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Accessing MESA

MESA is built on leveraged NSF cyberinfrastructure, which means there is no single "MESA login." You authenticate through the cyberinfrastructure components that back the service.

Accounts you will need

Service Purpose Sign up
CyVerse iRODS Data Store, Discovery Environment, ontology-aware metadata. user.cyverse.org
GitHub Source for all MESA repositories, issue tracker. github.com/join
Service When you need it
ACCESS-CI To run your own MCP server on Jetstream-2 or use GPU inference at scale. Apply →
ORCID Federated identity for cross-institution data sharing. Register →
Globus High-throughput data transfer between MESA, TACC Corral, and your institution. Login →

Authentication flow

MESA federates identity through CILogon, Globus Auth, and ORCID. The hosted mesa-mcp service uses CyVerse Keycloak OIDC for browser-based bearer-token flows.

sequenceDiagram
    actor U as You
    participant Cl as MCP client (Claude, Cursor, …)
    participant M as mesa-mcp service
    participant K as CyVerse Keycloak
    participant I as iRODS Data Store
    U->>Cl: Start session
    Cl->>M: Request tool list (bearer token)
    M->>K: Validate token
    K-->>M: User identity + scopes
    M->>I: ds_list_directory(/iplant/home/you)
    I-->>M: AVU-annotated listing
    M-->>Cl: Tool result
    Cl-->>U: Render in chat

Compute allocations

Resource What it is How to request
Jetstream-2 (NSF ACCESS-CI) GPU instances for self-hosted LLM inference and your own MCP servers. MESA holds a project allocation. Email the PI to be added to the MESA Jetstream-2 project, or apply for your own ACCESS-CI allocation.
CyVerse Data Store 5.2 PB iRODS storage, including MESA-curated collections. Default 100 GB on CyVerse signup; request more through CyVerse support.
UA HPC (cost-recovery) GPU & database servers for sustained prototype workloads. UA researchers only — contact the PI.
OSN Pod (ACCESS federated storage) 1 PB ACCESS allocation for replicated MESA artifacts. Coordinated through the MESA team.

Service endpoints

Service URL Status
Hosted mesa-mcp https://mesa-mcp.cis240692.projects.jetstream-cloud.org Pre-alpha
Documentation (this site) https://cyverse.github.io/mesa/ Active
Source code https://github.com/cyverse/mesa Active
Status & incidents (planned) TBD

Pre-alpha

The MESA prototype is pre-alpha through Month 12 of the project (June 2027). Endpoints may be reset, schemas may break, and data is not yet under the production backup/DR regime. Do not store data of record in MESA until the follow-on operations proposal is funded and 24×7 operations begin.