ORCD Newsletter: November 9, 2023

The ORCD “Get Well” plan moves forward!

Team ORCD continues to make strides to enhance and improve our shared computing experience here at MIT. Our engineering group has just installed and are currently testing over 3.4PB of new shared storage. They have also ordered an additional 6.9PB of new fault tolerant research space, and also some new home directory services at just under a petabyte of all flash storage to replace equipment that is now over 10 years old. This is just under 11 petabytes of brand new storage, and more work to enhance the login environments also continues in parallel.



We are using state of the art open source software and automation to manage and support these new storage systems so they will be both reliable, and cost effective for the MIT community. We will be announcing availability of these systems that are either currently undergoing rigorous testing, or en route to the facility, by the end of the year.

Super Computing 2023

As part of their continued professional development, and community outreach and support, a small number of the ORCD team will be attending the international supercomputing meeting in Denver, CO next week. There is a booth supported by the MGHPCC where each of the 5 member institutions will be showcasing their work. If you are in Denver please swing past and say hello. As a result, next week, our responses to orcd-help@mit.edu tickets may have a slightly higher latency than usual.

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ORCD staff member Lauren Milechin

Meet the Team: Lauren Milechin

Lauren has worked at MIT supporting the MIT SuperCloud teaching and consulting with researchers as a facilitator for over 6 years. She started her career with the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center as Associate Technical Staff before moving to main campus. Her interests and projects involve high performance computing (HPC), HPC education, big data, database technology, machine learning, and applications of these topics in other fields.

Lauren received an MS degree in industrial mathematics from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, focusing in computer science applications, such as machine learning and algorithms. She holds a BS degree in mathematical sciences from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she explored mathematical modeling of disease and of population dynamics.

In her spare time, Lauren enjoys taking ballet classes, hiking, camping, cooking, taking care of her saltwater fish tank, and reading fantasy books. She also picked up knitting two years ago and hasn’t put down the needles since!

Above the Fold

What We’re Reading

  • Peter has been waiting 25 years to see someone do this.
  • Department of That-Didn’t-Take-Long: Nvidia LLM helps design new chip to train LLMs
  • Biden Administration Executive Order to Make AI Safe and Secure 

Events Around Campus

 

We’ll be taking a week off from our newsletter on November 23 for the Institute holiday, and will be back with our next update on November 30.