What’s new

October 19, 2026

  • The Open On Demand (OOD) web portal to Ada is now available as a beta feature at https://ood.middlebury.edu. OOD enables you to access your files, launch jobs, open a shell and launch interactive applications, like VS Code, Jupyter and RStudio, from your web browser. Read more here.
  • Lmod, a newer module system used at many other HPC centers, is available as an opt-in beta feature. It uses the same module commands, adds module spider for searching for software, and is required for much of the newer software on Ada, including additional versions of R and GCC, and Miniforge. Read more here.
  • Apptainer (recommended for most users) and Podman are available as beta features for running software packaged as containers, e.g., images from Docker Hub. Read more here.
  • Spack, a package manager designed for HPC, is available as a beta feature for installing scientific applications and libraries in your own account. Read more here.
  • NVLink direct GPU-to-GPU communication cards are now installed in node002.
  • Multiple updates to the network configuration to improve stability and performance.

What’s new in August 2026: Node local storage

August 17, 2026

The local SSDs on each node have been re-enabled. These fast local drives, which don’t require any network transfers, are a good place to store temporary files (up to ~100GB) that are only needed during the execution of that one job. The easiest way to access the local storage is via the $JOB_TMPDIR environment variable, which points to a directory automatically created for each job by SLURM, and automatically cleaned up when the job finishes. Read more here.