Above the Fold
ORCD Services During Winter Break
The ORCD team will be on Winter Break December 23 through January 1. We will return on January 2. There will be no Office Hours on December 24, 26, and 31. We will resume Office Hours on January 2.
Only system emergencies will be dealt with over the break, other tickets will be triaged and handled after Winter Break.
We hope everyone enjoys their Winter Break and are looking forward to supporting more computational research in 2025.
ORCD Data Services Updates
Digital data is at the heart of most things that ORCD does. We’re excited about a few recent data-related developments:
- We’re thrilled that Darek Bielik took on a Data Services Consultant role in November!
- A new upload on ORCD’s campus-wide resources page provides details on the various data storage services ORCD is currently offering. These include base storage that is available to all system users and purchasable storage that can be added to meet project- or research group-specific needs.
What We’re Reading
- Automated chemistry labs for all - driven by LLMs
- Don’t forget the Ingenuity drone copter on Mars - first off planet drone copter accident investigation report released. Ingenuity still has potential to record 20 years of in-situ environmental data for future analysis.
- Fusion, started at MIT PSFC and then via the MIT Engine and Devens, MA, is potentially coming at scale to VA in the 2030s with Commonwealth Fusion - just in time for all the GPUs.
Meet the Team: Darek Bielik
Dariusz (Darek) Bielik recently joined ORCD as a Data Services Consultant. Darek has spent a career wrangling database and file-based storage systems for bio-pharmaceutical projects. He worked at Novartis NIBR for 17 years as a database administrator and database infrastructure architect. He has previously held roles as a database administrator and system architect with companies such as Bank of America Securities and ING Financial Services.
Darek holds a BS in Management Information Systems from University of Alaska Anchorage. When he’s not at work, he enjoys hiking, biking (and building bikes!), and playing squash.
Protecting Access to U.S. Federal Government Data
The MIT Libraries recently published new resources to assist researchers in ensuring continued access to government data that is vital for their research. See the news story on the Libraries’ website for more information.
You can also register for the Libraries’ End-of-Term Data Preservation at MIT event for a hands-on session on preserving the data you use from the federal government.
ORCD Around Campus
ORCD will be teaching two courses during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) in January. See the 2025 IAP Classes page on our website for more information and to sign up.
Introduction to Parallel Programming (January 14 - 15)
Parallel computing has been an important research topic in science and technology for decades. Thanks to the fast-developing field of deep learning in recent years, parallel computing is being used for more broad interests. In this class, concepts of parallel computing will be introduced. Attendees will learn not only the basics of high-performance computing (HPC) clusters and GPU accelerators but also programming skills with OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, Pytorch, and Deepspeed. Examples and hands-on exercises will be provided in several programming languages including C, Fortran, and Python. These parallel programming skill sets are useful for researchers to accelerate their computer programs and helpful for students to be prepared for a career in information technology.
Practical High Performance Computing (January 21, 23, 28, 30)
As part of the Practical Computational Thinking IAP course series, the focus of this workshop is to introduce the role of High Performance Computing (HPC, aka supercomputing) in research. We will discuss the fields where HPC is used and provide concrete examples where we describe the strategies used to scale applications to hundreds of processors. Students will learn when to scale from their laptops to HPC, what challenges that introduces, and how to address those challenges with efficient HPC workflows. Engaging will be used for hands-on examples using C/C++, Julia, Matlab, and/or Python. We will also demonstrate applications using other computing resources on campus, such as the Satori and SuperCloud clusters. Students should bring an existing research problem/application that they would like to scale as a project.