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.