User-friendly high-performance computing, thanks to MIT Lincoln Lab

High-performance computing systems might seem like the perfect tool for big data jobs, but they're not readily available and are notoriously difficult to use – especially for who haven't learned to write batch programming scripts for HPC systems the way engineers had been taught to do. As a result, most researchers have depended on high-end desktop systems, but today's data-intensive research means those systems can no longer deliver adequate performance.

To make it easier for researchers to access HPC resources, the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center at MIT has developed tools and training to bring HPC capabilities to desktops and laptops.  The effort draws on lessons learned from the development of the MIT SuperCloud, a unified platform of four large computing ecosystems: supercomputing, enterprise computing, big data and traditional databases.