2026-03-10 –, Breakout Room
We have streamlined LLM access on Tufts University’s HPC Cluster through Open OnDemand (OOD), enhancing AI use in research, teaching, and learning. We present a standardized toolkit of OOD applications: Research Chatbot (OpenWebUI + Ollama), LLM Notebooks (Jupyter + Ollama) and AI Image Generators (StableDiffusion, ComfyUI). Participants will gain insights into improving LLM accessibility via the OOD interface, comparing local and cloud based approaches for compute, aligning LLM tools with research needs, and lessons learned from deployment. Code, slides, and documentation will be available via GitHub.
This session introduces our standardized AI toolkit that makes advanced capabilities accessible to researchers without deep technical expertise, using Open OnDemand (OOD) on the Tufts HPC Cluster.
We’ll showcase three core OOD applications: Research Chatbot (OpenWebUI + Ollama) for private local language models and cloud APIs; LLM Notebooks (Jupyter + Ollama) for building agentic workflows in familiar notebook environments; and Image Generation (Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI) for creative and research image tasks. We also deployed code-free apps for speech recognition, OCR, and semantic text search. Key lessons include setting sensible GPU defaults, tailoring user interfaces, and extensive user testing. A live demo will highlight how the platforms work, and the focus on ease of access to local and cloud models for research use.
Participants will gain strategies for enabling broad LLM adoption and implementation resources (code, templates), alongside supporting documentation about model selection for research use cases. We will also provide a roadmap of future development directions based on our research community needs.
Kyle M. Monahan is Manager of Data Science Services in Research Technology at Tufts University, where he manages a team supporting advanced analytics, visualization, bioinformatics, LLMs, and secure environments for regulated data. A passionate advocate for HPC adoption and resource optimization, Kyle is also a Lecturer in Data Science at Tufts Gordon Institute. He has delivered many workshops, courses, and co-designed academic programs. Committed to making data science accessible, Kyle continues to support research and education across Tufts.