TY - GEN
T1 - The Scientific Impact of ACCESS
AU - White, Joseph Patrick
AU - Furlani, Thomas
AU - Hart, David
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2026/7/26
Y1 - 2026/7/26
N2 - The Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program was launched by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2022 as the latest evolution of the NSF’s 40-year-old support for a national-scale cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. The transition to ACCESS included a significant transformation in the policies and processes for obtaining resource allocations. While the largest allocations of resource time still require substantial proposal effort and close review, the vast majority of researchers are able to access resources quickly and with significantly less proposal effort and proportionally less effort for ACCESS allocations staff and volunteer reviewers. Due in large part to these changes, the first three years of ACCESS have realized a twofold increase in the number of projects and principal investigators along with a threefold increase in the number of jobs run. The end result has been to substantially broaden use as well as minimize the “time to science” for researchers. Overall, the policy changes, combined with increased resource capacity available from ACCESS-allocated resources, supported a transition from allocations as “gatekeeper” mode to a more welcoming “gateway” approach and have dramatically changed the impact of the ACCESS ecosystem on the research and education community.
AB - The Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program was launched by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2022 as the latest evolution of the NSF’s 40-year-old support for a national-scale cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. The transition to ACCESS included a significant transformation in the policies and processes for obtaining resource allocations. While the largest allocations of resource time still require substantial proposal effort and close review, the vast majority of researchers are able to access resources quickly and with significantly less proposal effort and proportionally less effort for ACCESS allocations staff and volunteer reviewers. Due in large part to these changes, the first three years of ACCESS have realized a twofold increase in the number of projects and principal investigators along with a threefold increase in the number of jobs run. The end result has been to substantially broaden use as well as minimize the “time to science” for researchers. Overall, the policy changes, combined with increased resource capacity available from ACCESS-allocated resources, supported a transition from allocations as “gatekeeper” mode to a more welcoming “gateway” approach and have dramatically changed the impact of the ACCESS ecosystem on the research and education community.
KW - ACCESS
KW - Allocations Process
KW - High-performance Computing
KW - Metrics
KW - XDMoD
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105048762582
U2 - 10.1145/3785462.3815850
DO - 10.1145/3785462.3815850
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105048762582
T3 - PEARC 2026 - Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2026: Resilient Roots + Empowered Communities
BT - PEARC 2026 - Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2026
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, PEARC26
Y2 - 26 July 2026 through 30 July 2026
ER -