News and Events

A message from Peter Fisher, Head of ORCD, about upcoming leadership changes.

New hands on help pages, spring positions for undergraduate and graduate students, and upcoming newsletter changes.

The MIT Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD) has multiple undergraduate and graduate student positions to work in our research computing support team. The Office of Research Computing and Data is a new campus initiative that aims to be the “go to” future of research computing for all campus researchers at all levels. The support team provides comprehensive help and training for all researchers on campus who want to leverage computing beyond their laptop and desktop. These positions will work alongside ORCD professional staff. The roles will be involved in helping researchers working with the most advanced computing tools on MITs largest and most powerful computing systems for data analysis, modeling, AI/ML and more.

2023 was a busy year for ORCD, with new hires to round out our team, progress on fixing our technical debt, moving our “Get Well” plan forward, and signing a strategic memorandum with our colleagues at OpenMind. We’re looking forward to building on that momentum in 2024.

We were recently invited to join a panel at the “Future Energy Center Systems” fall workshop with our colleagues at the MIT Energy Initiative and partners at the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium to speak to the challenges of modern datacenter infrastructure for research computing. The workshop included many from assorted industries, academia, and transportation, and we had the chance to talk about data center infrastructure.

Progress on the ORCD "Get Well" plan, Super Computing 2023, and more.

Life is full of unplanned activities, and nothing is more exciting than responding to events that are unplanned. This was the case during the evening of Saturday, October 14th, 2023. That was the night when all of our phones started to ring. All electrical power had unfortunately been lost to our flagship high performance computing datacenter, causing computing for each of the five MGHPCC member institutes to immediately, and somewhat abruptly, come to a halt.

As the machines sat quiet and alone in a now dark and silent room 88.2 miles from the ORCD offices, we knew we needed to build a plan to bring them back to life as quickly and safely as possible. Such unplanned situations are so rare—this was the first of its kind in over a decade—that forming good plans around them is unfortunately inordinately difficult. However, the ORCD team scrambled into action. 

We knew what we needed to do. 

The MIT Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD) has multiple undergraduate and graduate student positions to work in our research computing support team. The Office of Research Computing and Data is a new campus initiative that aims to be the “go to” future of research computing for all campus researchers at all levels. The support team provides comprehensive help and training for all researchers on campus who want to leverage computing beyond their laptop and desktop. These positions will work alongside ORCD professional staff. The roles will be involved in helping researchers working with the most advanced computing tools on MITs largest and most powerful computing systems for data analysis, modeling, AI/ML and more. 

ORCD news and updates for late September.

Welcome back for Fall at MIT.

We'rel returning to a bi-weekly newsletter, bringing you more details about our new team members, our developing ORCD vision of research computing, and idiosyncratic news from science and other parts of academia.

Announcing a strategic collaboration, and signing of a formal memorandum of understanding between the OpenMind project and the Office of Research Computing and Data, (ORCD).