, outreach, and other activities.