Last Friday, the PPC group hosted the annual SubMIT workshop, a one-day workshop discussing the SubMIT computing cluster which supports the research computing needs of the physics department here at MIT. In the last year, the SubMIT cluster has surpassed 600 users and this workshop was an opportunity to connect with some of the more active users to discuss plans and get feedback. The workshop started with several talks from the main SubMIT developers, moved into some tutorial sessions and ended on a high with 10 reports from various users on how they utilize the system for their own research.
One of SubMIT’s main selling points is its ease of use and that it is open to anyone with an MIT account. As stated on the SubMIT home page, the system was designed to support the research done by members of the physics department which was highlighted in the user talks. However, in addition, the SubMIT cluster has been expanded to support many classes, such as 8.02 (E&M) or 8.284 (Modern Astrophysics), as well as selected users from other departments. Several of these users presented on their research with one stating that, “the computing cluster for my department has a significant fee, so the SubMIT cluster became essential in order to get access to the computing power necessary to complete my thesis.”
In addition to the basic user support, the main discussions focused on software/environments and how to properly scale them using the batch computing systems available through SubMIT. Most users have conda environments which support their needs but several required workflows that extended beyond these basic setups. There was a lot of interest in the MIT Tier2 (T2) instance of CVMFS and how this allowed them to expand their software and computing tasks to make use of all MIT resources. This increased coverage allows users to better use tools like dask or snakemake which have been used further parallelize and speed up work through SubMIT’s slurm cluster.
Overall, the workshop had some great discussions and helped to connect the SubMIT developers to its users. The SubMIT team will continue to support research in particular physics research across MIT while upgrading the system to AlmaLinux9 in the coming months. Until next year, keep submitting!