Earlier this month, the new year was ushered in by the annual Basic Computing Services in the Physics Department workshop. The subMIT Project Lead, Joshua Bendavid, reflected on the day’s events, “The workshop was a great opportunity to take stock of the current state of the project and user community, provide further resources and education for users, and plan for ongoing developments and future improvements. We look forward to continuing discussions in the monthly Users Group meetings throughout the year.”

Amidst a series of informative talks, the subMIT team worked with both in-person and online attendees in the hands-on tutorial session. After lunch, the executive director of the MIT Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD) , Dr. James Cuff, gave a presentation with anecdotes of his history in high-performance computing as well as some initial findings and impressions from his first few months here at MIT. This can be summarized by Cuff’s enthusiastic statement, “there are unlimited opportunities for collaboration and coordination of research computing services, systems and talent across the university.”

As snow began to fall, the diverse talks by subMIT User Group representatives highlighted both the excellent physics being performed on subMIT as well as valuable feedback of how subMIT can be further improved to meet the varied user needs. Of the workshop, subMIT Deputy Project Team Lead, Matthew Heine said, “It was a fitting way to kick off the new year. In particular, seeing the great physics being done on subMIT as showcased in the user group talks allowed reflection on all the hard work performed by the users and the subMIT team over the past year. And the active discussions and user feedback let us look forward exciting improvements to come this year.” Thank you to all participants and contributors for making this year’s workshop a success.