ORCD Newsletter: September 2024

Above the Fold

New Academic Year Happenings

With the start of the academic year we are starting to roll out a few new projects. We are working with a few early-tester research projects on new central storage. The storage is better suited for the needs of training and inference projects (these projects have demanding I/O needs - e.g. https://www.hpcwire.com/2024/09/12/genai-its-not-the-gpus-its-the-storage/) as well as traditional large scale compute. The storage is predominantly based on open standards in order to keep costs consistent with deploying large amounts and current tests are seeing write performance of 6+ GB/s and read performance of 22GB/s.

We have also recruited the first graduate student to participate in our Research Computing Graduate Ambassador program. In this program, which we are just starting, we will be partnering with graduate students to train them in research computing skills that range from peer support to targeted projects that benefit the entire MIT research computing community. This program adds to our undergraduate program (which has grown to three students this semester).

Finally, we are excited that we have signed a memorandum of understanding with the Biology Department and with the Koch Institute to work collaboratively on refreshing core computing, data and (with the IS&T networking team) network infrastructure that will be integrated with the Engaging cluster. 

ORCD Updates Slack Workspace

ORCD has a new Slack workspace on the MIT enterprise grid where users can keep up with updates and announcements from the ORCD team. Members of the MIT enterprise grid can join the MIT ORCD Updates workspace by visiting https://mit-orcd-updates.slack.com.

What We’re Reading

  • This article does a good job summarizing the current state of play for those who thought and worked on ventilation and air quality during the pandemic.

  • Element 120 is within reach! 

  • Cool self-balancing monorail here.

  • October is cybersecurity month. The Hacking Google series on Youtube has an enlightening set of anecdotes about cybersecurity challenges. It begins with a shout out to the MIT model railway club!

HPC and Research Computing Events

  • Second Annual US Research Software Engineer Association Conference, October 15-17, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

    • This year's theme is Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A celebration of all that RSEs have done for computing in the past, in the present, and in the future.

  • SC 24, November 17-22, 2024, Atlanta, Georgia.

    • The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis

    • The Program is designed to share best practices in areas such as: algorithms; applications; architectures and networks; clouds and distributed computing; data analytics, visualization, and storage; machine learning and HPC; performance; programming systems; system software; and state of the practice in large-scale deployment and integration.