Basic Computing Services (subMIT) Review

Thursday 22 May 2025, 13:00 → 15:35 America/New_York

Building 24-506 (MIT)

Zoom connection available at

https://mit.zoom.us/j/96743699673?pwd=b3h2Q3c3cVQwYW12blhMUG5SWXZCZz09

13:00 → 13:10 Opening Remarks from the Steering Committee

Speaker: Christoph Paus (MIT)

13:10 → 13:25 Overview: The purpose and impact of SubMIT

• What is the problem we are trying to solve
• System usage: total and weekly users, by department etc. …
• Public presence: Web page, Paper on SubMIT, Publications with SubMIT, …

Speaker: David Walter

13:25 → 13:40 User Workflows on SubMIT

• Account creation and login
• Access through JupyterHub or terminal
• Conda, Containers, singularity
• Batch computing using slurm, htcondor
• External resources and how to access them

Speaker: Luca Lavezzo (MIt)

13:40 → 13:55 Hardware resources and performance

• Hardware resources, compute, network, ...
• status, capacity, usage, ...
• What resources make SubMIT attractive
• Benchmarking of the system, analysis challenge

Speaker: Mariarosaria D'Alfonso (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

13:55 → 14:05 Break

14:05 → 14:20 User support

• Communication channels: Stack, email, …
• Chatbot
• User's guide
• Emails to tickets analysis
• How the community evolves/grows

Speaker: Marianne Moore (MIT)

14:20 → 14:35 Engagement with the user community

• SubMIT workshop, tutorials, user meetings
• Classroom usage, workshops hold at MIT using SubMIT resources
• Customization and user requests:
  • OpenMPI, Mathematica, Globus;
  • Groups: priority access on purchased hardware, storages, webpage
  • Dropbox like storage? We didn’t follow up on that
• Current limitations and open challenges
  • Balancing restrictions/rules with fair share usage

Speaker: Matthew Heine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

14:35 → 14:50 Stable long term operations & outlook

• What did we learn the last year(s)
• Software upgrades policy
• The future of SubMIT
  • Control groups (partially done): Limit abuse of the system, include CephFS machines in Slurm pool, …
  • Take control over LDAP server (This will allow us to…)
  • Removal of old data (/ceph)

Speaker: Zhangqier Wang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

14:50 → 15:00 Discussion & feedback