Reflections on a New Year
Happy New Year from ORCD!
2023 was a busy year for ORCD, with new hires to round out our team, progress on fixing our technical debt, moving our “Get Well” plan forward, and signing a strategic memorandum with our colleagues at OpenMind. We’re looking forward to building on that momentum in 2024.
The ORCD team is preparing to launch searches for multiple positions to support our infrastructure, research community-facing, and administrative teams. We’re excited to expand our small but mighty crew and our capacity to provide services to the MIT community. We’ll share our job postings in this newsletter and on the jobs page of our website when they’re announced.
Above the Fold
-
MIT group releases white papers on governance of AI here. This is important and it is good MIT leads this effort.
- More stuff hits the Earth than you think…
What We’re Reading
- Three way fight between MIT, Eversource, and Cambridge heats up. You can see a great picture of the site, which is right next to our ORCD offices.
- Department of It-Had-To-Happen: AI created avatars will deliver the nightly news.
- MIT bought the Volpe site from the GSA in 2017 for $750M. There is a story that Volpe was supposed to be the site of Mission Control, but here is the real story.
- Trouble in paradise: scale exascale computers
Events Around Campus
- Practical High Performance Computing: Scaling Beyond your Laptop (12.091/12. 12.391)
Instructors: Lauren Milechin (MIT ORCD), Julie Mullen (Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center), Chris Hill (MIT ORCD)
Teaching Staff: Shaohao Chen
Schedule: 10am-1pm, January 16, 18, 23, 25
Location: 45-804
Are you interested in learning how to use High Performance Computing resources to scale your application or code? This January during IAP we will be offering the Practical High Performance Computing: Scaling Beyond your Laptop class to help get you started. The focus of this workshop is to introduce the role of High Performance Computing (HPC, aka supercomputing) in research. We will discuss the fields where HPC is used and provide concrete examples where we describe the strategies used to scale applications to hundreds of processors. Students will learn when to scale from their laptops to HPC, what challenges that introduces, and how to address those challenges with efficient HPC workflows. Students should bring an existing research problem/application that they would like to scale as a project.
Anyone interested in attending should fill out this form: https://forms.gle/MtFHQtNv9DvX2gDk9. Students looking to take this class for credit should also sign up for 12.091/12.391. Please sign up by January 9, space is limited. If you have any questions please send an email to Lauren Milechin at milechin@mit.edu.
- Class Topics:
- January 16: Introduction to Supercomputing Workflows and Systems
- January 18: Serial Optimization and Parallel Speedup
- January 23: Building and Running Parallel Workflows
- January 25: Distributed Computing
- Class Topics:
- IAP workshops from the MIT Libraries, including:
- January 9, 2024: Data Bites: Writing Better READMEs
- January 10, 2024: NIH Data Management and Sharing Plans: What & How
- January 11, 2024: Data Bites: Using the Dryad Data Repository
- January 16, 2024: Data Bites: Backing Up Your Stuff
- January 17, 2024: Data Management for Postdocs and Research Scientists
- January 18, 2024: Data Bites: Making Your Code Citable with GitHub and Zenodo
- January 22, 2024: Data Management: File Organization
- January 23, 2024: Carpentries@MIT: UnixShell/Python/Git