The Infrastructure Group
The Infrastructure Group (TIG) provides service-oriented computing, communications and operations assistance to support the world-class research underway at CSAIL. On the technical side, TIG handles everything from maintaining and monitoring a complex computing infrastructure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to ensuring lab members can access cutting-edge computing services and in-person support. TIG maintains the lab’s four on-premises data centers as well as hosting in off-premises facilities. Additionally, TIG actively promotes CSAIL research to the broader MIT community, reputable news organizations and the general public via a full-range of media relations and communications services.
The CSAIL Slurm cluster has been restored to normal operation.
For more information about last week’s events, see: Cluster Outage September 2025.
Please subscribe to SLURM-announce to receive important notices by e-mail.
All CSAIL/Linux systems now require DUO Multi-factor Authentication.
See our ssh documentation for important information on working with DUO and minimizing its impacts on existing workflows especially our recommended client configurations. Note CSAIL/Ubuntu systems already have this recommended configuration by default.
Every two months, the whole cluster will be reserved for necessary maintenance. The downtime window begins at 6:00am, and ends when we have finished any necessary work.
On July 31, CSAIL NFS shared scratch filesystems were cleaned out.
Files which had not been accessed in more than 366 days were deleted.
Files belonging to users who no longer have active CSAIL accounts (and
thus are unable to clean up for themselves) were also deleted.
This cleanup affected only the /data/scratch and /data/scratch-oc40
filesystems.
Scratch filesystems do not have backups or snapshots, so once deleted
these files cannot be recovered.
A list of deleted files in each filesystem has been left in a file named
OLDFILES.DELETED.
On April 30th, 2025, TIG’s support for CSAIL Ubuntu 20.04 will end. Please see https://tig.csail.mit.edu/operating-systems/csail-linux/linux-install/#installation-new-or-old-host for reinstallation instructions. Contact help@csail.mit.edu with any questions.
Support
TIG is generally available Mon - Fri, 9 AM - 6 PM US/Eastern Time following the recognized Institute Holidays and Special Holiday calendar.
If you would like to open a support case regarding Computing or Facilities related issues, sending an email to the address below will create a trouble tracking ticket in which we will promptly respond to.
E-mail: help@csail.mit.edu
Walk-in
We are located on the second floor of the Stata Center, in 32-270.
TIG is physically on site Mon - Fri, 9 AM - 5 PM US/Eastern Time. If the doors are closed, there is a doorbell at the handle to the doors. Just give us a ring and we’ll be happy to see you and assist if we are available.
Phone
Creating a ticket via e-mail to help@csail.mit.edu is always preferred, but you can also reach us by phone.
We are available Mon - Fri, 9 AM - 6 PM US/Eastern Time. If we are unavailable or it’s during off business hours, we recommend sending mail to help@csail.mit.edu. You can also leave a voice mail.
TIG Hotline: 617-253-8304
To request an emergency repair or report an emergency that endangers MIT property, call:
MIT Factilites 617-253-4948