About BC Research Services
Research Services provides consultation, training, and tutorials to support computing and research at Boston College. The Research Services staff has expertise in statistics, statistical software, qualitative research, surveys, GIS, scientific computation, data analysis, computational mathematics, and visualization. We also provide assistance with coding, databases, Web technologies, and administration and consultation for research oriented computing hardware based within the departments and institutes.
Announcements
Andromeda Support Help Sessions
Research Services is available to assist with Andromeda. We also offer walk-in office hours for support with cluster-related questions.
Time:
Monday (Online): 1:00-2:00 p.m.
Thursday (Hybrid): 1:30-3:00 p.m.
Location:
Online Meeting (Monday and Thursday): https://meet.google.com/qvh-kojm-vuv
In-person Support (Thursday): O’Neill Library 528 (ITS Conference Room)
Recent Update (Released on August 11)
Dear Andromeda Researchers
I just wanted to send a friendly reminder that large computational jobs or processes should not be run on the login node. The login node is the gateway to the cluster and is not provisioned to run heavy compute jobs. It has only 8 core and 96GB of RAM. For script testing we do have an interactive sessions which will allow you to test scripts on our more high-powered compute nodes. When a job or process consumes too many resources the login node becomes unresponsive and folks are not able to login, additionally other key services may fail.
If you are not sure if you are executing processes that are too large for the login node please let us know and we will be happy to show you how to submit jobs via Slurm or launch interactive sessions.
We have also noticed that many of the processes on login node have been submitted/executed by AI agents. This makes applying remedies problematic because when we kill a process that is using large amounts of CPU or memory the agent often launches a new job to replace the killed process. Please do not allow or instruct an AI agent or coding tool to launch jobs autonomously on Andromeda.
We are always willing to assist if you have questions. Feel free to submit a ticket using bc.edu/researchhelp.
Thanks
Matt
HPC Services Overview
Andromeda is in a healthy state.
The old cluster (“Andromeda 1”) has been permanently offline since 09/15/2025.
If you have any questions or require assistance, please reach out to us via Research Help.