Shared Computing

General purpose shell access

login.csail.mit.edu (more information) is available for general purpose access. It should be used for computationally non-intensive tasks, such as reading email, editing text files, compilation of small source packages, etc. It should not be used for long running or computationally demanding processes.

OpenStack

TIG maintains an OpenStack based ‘cloud’ platform for all lab members.

OpenStack is a free and open software suite for providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) both for private clouds like we’re implementing and large public clouds. We are currently using “Nova” compute services, “Keystone” identity service, “Horizon” web dashboard, “Cinder” volume service,“Glance” image management,“Neutron” networking service, and “Heat” orchestration service. We are currently using the “Mitaka” release (aka 2016.1 released May 2016) 16.04LTS “Xenial” with KVM as the virtualization layer. We also have an OpenStack “Swift” and AWS S3 compatible object store based on [Ceph] with 168TB available storage (505TB raw less 3x replication)

As of June 2018 we have 40 physical nodes, with 1720 cores and 11T RAM.

Detailed information on account self-signup and usage is available on the OpenStack page.

SLURM Compute Cluster

TIG maintains a SLURM compute cluster for automated allocation of GPU and CPU compute resources. Usage information is available on the SLURM page.