MKI provides Internet access for a few hundred machines, from Raspberry Pis to GPU servers, oscilloscopes to petabyte-scale file servers, with an MKI-maintained local area network which is a subnet of the MIT campus network. This subnet spans two buildings, 37 on Main Campus and NE83 just off campus, and provides Gigabit Ethernet connections to the desktop, with 10 Gigabit Ethernet to major servers and a 10 GbE backbone. Wireless networking service is provided by MIT’s Information Systems and Technology department.

General Description

  • About a hundred unix and linux machines are grouped as “spacenet” and share user accounts. Most of those machines export filesystems which are automounted amongst all the spacenet machines, facilitating the sharing and processing of data.
  • A number of other computers, both workstations and servers, are not part of spacenet but are used independently by particular projects for data processing or lab work. In addition, there are many dozens of personal computers, both desktops and laptops, on the network. Most personal computers at MKI run MacOS.
  • MKI also maintains a High Performance Computing cluster for large computational projects. This system has about a thousand cores and a petabyte of disk space.
  • Finally, the MKI network has a couple dozen printers (mostly workgroup sized color laser printers), one or two 3D printers, several photocopiers, and a few miscellaneous devices such as networked oscilloscopes.
  • While part of MKI, the LIGO Project is located in buildings NW17 and NW22, and its subnet is managed by IS&T, not by MKI staff.

Services

Email

MKI recommends that people use MIT’s mail services, run by IS&T. Their email infrastructure provides reliable service and good spam filtering, and doesn’t scour your emails for marketing purposes.

Web

MKI’s primary web server is space.mit.edu, but there are numerous other web servers for various projects.

FTP

MKI provides an anonymous FTP server which can be used to make data available to the general public. However, if you have large quantities (over a gigabyte) of data that you think should be made available via FTP, you will probably need to use another server. Either way, see Kenton Phillips <kenton@space.mit.edu>.

Resources

General Computing

Historically most of the computers in the department have been the property of individual projects. As such they are primarily intended for use by those projects, and users will need to inquire with their supervisors or fellow researchers about which machines to use to do their work. However, we are currently (August 2020) in the process of planning to install a set of machines for general-access computing.

High Performance Computing

Access to the HPC cluster is available upon request.