
Above the Fold
At this year's First Year Explorations event, ORCD recruited several students to participate in a new drop-in center that we hope to launch before the end of the year.
ORCD Resources and Updates
In the past year, MIT, ORCD, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have collaborated to provide computing resources for the Institute. Over the summer, ORCD deployed 308 GPUs, 10,992 CPUs, and 8 PB of storage, along with 384 additional PI-priority GPUs. More hardware is planned for deployment in the coming months, including newer-generation Blackwell GPUs.
Currently, anyone with MIT Kerberos access can use these resources on a first-come, first-served basis. Starting January 1, 2026, a tiered access model will be rolled out, adding priority hardware rental and allowing for researchers to prioritize high-priority projects. With the Office of the Vice President for Research, we will be communicating more information in the coming month.
ORCD provides documentation for account setup, resource location, and detailed assistance, and can help with computing purchases via orcd-help@mit.edu. Office hours, training classes, and individual group meetings are available to help researchers.
Finally, ORCD awards computing resources to complete AI-related projects through its Seed Fund Awards. Round 2 proposals are due Oct. 1, 2025.
ORCD announces updates in our monthly newsletter. MIT users can subscribe here.
What We’re Reading
- Lessons learned around bringing AI into a class.
- Even more GPUs in Holyoke, MA ( for Lincoln Laboratory projects )
- Even more transistors for AI.
- Even more AI coding smarts. Consensus seems to be GROK related (or Claude). It worked well for parsing Slurm scontrol output!
ORCD Fall Training Schedule
ORCD will be teaching multiple classes to members of the MIT community during the fall of 2025 at MIT.
- Introduction to Engaging:
- Tuesday, October 14, 2-4 PM
- Wednesday, November 12, 10 AM - 12PM
- Introduction to Parallel Programming Series:
- Parallel Programming with OpenMP: Wednesday, October 22, 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
- Distributed Computing with MPI: Wednesday, October 22, 2 - 4 PM
- GPU Programming with CUDA: Thursday, October 23, 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
- Distributed Deep Learning: Thursday, October 23, 2 - 4 PM
See the 2025 fall classes page on ORCD’s website for more information and signup instructions.