ORCD Training Team News
We are having a summer of training in ORCD. The ORCD support team all completed Software Carpentries training this month. The Carpentries training is a great experience - it focuses more on communication and how to make technical training stick in the mind as much as anything software-related.
The team also held two workshops for 30 students this month on getting started on ORCD clusters and on hacking generative AI. Two more cycles of training events are planned for the summer and more are being scheduled for the fall.
If you would like a class with your lab or research group please feel free to reach out to orcd-help@mit.edu. We are also exploring options for a central drop-in space on campus starting in the fall, to complement our existing office hours on online help. Watch this space for updates.
ORCD Summer Schedule Updates
Office hours on Tuesday, July 22 and Thursday, July 24 will be cancelled while one of our teams attends a conference.
Ticket response time will be slower the week of July 21 due to staff conference attendance.
ORCD Seed Fund Kickoff
ORCD’s inaugural round of seed funding received 41 proposals and is currently supporting 8 summer projects to accelerate AI/ML activities of graduate researchers across campus. Whilst doing their seed fund research, the groups are also working with ORCD to try out some GPU (and CPU) reservation tools. These are aimed to support occasional intensive resource needs for model training and other workloads. The plan is to make these tools generally available later in the year.
New ORCD Lead Data Engineer
Dariusz (Darek) Bielik, who previously worked with ORCD as a Data Services Consultant, has started a new role as our Lead Data Engineer! We’re excited to have Darek onboard in his new position to support our growth and the strategic transformation of our storage architecture.
What We’re Reading
- Interesting celestial navigation article means we are no longer lost-in-space (even when Earth is out of reach) courtesy of New Horizons, the only satellite to have a song written for it by Brian May.
- Historic MIT fusion location gets remodel for new fusion science.
- Boltz-2 new model from a team led by Regina Barzilay released. The team made use of one month of 128 H100 Lambda Labs resources with partial support from ORCD to help get the model over the line.
- Anysphere on a tear thanks to cursor.ai coding tool.
ORCD Summer Training Schedule
ORCD has multiple on-campus summer training sessions coming up. Our available class spots have filled up, but you can reach out to orcd-help@mit.edu to request to be added to the waitlist.
- Introduction to Engaging: July 30, 2-4pm, August 27, 2-4pm
- Introduction to Parallel Programming Series: July 14 (date change) & 16
- Parallel Programming with OpenMP: July 14, 10am-12pm
- Distributed Computing with MPI: July 14, 1-3pm
- GPU Programming with CUDA: July 16, 10am-12pm
- Distributed Deep Learning: July 16, 1-3pm
See more details on ORCD’s website.
Want to schedule an onsite ORCD training session for your DLCI? Send an email to orcd-help@mit.edu and we can work with you to schedule a session.