Above the Fold
- Lessons from DeepSeek for American AI - a Sputnik moment - from Daron Acemoglu
- Crowd sourcing - a fascinating study of the the dynamics of crowds (Nature)
- I have always asserted that coffee was invented at MIT in the 1920s. Jeff Grossman carries on the tradition (MIT News)
- The SS United States, one of the great ocean liners, has begun its final journey to become a reef in Florida.
ORCD Strategic Seed Fund Request for Proposals
The Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD) is launching a new Strategic Seed Fund Program. The deadline for the first round of seed fund proposals is February 28th, 2025. Seed funds in this round will cover the equivalent of 3 months of one or more graduate student salaries and will also provide priority access to up to 32 H200 GPUs for a 3-6 month period.
The seed fund is looking for projects that will provide ORCD real-world feedback from research projects on how ORCD resources can help accelerate time to results for AI/ML and beyond activities. Projects, from all areas of MIT, for which access to GPU resources and knowledge will enable more rapid completion of some high-impact goals are of particular interest.
Templates and the Submission Portal can be found here.
If you have questions, please send an email to orcd-help@mit.edu.
Heavy Metal
This month around 3000kg of new H200 and L40S GPU servers were racked at MGHPCC. These are part of the new MIT hardware being installed over the next 6 weeks. Overall the servers racked will provide around 35 FP32 PFlop/s of compute capacity, or 11 FP32 TFlop/s/kg.
What We’re Reading
- Possible computer racks running at 819KW per rack in 2027?
- Kelvin Drogemeir testimony on the ups and downs of indirect costs from 1945 - 2017.
- Moon traffic - potentially 3 moon landings en-route by Mar 1 2025.
Events Around Campus
- Artfinity: The MIT Festival for the Arts
- February 15 - May 2, 2025: See the full events schedule