Welcome/ Welcome Back COEIT Retrievers!

COEIT Advisors are here to help new and returning COEIT students!

If you need help with a schedule adjustment or have general questions please see the information below for the various ways to connect with a COEIT Advisor.

ALL Computer Science and Engineering Majors/ Pre-Majors & First Semester IS/BTA Freshmen:

Schedule an online or in person appointment here.

For quick questions email:  coeitadvising@umbc.edu

Attend Weekday Walk In Advising- Sign in Sheet Located outside of ITE 204*:

Thursday, August 20th  - Friday, September 4th:  10:00 - 12:00 & 1:00 - 3:00

*Please bring your laptop to Walk In Advising if you need to make schedule adjustments. 


Information Systems & BTA Transfer Students and Continuing Students:
Please consult advising Information for the IS Department here

Welcome/ Welcome Back COEIT Retrievers!

COEIT Advisors are here to help new and returning COEIT students!

If you need help with a schedule adjustment or have general questions please see the information below for the various ways to connect with a COEIT Advisor.

ALL Computer Science and Engineering Majors/ Pre-Majors & First Semester IS/BTA Freshmen:

Schedule an online or in person appointment here.

For quick questions email:  coeitadvising@umbc.edu

Attend Weekday Walk In Advising- Sign in Sheet Located outside of ITE 204*:

Thursday, August 21st - Friday, September 4th:  10:00 - 12:00 & 1:00 - 3:00

*Please bring your laptop to Walk In Advising if you need to make schedule adjustments. 


Information Systems & BTA Transfer Students and Continuing Students:
Please consult advising Information for the IS Department here

This fall, the Center for Social Justice Dialogue is hosting Interact, a series designed to help participants hone the skills to successfully engage in dialogue across difference. If you are a first year undergraduate student interested in upscaling your dialogue, register now!

WHAT IS INTERACT?

Interact is a four-week program for undergraduate students focused on creating an introduction to the dialogue skills required to engage in difficult conversations, dialogue across difference, and intercultural dialogue.

The goal of Interact at UMBC is to develop foundational skills connected to competencies for dialogic community building including critical self-reflection, generous listening, cultural storytelling, and loving accountability. As a result of participation in Interact, participants will have the skills to engage in dialogue within any type of situation and any topic of conversation.

Participants meet weekly in small groups for 90-minute sessions that are co-facilitated by 2-3 facilitators. Each small group consists of 10-15 participants. During these sessions, participants learn and practice the necessary skills to become inclusive leaders and engaged community members.

Participants who attend at least three of the four sessions will be entered into a raffle to win prizes. 

To register, click this link!

Welcome Back!
We hope you had the chance to relax and wind down a little during the summer break!
Hopefully your first week of classes went well and are getting back into the grove of things.

Something to look forward to?

**INVOVLEMENT FEST**
You can come see us at Involvement Fest happening on **September 2nd from NOON to 2pm** on the North Lawn *between the commons and the Library, Not the RAC*. 

Hope to see you there!

**Club Meetings**
Our club meetings will now be held **WEDNESDAYS** from 12-1pm in **ITE239**. We still send out announcements on myUMBC and on discord if any room change, no GBMs, or different time for our future events.

Come engage with the habesha community at UMBC with EESA! Welcoming the new class with a fun Trivia Night about habesha, black, and pop culture. We'll see you on Wednesday, September 2nd at 7pm in ILSB 116B!

Hey y'all! We're here to announce when and where our weekly meetings will take place! Our first meeting will be this Friday, the 4th, from 4-5 PM in ILSB 101. We can't wait to meet you all!

UMBC CSEE students MD Nazmus Sakib, Naga Manogna Rayasam, and Professor Sanorita Dey received a Best Paper Award at the 2026 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing for their paper, Expecting Too Much, Getting Too Little: Exploring the Challenges and Design Opportunities of Asynchronous AI Interviewers. The team will present the work at CSCW 2026 in October in Salt Lake City, Utah. Read more here.

Are you interested in learning more about the UMBC Library's Adam Matthew Explorer database for your research or teaching?

The Library will be hosting an Adam Matthew representative on Tuesday, October 20th, and they are sending a quick poll to get a sense of what time might be best to schedule the presentation: https://forms.gle/tcerad1MmALXwArw5 Note: The presentation will be in person at the library (with food) and shared online via WebEx as well.

AM Explorer is one of the UMBC Library's largest digital primary source databases, and features historical manuscripts, letters, pamphlets, images, and more from the 12th century to the 21st. It has collections relevant to the study of history, english, cultural studies, and the arts. 

Click the AM Explorer database link to get access to UMBC's subscription.See also the AM Explorer guide for an overview of its collections.

Feel free to reach out to Erin Durham Wright, UMBC's Reference & Instruction Librarian, if you have any questions: edurham@umbc.edu

Happy end of August everyone!

I'm writing to give everyone an update regarding the UMBC HPCF and other Research Computing projects currently undertaken by DoIT during the month of August.

Summary

• Preemption Notifications
• Downtime Scheduled for September 29th
• Slurm Queueing Updates
• SIG Committee Meetings Scheduled

Preemption Notifications

As mentioned in the post-downtime message from August 25, there will now be a notification message written to the Slurm error file of a preempted job. If a job is preempted, the associated Slurm error file will see a message like “[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION] Job XYZ was PREEMPTED by Slurm.” along with a timestamp and other information.

We will add more reports such as this that will help users figure out what resources were used by their jobs.

Downtime Scheduled for September 29th

The DoIT Research Computing & Data team has scheduled a downtime on September 29th. Please plan your workloads and batch jobs accordingly, as cluster services will be temporarily unavailable during this window and jobs will be canceled during this window. We appreciate your patience as we complete these updates to ensure a more robust and high-performing computing environment.

We will send out a reminder with additional details two weeks prior to the downtime.

Slurm Queueing Updates

Earlier in the month, many users noted that job wait time increased due to a large volume of job submissions. Minor changes were made to Slurm to better react to cases such as these, effectively limiting the number of jobs that can accrue priority that are submitted by a single user. This change and other topics will be discussed at both the CPU and GPU SIG sub-committee meetings in early September.

If you experience unexpectedly long wait times on your submitted slurm jobs, please submit a descriptive RT Ticket so we can investigate!

Shared Infrastructure Governance Committees Scheduled

The various sub-committees of the Shared Infrastructure Governance Steering Committee have been scheduled. These sub-committees each work to address strategy, new ideas, and issues affecting the research computing cyberinfrastructure of the campus. Meeting locations will be announced via the HPCF myUMBC Group. Please see the Shared Infrastructure Governance webpage for more information

• Advanced CPU Infrastructure sub-committee meetings will take place on the second Friday of each month starting at 1500ET.
• Advanced GPU Infrastructure sub-committee meetings will take place on the first Monday of each month starting at noon ET. 
• Cloud Infrastructure sub-committee meetings will take place on the second Wednesday of each month, starting at noon ET. 
• User Experience sub-committee meetings will take place on the second Monday of each month starting at noon ET. 

Publications
If you have any publications, presentations, theses, or other works that made use of the campus cluster, please submit an RT Ticket with bibliographic information so that we can accurately reflect this work in our records and on the HPCF Website. 

Need Help?
As always, please communicate any issues/questions to the Research Computing RT Queue (hpcf.umbc.edu > User Support > Request Help).

Gregory Ballantine,
HPC System Administrator