Connecting Shared Research Facilities Through Open‑Source Lab Management

MIT.nano hosted the 2026 NEMO User Meeting on October 5‑6, bringing together 65 representatives from 25 laboratories, universities, government labs, and industry partners. The event, sponsored by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC), focused on the open‑source NanoFab Equipment Management and Operations (NEMO) platform.

Participants demonstrated how NEMO’s community edition enables facilities to share extensions for user administration, chemical tracking, equipment status, and billing. Because the core operational challenges — training, scheduling, access control — are common across diverse sites, a single adaptable codebase reduces duplicated development effort.

Why it matters for GPU/AI infrastructure

AI workloads increasingly rely on shared GPU clusters that face the same coordination problems as nanofabrication labs. An open, interoperable management layer can streamline allocation, monitoring, and cost recovery for GPU resources, accelerating time‑to‑insight for model training and inference.

The collaborative model also aligns with cloud‑native practices: facilities can contribute improvements upstream, benefit from peer‑reviewed modules, and avoid vendor lock‑in — key considerations for organizations building scalable AI compute platforms.