DLCI and Commercial Resources

A number of DLCI groups operate dedicated computational resources for their own communities, and commercial options are also available.

TIG Shared Computing

TIG shared computing, operated by the CSAIL infrastructure group, consists of an Openstack cluster and a Slurm cluster for general use by members of CSAIL. The Openstack environment supports full virtual machines. The Slurm cluster supports Singularity as a container engine for Docker containers. Additional compute and storage resources can be purchased by PIs to support group specific needs.

Further information and support is available at help@csail.mit.edu.

LNS Computing

The Laboratory for Nuclear Science in Physics operates computing resources that are available to researchers within LNS.

Further information and support is available from pra@mit.edu.

Kavli Computing

The MIT Kavli Institute operates a cluster for astrophysics research. The cluster uses the Slurm resource scheduler and is available for use by Kavli researchers.

Koch Bioinformatics

Koch operates a bioinformatics facility which specializes in processing needs of computational biologists.

subMIT

Open to all members of the Physics Department, subMIT provides specialized physics computing support along with access to a login pool connected to a local SLURM cluster and HTCondor access to large-scale external resources, including the Open Science Grid, CMS Tier 2/3, and the Lattice QCD cluster. In addition to traditional CPU nodes, the internal SLURM cluster includes specialized hardware such as GPUs, high-density (hundreds of cores per node), high-memory CPU nodes, fast NVMe scratch space, and a 100 Gbit/s network. Further information is available at https://submit.mit.edu/ or submit-help@mit.edu.

SuperCloud

The SuperCloud system is a collaboration with MIT Lincoln Laboratory on a shared facility that is optimized for streamlining open research collaborations with Lincoln Laboratory (e.g.,  AIA, BW, CQE, Haystack, HPEC, ISN). The facility prioritizes access for Lincoln Laboratory collaborators. Further information and support is available at supercloud@mit.edu.

Features:

  • Compute power: The latest SuperCloud system has more than 16,000 x86 CPU cores and more than 850 NVidia Volta GPUs in total.
  • Hardware access: Hardware access is through the Slurm resource scheduler that supports batch and interactive workload and allows dedicated reservations.
  • Portal: A custom, web-based portal supporting Jupyter notebooks is available.
  • Software: A wide range of standard software is available and the Docker compatible Singularity container tool is supported.

Commercial Cloud Based Resources

Many commercial cloud-based resources are available, and some are commonly used at MIT.

  • MIT Cost Object Cloud Accounts: Provides a central location for creating standard AWS, Google or Microsoft commercial cloud provider accounts that are tied to cost objects and projects. Enables tracking of expenses for different projects.
  • Google Colab: Provides a free base service that can be very useful for modest workloads, for example in classes.
  • Binder: Provides free virtual machines that can be flexibly configured by providing a Github repository with software setup instructions.
  • Code Ocean: Highly customizable cloud based virtual machine system. Machines in Code Ocean are direct charged and performance is more predictable than free services.

The ORCD team is also experimenting with a simplified AWS system called RONIN, designed to support university research and teaching needs. If you are interested in testing RONIN, contact ORCD.

Major Cloud Provider Credits Program

Most cloud providers provide useful compute and data credits programs for educational and research needs.