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 July 27)
Dear Andromeda Community,
Some of you may have noticed that the login node became unresponsive for two distinct periods Wednesday evening. The root cause of the issue is that an autonomous AI agent was executing processes on the login node that consumed available CPU resources. Our efforts to resolve the issue were complicated because the agent would relaunch the process shortly after our system administrators killed it.
In the short term we have taken steps to mitigate saturation of the login node.
In the bigger picture autonomous AI agents pose a unique risk in HPC environments for a variety of reasons, in particular, they are a risk to the contents of the shared file system. At this time we ask all users not to let AI agents launch jobs, processes or other executables. That is, only humans are allowed to submit jobs on Andromeda. If we discover jobs launched by AI agents or similar we will first kill the jobs and then reach out to the user with further guidance.
We understand that AI coding tools and agents can greatly speed up research and we have benefitted from the efficiency gains by these tools. Our goal is to find a solution that allows researchers to safely benefit from the AI tools and products. The Research Service team is working with their ITS colleagues to develop a set of technical guardrails, policy guidelines and educational resources.
This is an active area of development of Research Computing units nationwide. Although many unique solutions exist there is a consensus that humans remain “in the loop” and general prohibitions against allowing AI agents to submit jobs or start processes on HPC systems.
Thank you for your cooperation in maintaining the integrity and stability of the Andromeda Cluster.
Matt Gregas, PhD
Research Services
Boston College
PS: As a reminder any installed software needs to be approved by the Boston College Get Tech committee. This is required by ITS policy.
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.