These are some of the projects we work on! For the full info, see our Projects Database.
Active projects
ARK Subproject-C
ARK Subproject-C is an intelligent calendar with a chat interface designed to dynamically reorganize activities based on environmental cues, like missed deadlines and new commitments. It learns your work habits to optimize time allocation, ensuring timely goal completion.Cluedumps and IAP Classes
SIPB organizes dozens of IAP classes each year on technical topics both serious and fun. During the fall term SIPB also offers a series of Cluedump talks, with a different topic each week. Add yourself to cluedump-announce@mit.edu if you’re interested. We’re also looking for MIT students to help keep them running smoothly.Courseroad
Maintaining and adding features to the courseroad.mit.edu website, a degree planning tool for MIT courses. Our backend is shared with Fireroad (fireroad.mit.edu) and our frontend is written in VueJS.delta
vhosting is hosting multiple servers from the same machine. delta is a best-effort vhost server for ad hoc open source services. the project was started by almonds who figured it would be more convenient than Web Scripts, XVM, or lemonpepper, for quickly spinning up as-needed services, without allocating another IP address. delta’s servers are guided by a principle of statelessness; databases for delta services ought to be from dedicated database servers, like Scripts MySQL.doorpi
Doorpi senses when the SIPB Office door is closed & open and displays this information in at https://doorpi.mit.eduDormDigest
Dormdigest is a web service that takes in student emails from dormspam, extract the event’s time, date, title, and location, and automatically add it to a website that all MIT students can peruse through!
Future plans include utilizing running open-source LLMs to improve date/time parsing, adding support for event edit + creation on the website, and Google Calendar integration.
Hydrant
Hydrant is a class planner for MIT students.Mastodon
https://mastodon.mit.edu is an instance of the Mastodon federated social networking platform, a part of a Twitter-like communications network of independently-run servers. Anyone on any individual server can communicate with the global ecosystem of federated servers, creating a decentralized social network where no one person or corporation has control of everyone’s data.MIT Matrix
SIPB Matrix (codename Uplink) is SIPB’s effort to bring the Matrix (matrix.org) network to MIT, providing not just another hosted homeserver, but a practical way to communicate that works with the school’s existing social dynamics and ecosystem (class group chats, Moira lists, etc), aiming to reduce the usage of proprietary alternatives such as Facebook Messenger, and exclusionary and proprietary alternatives such as iMessage.Petrock
Petrock is a new service that allows your sites to log users in with their MIT account via Touchstone. Petrock is intended to replace IS&T’s now defunct OpenID Connect Pilot and can be an accessible alternative to setting up a Shibboleth server or using CSAIL’s Shimmer. For more details, contact us by email or at SIPB’s weekly meetings.SIPB Hardware Operations
The HWOPS team maintains the physical server rooms for SIPB: maintaining and upgrading our physical infrastructure, coordinating with IS&T and Facilities, and communicating with other SIPB projects that have or need physical computing resources. We are responsible for the operation of the machine room in W20-575A, as well as for some operations of SIPB’s servers in W91. We provide physical server space, server hardware, and server support services to other SIPB projects.SIPB Hyades
The SIPB Hyades project is SIPB’s next-generation computing infrastructure service, designed to eventually replace Scripts and XVM with a self-configuring Kubernetes cluster deployed on bare metal servers. Hyades is a cluster computing management system (SIPB’s internal AWS). Whether a user wants to host their website, run code for a class, or work on a side project, our service will give them a container to fit these tasks.SIPB LLMs
To provide access and promote understanding of large language models (LLMs) to MIT students, researchers, and instructors. The LLMs we offer are open-source (permissive use) and self-hosted by SIPB. Our intention is to implement the project responsibly, informed with the input of as many stakeholders involved as possible. All project members/roles are encouraged to attend the weekly meetings and contribute to discussion. <3SIPB Mirrors
SIPB is a download mirror for various open source software projects. In particular, we mirror the package repositories for popular Linux distributions such as CentOS, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, providing a fast local copy for the MIT community. We also serve as the upstream for local mirrors at other universities and research labs.SIPB Project Database
SIPB Project Database is focused on supporting the process of creating and developing projects within SIPB. We want to make it easier for people to join in SIPB projects and for project maintainers to more easily train new people and advertise their projects to the community.
Currently we’re responsible for the development of the SIPB project listing website (which you see here), and are looking at expanding our scope to things like: hosting regular project showcases, creating informational workshops about SIPB services, and launching initiatives for supporting onboarding of new members.
SIPB Scripts
Scripts is SIPB’s most used service, which hosts thousands of websites for the MIT community. scripts.mit.edu is a Linux/Apache web hosting platform for the MIT community. Any Athena user or group locker can host dynamic web applications written in PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, or any other language, or automatically install blog, wiki, and other software via the quick-start autoinstallers.SIPB Website
Keeping the SIPB website nice-looking and up-to-dateInactive projects
CertAssist
Download and install your MIT personal certificate using the CertAssist website, even if your browser is not supported by ca.mit.edu.Locker Software
SIPB maintains a variety of software that can be run on all Athena computers (including your own computer, see Macathena and Debathena below!)
- whichlocker (add outland; whichlocker)
- rolodex (add sipb; rolodex)
- gp (add gp; ecm)
- Many, many more (look in /mit/sipb, /mit/outland, /afs/sipb/project, etc.)
SIPB Badges
Recording the achievements of our members through interactive SIPB badges!SIPB Discord
A project that creates discord bots that authenticate against your choice of MIT lists.SIPB Documentation Project
The SIPB Documentation Project is a project to document in written form the collective knowledge that SIPB members take for granted or use in maintaining services and projects that is not otherwise written down anywhere.SIPB Library Project
The Library Project aims to provide a web interface for managing the SIPB Library. This includes an administration and cataloguing UI, as well as a book scanner and checkout process.SIPB Mattermost
SIPB’s Mattermost instance for communication. Mattermost is an open source, private cloud Slack alternative hosted on XVM. By the way, a lot of SIPB communication happens on Mattermost – would recommend joining if you haven’t already!SIPB Minecraft
Virtual MIT in a Minecraft server!
Contact: sipb-minecraft-root@mit.edu or William Moses, wmoses@mit.edu
Backup Contact: Shayna Ahteck, asahteck@mit.edu
SIPB Publicity Committee
SIPB runs events, which means SIPB needs posters, dormspam, cool swag, and whatever else our publicity committee can imagine – sometimes even chalking Stata!SIPB Social Committee
SIPB has a lot of cool people and we should hang out outside of meetings! We need people to remind us to do so by scheduling social events
Contact: Emma Batson, emmabat@mit.edu