Hello world!

Hello from the Office of Research Computing and Data – ORCD.

Our official start date is not until Sept. 1, 2022.  We write to introduce ourselves to the MIT Community and share some early thoughts on ORCD.

On May 5, 2022, VPR Maria Zuber announced the formation of ORCD with Peter as MIT’s launch director.  OCRD grew out of a need for MIT to add resources to research computing and data access across all of MIT.  While MIT has substantial research computing resources, access, awareness, and confidence in base resources are uneven across researchers. Some groups with computing resources still rely on their researchers to serve as system administrators. We need to grow outreach and engagement efforts to help the full spectrum of MIT researchers, starting or established, transition to new systems or methods.

Over the summer, the ORCD team is coalescing around goals for the coming year, including the following:

  1. Develop the principles that will lead to a “computing bill of rights,” with the overarching goal of creating equitable access to research computing resources for all members of our research community.
  2. Develop a financial model and raise funds to support our first goal.
  3. Inform the MIT community about our research computing and data resources and how to use them.
  4. Hire an executive director to partner with internal and external users, vendors, and other interested parties.  Our search for this member of the ORCD team has started, and you can learn more about this role here.  Please share this fantastic opportunity with colleagues and others who may be considering a new challenge.
  5. Form an advisory committee with representatives from all five schools, the college, VPR, IS&T, and libraries to advise and guide the ORCD Team, serve as local resources to the units they represent and guide forming an appropriate participatory overall governance structure.

We will continue communicating with you regularly using this mailing list.

Please share this message with anyone you think may be interested or send us their name to add to our list.