Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2024-09-30 The meeting was called to order at 19:33 by innaavo. In attendance were Student keyholders: alwinfy, innaavo, arjunjb, nmorgan, turino14, rgabriel, xy Associate keyholders: scj643, almonds, bbaren Members: manjola, dtemkin, skylarh, joliehan, suufi Guests: dianetc Administrivia: alwinfy: What's poppin innaavo: Yay! Happy BBQ end! innaavo: I wanted to bring up that some of the alums wanted to say thank-you/contribute to SIPB. What do you think about sending an email to sipb@ telling them to donate? [various]: Sounds good innaavo: I just wanted to get some input alwinfy: You're the supreme dictator. You say jump, we say how high almonds: Would they donate to a specific place? alwinfy: We have an existing donations cost-object scj643: Can we allocate for bowls for the office? almonds: We could get soap and wash them in the bathroom next door, being sure no actual food goes into the sink. innaavo: Could we get cutesy bowls with a bunch of different designs? scj643: I'd like the Target bowls, they're less likely to break alwinfy: We should get bowls that aren't plastic - they're not durable. They're fine for being dropped but they get bendy and scratched up, and don't play nice against hot water - we'll be making ramen in them. scj643: Target bowls are like 50ยข each. alwinfy: We have the cash, though! innaavo: How about we put it to a vote? [vote goes 6-1 in favor of ceramic] scj643: Let's do dish soap in there too. [discussion about "how much could four bowls cost? $100?"] innaavo: Let's do $50. alwinfy: Seconded. Motion to white ballot turino14: Seconded [motion passes by white-ballot] nmorgan: I talked to Justice a while back about allocating for Ark. He suggested getting a server for testing for people without good local hardware. scj643: How long do we need it for? nmorgan: For the project, we're hoping to push it out by end of next year - I don't know what we'll need at that time, I want to talk to almonds about that. For testing, a 3080 would be more than suitable, and Justice suggested $3000 for it. scj643: Would a 2080 not suffice? almonds: We can talk about this later but how powerful of an LLM do you need for this? nmorgan: We're looking at about 7b and things on that size. We're just testing now, though, not running anything giant. almonds: In the meantime you can use the LLMs dev-0 server. [points to BOSS-BABY] nmorgan: That one has an AMD GPU. We need CUDA. nmorgan: We're experimenting with certain inference engines, which have to use CUDA. It's possible, but the experience might suck. scj643: Make the donation email about buying us an H100. manjola: We can have a wishlist. innaavo: How do we feel about doing events for October? Like a hackathon or a movie night or something. scj643: Are we looking for themes right now? innaavo: Just a good day right now - a theme later. almonds: Another barbeque with alums... innaavo: How's the last week of October? Or the week before? [discussion of timetabling] innaavo: Let's do a Thursday night, maybe? alwinfy: How about Thursday the 24th? bbaren: Maybe Chinese from Zoe's. We'll tip generously. innaavo: We can hang out in the office, maybe put a movie on? innaavo: Let's dormspam it out maybe next week. Project Reports: scj643: I'd like to get the ball rolling once again on getting a Vault server. (It needs a dual power supply and TPM.) I'm no longer talking to Dell, so, rgabriel: We can also get a non-Dell server... scj643: Can someone help find that, though? I tried contacting SuperMicro (one of their distributors) and we haven't heard back. bbaren: Aren't we supposed to order through GovConnection? Or is that 6 years out of date? [discussion of GovConnection] almonds: SIPB LLMs continues. I might have forgotten to mention a couple weeks ago that we set up an Ollama server at LLMS-DEV-0.MIT.EDU. And then last LLMs meeting, I installed Mixtral, the same model on BOSS-TODDLER, as well as a handful of other neat models. What's nice about this interface is that you can switch between models. If you want an account, ask at sipb-llms@mit.edu. [demonstration on the Jitsi of the LLMs site] nmorgan: Ark continues; we had a new member onboarded recently. We're still working on finding a suitable solution for storing information that doesn't make the LLM forget transiently. dtemkin: CourseRoad continues. We've fixed the login thing that's been annoying people for months now, and we've got new colors! The /dev endpoint has both of these, and we'll be dormspamming about it soon to not piss people off. alwinfy: Holy shit... almonds: HWOps continues. We finally removed half the UPS cells from 2006 that had been on our to-do list for years. I'm impressed that they're gone now and grateful for Facilities. We also moved LIMEKILLER, SIPB's IPv6 server, and set up one of the KVMs on the KRONOS server rack. rgabriel: Matrix continues. I'm hoping to start meetings back up Mondays at 18:30 - psvenk and almonds at least are also in on this. skylarh: Eventful continues to not continue - we are still waiting on people emailing back. I'm drafting an email to poke the head of CPW to see if they'd be interested in using the Eventful timeline. I'm also considering adapting it to be used for scheduling as well as displaying schedules, but that hasn't really been explored yet. alwinfy: Do you want a meeting in the office for this? skylarh: Let's say this Thursday (10/3) at 5pm. suufi: OpenGrades needs to be switched over to HTTPS! innaavo: We'll be starting Cluedumps back up soon! During the year, if we have interest in people who want to plan them. I'll send another one out to the frosh who said they were interested, but if there's a talk you want to see done, or a talk you want to give, let me know! scj643: Maybe I'll give a PKI talk again? alwinfy: Maybe consider mailing out to sipb@? We have a lot of cruft who'd probably be willing to give one Other: skylarh: I'm tired... dtemkin: Hi tired! innaavo: I think we're getting pretty busy right now alwinfy: We're all hosed... scj643: [unemployedly] Speak for yourself! Other Other: dtemkin: The election's sooner than you think! scj643: Weekly reminder to not work for Dell. The meeting was adjourned at 20:05. The meeting was un-adjourned at 20:10. Administrivia (again): innaavo: Oh yeah! I'd like to nominate dtemkin for keyholdership. alwinfy, nmorgan, arjunjb: Seconded dtemkin: I accept. The meeting was re-adjourned at 20:12. Minutes taken by alwinfy, almonds, innaavo and submitted by alwinfy.