ORCD Newsletter: January 2026

Above the Fold: New Research Computing Services Available

We’re pleased to announce that additional computing services are now available from the Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD). These fee-based services provide PIs the opportunity to run longer, more resource-intensive, high-performance computing jobs for research. This new service offering helps meet the need for access to more GPUs and CPUs at a price point lower than comparable commercial offerings. While the new services mark a significant expansion to our offerings, ORCD will continue to offer a base level of computing services, including capacity on GPUs and CPUs, to all MIT researchers at no cost.

See the full announcement and ORCD’s compute access service information for more details.

Fall 2026 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 March 4, 2026. In this funding round, ORCD is planning to support around 6 project opportunities for one semester of graduate student funding (Fall 2026) 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.

Coming Year Infrastructure Plans (and ORCD vs. the Supply Chain)

Looking forward to the coming year, we have quite a bit of infrastructure growth coming up in 2026. Key elements include:

  • Expanded Capacity: MGHPCC is bringing 3MW of additional power and cooling online. MIT’s share is roughly 500KW. This is small relative to the overall AI boom, but still equivalent to 1-2 new campus buildings at MIT – with effectively zero CO2 emissions. In collaboration with IS&T, we are racing to fit out another row of racks to hold new hardware that is already in the MIT order pipeline.
  • Hardware Growth: ORCD has 40 general-use B200 GPUs in its order pipeline for Engaging. The Massachusetts AI Hub collaborative is in the final stages of deploying 248 B200 GPUs, 152 RTX 6000 Pro server GPUs, and associated networking and storage. These will be available to MIT researchers in the coming months. We are also adding multiple PI purchased H200, B200 and RTX 6000 resources for various groups. 
  • General Access: We are targeting approximately 100 public B200s on Engaging by mid-year. Access models include a no-charge base tier, rentable hardware and priority. Active conversations are ongoing with Google Cloud around discounted rental services that will provide further GPU capacity.
  • Supply Chain Alert: The computing supply chain is currently a big, hot mess. Global manufacturing capacity for all sorts of data center building blocks from power supplies to memory DIMMs is seeing unprecedented global demand, driven by an estimated $500B annual AI infrastructure buildout worldwide. We are routinely seeing months of delays on commodity parts and vendor price fluctuations of 100% or more on some components. Delivery times currently have significant uncertainty. We are doing everything we can to mitigate the impact on researchers and to communicate information in a timely fashion.

What We’re Reading

Intro to Engaging Workshops

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 weekly this Spring; the same material will be covered in each instance of the class.

  • Wednesday, February 4, 10 AM -12 PM
  • Tuesday, February 10, 2-4pm
  • Wednesday, February 18, 2-4pm
  • Tuesday, February 24, 2-4pm

See the classes page on the ORCD website for more details and signup information.