Above the Fold
The loss of Nuno Loureiro can be the only thing above the fold in this horrible week for tragedies. Already a leading scholar of plasma physics and the director of the PSFC, Nuno was certainly destined for higher accolades and positions. And he was a decent man–every article mentions his kindness, honesty, and integrity. Whether you knew Nuno or not, please watch this short video of him speaking on failure.
ORCD Team Winter Break
The ORCD team will be on Winter Break December 22 through January 4. We will return on January 5. There will be no Office or HPC Help Hours during this time. We will resume Office Hours on January 6. HPC Help Hours will resume at the start of the Spring semester in February.
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 2026.
Artificial Intelligence Compute Resources at MGHPCC
Earlier this month, the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) and the Healey-Driscoll Administration announced the vendor partners who will supply technology resources for the new Artificial Intelligence Compute Resources (AICR) at MGHPCC. A grant through the Massachusetts AI Hub, along with matching funds from the MGHPCC member universities, including MIT, will significantly expand the compute resources available to the MIT research community through ORCD.
We estimate this new set of resources likely adds more than 20 quadrillion transistors (logic cells plus memory cells plus storage cells) to capacity available to all MIT researchers, in the form of:
- 248 B200 GPUs, each with 192GiB of HBM3e memory, and with an aggregate memory bandwidth in excess of 1.9PiB/s.
- 152 RTX 6000 Pro Server GPUs, each with 96GiB of GDDR7 memory, and with an aggregate memory bandwidth of more than 0.25 PiB/s.
- 15 PiB of AI workload oriented working storage.
If you have questions about these resources or how to access them, please email orcd-help@mit.edu.
What We’re Reading
- Computational Science Graduate Fellowships application due Jan. 15. 2025.
- “How the Internet was Lost” review by James Gleick. The review is worth reading even if you do not plan to read any of the books.
- “Building Mentally Healthy Cities with Neuroscience” - yeah, sign me up.
- Just what we need right now: self-driving trucks.
- NIST wants to hear from you about AI cybersecurity standards
- Happy 30th Javascript.
IAP 2026 Classes
- Introduction to Parallel Programming
- 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.
- See the ORCD website for more information and registration.
- Practical Computational Thinking
- ORCD, together with the MIT Libraries and the Schwarzman College of Computing, will be offering a hands-on sequence of classes, “Practical Software Carpentries,” “Practical Programming with Data,” and “Practical High-Performance Computing,” that cover skills from beginner to advanced that are useful for using computing in research.
- See the ORCD website for more information and registration.
- Build a Mini-SuperComputer
- January 13, 14, and 15, 1-4PM
- In this hands-on IAP course, you’ll design and build a working supercomputing cluster using Raspberry Pi components.
- This class is full for this IAP, but may be offered again this year. If you are interested send an email to orcd-help@mit.edu and we can reach out if we run the class again.