The IT department bottlenecks progress. How should I handle this?
This is a partial solution I've used myself, and it assumes a few things: 


You access your clusters remotely through a connection (like other answers pointed, cloud servers or remote), so where you work isn't exactly the bottleneck. 
The software you use isn't OS dependent or has any special licenses
You do not have a ton of things hooked up from serial ports to measuring equipment and whatnot.




One thing I've done in this situation is, when you finally grab a ticket from IT, ask them to install a virtual machine like VirtualBox and have them enable virtualization in the BIOS. Most processors allow this nowadays. Make sure they install it properly or they will ghost again.

This basically allows you to install any Linux distribution you want (you need Licenses for Windows images), so it is an operating system where you have all admin rights. This completely removes the IT middleman if your case is just coding and clustering the data crunching since you don't need their permission to do things in the VM, and also shouldn't impact performance significantly. 

If IT is worth half a dime, they will appreciate the solution, since:


It takes gargantuan effort to compromise the Host Machine through a VM if you are not malicious
Resulting lack of tickets from you needing something updated/installed.


Worst case scenario you can still alternate between both Operating Systems, and do small things in the VM with your admin rights.