AiiDA and Renku join forces to lower the barrier to access to the Materials Cloud

This was published on January 4, 2026

The Materials Cloud Archive has become even more accessible and easier to use for scientists. The repository for materials science supported by NCCR MARVEL has been integrated with Renku, the open-source platform for data science developed by the Swiss Data Science Center. The integration allows users to access the MCA archives without installing the AiiDA workflow on their local system and without a previous knowledge of how AiiDA works, two factors that represented a barrier to access to the Materials Cloud for many scientists.

What once required complex local installations, prior AiiDA knowledge, and manual configuration steps is now accessible with a single click. Researchers can discover data on the Materials Cloud Archive and immediately explore it interactively without any local setup or risk of modifying their existing installations.

The AiiDA and Renku development teams have been in touch as early as 2019.

The first integration was achieved by creating a template Renku project with AiiDA pre-installed. With the latest release, researchers can simply click the Renku logo next to any AiiDA archive on MCA and are automatically launched into a fully configured environment with their selected data ready for exploration.

For the future, the AiiDA team is exploring further expansions, like using Renku 2.0's new data connectors to mount MCA archives directly in project filesystems, which would eliminate download times and storage limitations— crucial for large archives; and expanding the integration to other AiiDA applications like AiiDAlab. With this, users would be able to use the graphical user interface (GUI) provided by AiiDAlab, rather than just a single jupyter landing notebook.

More detailed information about the project and about the collaboration between the Renku and AiiDA teams can be found in this blog post.

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