Dear ORCD-All,

Things for ORCD have been hectic: our top priority remains hiring a Platform Infrastructure and Data Services (PIDS) Director and a Project Manager.  James and Heather have gone through many applications and will start interviews soon.

At the same time, several groups have approached us about adding computing or storage to our shared Engaging system.  We encourage this: the sharing increases the use of MIT computing and storage resources, and having everything under one roof makes managing easier.  This gives Chris, James, and Paul plenty to do.

Lincoln Lab’s SuperCloud machine remains popular, especially with conferences approaching, and Lauren holds office hours, consults with users, and appears in videos on how to use the machine best.

The MIT Research community keeps us very busy.

Some things have come to our attention:

• We’ve heard the frustration in certain quarters about hyper scaler (AWS, Google, Microsoft) billing as hard to understand, at best, for accounts set up using a credit card or purchase order.  IS&T has a portal that connects your hyper scaler account with an MIT account with a charging limit and aims to make user charges easier to understand.  If you don’t currently use it, please give it a try. You can ask for help at servicedesk@mit.edu.
• Some fields have started to require an Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier, ORCID, to accompany submissions to journals and conferences.  Having an ORCID gives a researcher name flexibility and makes access to their publications easier.  Find out more here.

Enjoy Spring!

Peter

Above the Fold

• President Kornbluth’s inauguration speech, “Join us for something important and new.”

Announcements

• Colleagues and heavy SuperCloud suers in the Kavli Institute may have observed a star being swallowed by its Sun.
• IBM’s Inspiring Quantum Summit, video here.
• The deepest fish ever recorded.  Science pictures from Nature.

Dear ORCD Community,

In this year’s budget cycle, ORCD received support for the ORCD Secure Research Data Enclave (OSRDE) and our “Get Well Plan” to dramatically improve the quality, capacity and reliability of our shared clusters.  We will begin design work and engage the CRCD for advice in the coming months.  Great news!

ORCD has also partnered with the MIT Climate Sustainability Consortium, MCSC, to understand our data center energy use and efficiency.  We have engaged two UROP students, Wendy Zhang and Yichen Gao who will work with us over the Spring term and hopefully beyond.

Peter

Above the Fold

• Work with ORCD:
  • Director of Platforms, Infrastructure and Data Services
  • Program Administrator

Announcements

• For GPU fans, Chris Hill lost power at his house and sent this video of his generator producing 5.7 kW, about the same power as eight A100s.

The noise level is 95 dB, also aapproximately eight A100s.  Think about that…

• More quantum wormhole drama from Quanta Magazine.
• QuEra is a quantum computing startup spun out of MIT that offers access to their 256 qubit quantum simulator via AWS.   They have just partnered with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center to bring quantum computing into the DOE research ecosystem.

Dear ORCD Community,

We have been busy since the first of the year.  First, Monday will be our first day in the news offices at 105 Broadway, 7th floor.  We’ll be ready for visitors soon.  In the meantime, here is a picture with ORCD Executive Director James Cuff and Space Administrator Greg Raposa  off to the left:

We have a big table for office hours.  I’ll order a good coffee machine,

ORCD started as ORC, and the last D (for Data) came later when we recognized an urgent need for secure storage across the research enterprise.  In addition to storing data generated by computations and experiments, MIT researchers gain access to many different data sets that come with Data Use Agreements that require security beyond what MIT has in on-campus data centers and at MGHPCC.  These requirements continue to “evolve” (i.e., get more onerous).  At the same time, MIT researchers increasingly need to make their data available outside MIT as part of Data Management Plans required for federal funding (as always, please get in touch with Interim Head of Data and Specialized Services Amy Nurrnberger or go here for help. These imperatives combine to make the D in ORCD our top priority in the near term (as well as keeping people from calling us “orcs”).

Peter

Above the Fold

• Good article about chatGPT and lossy compression

Of possible interest

• Prof. Dennis Whyte talks about fusion with Lex Friedman here
• World Wide Web Consortium is now a public-interest nonprofit organization
• Many in business think of computing hardware as lasting about three years.  Meta begs to differ.