Sept. 23, 2025 — In the world of cyberinfrastructure (CI), you can never stand still. That’s why the U.S. National Science Foundation has been investing in upgrades to a number of Resource Providers (RPs) who allocate their resources through the ACCESS program.

Many of these resources are already available to researchers through ACCESS, and some are available through the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot. This means more High-performance Computing (HPC) resources for researchers and educators that will help power their work in the coming year. Here’s a sampling of the augmented resources across the ACCESS ecosystem.

San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)

Last year, as part of the NAIRR Pilot, NSF awarded SDSC $5.3 million to increase Expanse’s AI capabilities. Expanse is SDSC’s flagship supercomputer, and this expansion added 34 Dell XE9640 servers to Expanse, each containing four NVIDIA H100 GPUs, two 36-core Intel Sapphire Road processors, 1 TB of RAM and 6.4 TB of local NVMe storage. The funding also provides for the purchase of 3 PB of cloud-compatible Ceph storage and support to cover two years of operation.

Additionally, SDSC received an NSF grant to provide IT support to research groups who will use the NVIDIA DGX Cloud platform.

Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC)

RCAC recently announced that its supplemental artificial intelligence (AI) resource, Anvil AI, was available for allocations through the ACCESS program. From the RCAC press release:

Purdue University’s powerful national HPC-resource, the Anvil supercomputer, recently received an upgrade, thanks to support from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) NAIRR Pilot Program. This hardware upgrade added a total of 84 Nvidia H100 SXM GPUs to the system. Along with the GPUs, Anvil AI also features 1 petabyte of object storage, which can host datasets needed by AI researchers.

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC)

Early this year, PSC announced that 10 new nodes were added to Bridges-2. From the PSC press release:

These HPE Cray 670 nodes, each with eight (8) H100-SXM5-80GB GPUs and 2 TB node memory, are interconnected by a high-performance Infiniband network to the Bridges-2 system, will increase Bridges-2 GPU capacity, and should significantly improve the performance of ML and HPC workloads.

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

NCSA has been awarded significant hardware additions to both Delta and DeltaAI to increase the resources available to NAIRR Pilot projects. NSF funded these additions through the NAIRR Pilot, and they include:

52 nodes, each with four NVIDIA Grace Hopper superchips (208 GH200 chips)
8 nodes, each with large memory and eight NVIDIA H200 GPUs
1.5 PB of flash storage from DDN

These additions add 18 DP PF and 538 AI PF with the latest high-performance NVIDIA Hopper series GPUs. The additional performance exceeds Delta’s base performance. The NVIDIA H200 GPUs will have the largest GPU memory of any NSF-funded system currently available.

As a result of these additions, Delta and DeltaAI are providing 2.6M A100 equivalent GPU hours annually for NAIRR pilot-allocated projects.

If you’d like to learn more about the various resources available for allocation through ACCESS, visit the ACCESS Resource Catalog page.

Source: Megan Johnson, NCSA; ACCESS