2020 - A year full of changes 2020 began somewhat normally, except that the world was coming to grips with a global pandemic. By February plans were being formed for a probable change to 100% remote work for FASRC staff. This became a reality in March and we bid our offices in '38' farewell for some indeterminate time. This…
Blog
A Retrospective Odyssey
by Paul Edmon December 2, 2020 Back in 2008, the Odyssey supercomputer was installed on the seventh floor of the Markely-Boston co-location data center at 1 Summer Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Until this point Harvard had not really been a player in the realm of supercomputing, unlike other major universities who had been doing so for decades. However with Odyssey Harvard…
Congratulations to Madelyn Cain for JobID 1!
by Paul Edmon, September 1, 2020 One of the features of our scheduling software, Slurm, is that it has a max JobID of 67,043,328 (for the fascinating reason why see the Slurm docs). This means that when we hit that limit the JobID rolls over to 1 and starts counting again from there. We thought this would be a fun…
Summer 2020 datacenter consolidation
On-going work July - ? in our Boston data center Due to scheduling of resources around pandemic guidelines and rules, as well as scheduling with the data center and vendors, an end date is not yet known. As part of cost-savings plans, FASRC and Harvard Medical School will be combining space in our Boston data center. This allows FASRC, HMS,…
Holidays and Tech: Your first computer
A bit of fun before the holiday break. One thing that people in our profession can count on is 'your first computer'. There is one for each of us, and generally they hold a special place in our hearts and very often they're tied to holidays or birthdays. We did an impromptu survey of FASRC (as well as with some…
Cannon makes super-computing Top 500 List
The November 2019 Top 500 List has just added Cannon, and we're very pleased to say we've ranked #144 overall and # 7 on the US academic list. We and the Harvard FAS are very proud to have Cannon in such a prominent position in the list. It demonstrates Harvard's commitment to pushing the envelope to provide its researchers with…
On Artificial Intelligence
by Paul Edmon, November 20, 2019 Currently in the realm of computer science there is no hotter topic than Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). However as this slide deck from Professor Arvind Narayanan at Princeton notes there is also a lot of snake oil going around too. Thus an understanding of AI is important in our current day…
Harvard/Yale meetup at MGHPCC
by Maggie McFee - Nov. 13, 2019 While attending the PEARC conference, Maggie and Austin ran into some of our Yale Research Computing counterparts: Kaylea, Robert, and Ben. While there's an intense sports rivalry between the two schools, this wasn't the case with our RC departments. We really hit it off well and we talked about our similarities, differences,…
What’s Old is New Again
by Paul Edmon, November 4, 2019 As Solomon said "there is nothing new under the sun", and so it is with archival technology. Hollywood it seems has stumbled on the trick of etching glass to store data for long term (i.e. centuries). Fun thing is this is a return to previous methods of storage. A general rule about data, the…
A Cautionary Tale
by Paul Edmon, October 16, 2019 First, in order to not bury the lede, if you are a chemist using or have used the "Willoughby-Hoye" python scripts please be advised that there is a bug which may impact your results. It is advised that you re-verify your results with the updated patched version. See these articles for more details: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216…
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