The second annual GOOD Conference took place March 9–12, 2026, welcoming 88 attendees from nine countries to the beautiful Salt Lake City, hosted by the University of Utah. The event brought together developers, system administrators, researchers, and institutional leaders around a shared mission: advancing the capabilities and adoption of Open OnDemand. Attendees left with new ideas, new connections, and fresh thinking about where the platform can go next.
The conference kicked off with a Contributor Jam, an introduction to the platform and how to contribute code, documentation, or ideas. The main program featured technical presentations, community discussions, and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions covering disciplines from chemistry and climatology to medicine and the social sciences, shining a light on practical implementations, emerging technologies, and community-led innovation.
Topics included LLM integration, OnDemand andragogy, custom application design, HPC desktops in the cloud, workflow management, MATLAB integration, modular dashboards, Kubernetes-based deployments, job sharing, domain-aware workloads, CryoSPARC sessions, and bridging AI and HPC across on-premise and cloud environments. The breadth of sessions reflected a community increasingly focused on extending OOD into AI/ML workflows, cloud-hybrid deployments, and making advanced computing more accessible across diverse institutional settings.
Two initiatives launched at GOOD 2026: the Appverse, a growing catalog of app configurations already featuring 80 apps across 57 software packages from over 17 institutions with an easy process for adding more, and the Contributor Wall, recognizing contributions across GitHub, Discourse, app development, and community committees. Both are live on the Open OnDemand Community Hub.
The inaugural GOOD Example Award honored Sean Anderson (Wake Forest University), Brandon Biggs (Idaho National Laboratory), and Robin Karlsson (CSC – IT Center for Science), each recognized with a signature red jacket recognizing their leadership and impact within the Open OnDemand community.
It is exciting to see the community thriving — more to come!
> GOOD26 presentations on Vimeo
> Follow Open OnDemand on LinkedIn