Above the Fold
- Launch of the Nancy Roman telescope is big news. A repurposed spy satellite ( sort of ), the Roman Observatory will allow the study of distant supernovae, exoplanets, and a host of other astronomical objects.
- Weirdly inspiring: MIT leans into AI in the classroom: AI and Education Report and the President’s letter to the MIT Community.
Spring 2027 ORCD Seed Fund Grants
The MIT Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD) is continuing our strategic Seed Fund initiative. The Seed Fund is one part of a strategic effort supporting infrastructure for applied AI/ML research, creating a powerful AI/ML platform for all of MIT.
The deadline for this round of seed fund proposals is Monday, October 5 at 11:59PM ET. In this funding round, ORCD is planning to support around 6 project opportunities for one semester of graduate student funding (Spring 2027) and 3-6 months of enhanced compute resources.
Ideal projects will be interested both in advancing their own domain research and in contributing to growing an ecosystem of openly shared applied AI/ML software and tool knowledge. Projects, from all areas of MIT, for which access to GPU resources and knowledge will enable more rapid completion of some key goals, are of particular interest.
See our Seed Fund page on our website for more details and application instructions.
If you have questions, please send an email to orcd-help@mit.edu.
Negative Space - Disk Storage and Carbon Emissions Edition
In art, negative space ( or Ma ) refers to areas that aren’t painted or drawn. Knowing what to leave out is as important as knowing what to include.
In ORCD we have been looking at the exploding costs of storage (a 24TB USB disk from Microcenter is today listing at $1059, where it was $279 a year ago). This has us thinking about another sort of negative space and how we can help researchers decide what not to store. In coming months we will be starting to share with groups more details of their storage use. This is intended to help groups manage storage and get the most out of storage investments. We will be happy to help groups who would like assistance cleaning up things that may not be needed anymore - if that sounds like you please reach out to us at orcd-help@mit.edu.
In the same vein - we estimated how much CO2 was not emitted by the computing ORCD supports at MGHPCC. Our July power draw averaged 1.8MW. The emissions avoided can be computed from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates for carbon intensity of regular electricity in Massachusetts. Based on this, we estimate the MGHPCC-housed compute that researchers used has avoided just under 300 tons of CO2 emissions for MIT research computing in July.
Maybe it’s OK to be negative, sometimes!
ORCD Student Jobs
ORCD is looking for students to support our Research Community Facing team in the Fall 2026 semester. We’re hiring both undergraduate and graduate students to support our drop-in help desk, contribute to writing cookbook recipes, and more.
View our jobs page to read the student job description for our available openings.
MIT Prize for Open Data
The deadline for nominations for the 2026 MIT Prize for Open Data is September 14.
Winners receive $2,500 and an invitation to present their project at the “Open Data at MIT” event on October 20, during Open Access Week. Learn more and submit a nomination.
What We’re Reading
- Where’s the beef ( AI labs adding a little bit of garnish ) ?
- Just in time for the start of term, Anthropic will watermark text .
- Quantum hacking - sooner than you think?
- AI land and ocean from NVidia and others.
Upcoming Workshops and Training
Introduction to Engaging
The MIT Office of Research Computing's Engaging Cluster is available to the MIT community for running computational workloads that don't run well on your own computer. This hands-on tutorial walks you through the basics of using Engaging for your research.
This course is being run regularly this Fall; the same material will be covered in each instance of the class.
- Thursday, September 10: 2-4pm
- Tuesday, September 22: 2-4pm
- Thursday, October 15: 2-5pm
- Wednesday, October 28: 2-4pm
See the classes page on the ORCD website for more details and signup information.