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Services Offered By The Computing/Data Services Core |
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The Computing/Data Services Core supports projects by providing help with computer use and with statistical advice. Staff members are available to provide training and help to faculty, as well as the students and staff who work with them on a wide variety of computing and statistical problems. Requests for help may be sent to CSDA helpdesk or directly to staff members. E-mail addresses, phone numbers, and hours of staff members are listed below (Hours are flexible, and may change).
Other sources of information that may be helpful to you are the ITS FAQ web site: http://www.albany.edu/its/help/help-request.html or call 442-3700. ITS also offers training courses, see web site: http://web.albany.edu/its/training/ CSDA'S WEB PAGE, COMPUTING HELP DOCUMENTS, CLASSES, WORKSHOPSPublic Infrastracture Core maintains the CSDA Website : http://csda.albany.edu. At that site, there are computing and statistical help documents. You may find these useful, and we welcome suggestions for other help documents and improvements to the existing ones. The Computing/Data Services Core offers classes and workshops in computer use and statistics. Notices for these are sent to people affiliated with the Center, and are also posted on our web page. CSDA UNIX CLUSTERCSDA has its own UNIX cluster, providing software and disk space that would not be available otherwise. It may be used only by CSDA Associates, as well as the staff and students who have been authorized to use it by CSDA at the request of an Associate. Please see the document Access to CSDA UNIX Cluster on our web page for information about eligibility and for information about how to gain access. See Center staff or help documents for any other questions about using our UNIX cluster. CSDA UNIX MachinesFollowing is a description of the machines that comprise our UNIX cluster. The following information is provided about the machines: name, type, number of CPUs, speed of CPUs and amount of Random Access Memory.
All of these machines may be used by remote login — you can login to these machines from home or your office. All machines, with the exception of liska, halley, and sanger, may be logged onto directly in BA B-18. Logging onto the machine directly offers a window-like environment that some find more user-friendly. Jobs that write large files will run significantly more quickly when using the machine Liska. The University at Albany's ITS UNIX cluster is comprised of several machines. It is available to all University at Albany faculty and students. The host IP for the compute/file server is acunix.albany.edu. Note that files stored on CSDA disks are not available from the University’s UNIX file server. Statistical Software available on our UNIX cluster:
1. SAS : A multi-purpose statistical package. Manuals are available for use in BA-B18, and our WWW site has documents to help users get started. Also see http://support.sas.com/onlinedoc/913/docMainpage.jsp for on-line documentation of the latest version. 2. SPSS : A multi-purpose statistical package. Manuals are available for use in BA-B18, and our WWW site has documents to help users get started. 3. STATA : A multi-purpose statistical package. Manuals are available for use in BA-B18. The following line should be issued, or put in your .cshrc before use: set path=($path /csda/local/src/stata)Then, the following command invokes the program: stataFor more information, please see stata.pdf 4. Stat/Transfer : A software than can be used to translate one kind of data file into another. Stat/Transfer is stored in the same directory as Stata, so the command: set path=($path /csda/local/src/stata) must either be included in your .cshrc, or issued at the command prompt. We obtained this software in an early release, and the company has not completed documentation for it. Also, the software does not work with all of the latest versions of files. The command to invoke the software is "st" followed by the file to be converted, and then the name of the file to be created. For example, the following command would create a file usable by "stata" from a file usable by spss. st file1.sav file1.dtaFor more information, please see stattransfer.pdf and stattrans.pdf or e-mail apchelp for help. 5. Prelis and Lisrel : These software programs are available on only the machines liska, pearl, and malthus. Prelis can prepare data for use in Lisrel. Lisrel can be used for confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation models, and causal models. Manuals are available for use in BA-B18, and our WWW site has a help document on using Prelis and Lisrel. Sample programs provided by the software company can be found in the subdirectories of: /csda/local/src/EXAMPLES, if you have the following line in your .cshrc: set path=($path /csda/local/src)
Issuing the command lisrel will invoke the software Lisrel. 6. SPLUS : A data analysis and graphics program. Manuals are available for use in BA-B18. To use, type: splus
Disk Space:
Faculty members with access to our UNIX cluster will have a directory on the disk /csdaf. Students will have a directory on the disk /csdas for their own use (dissertations, papers, etc.). Directories will be named the same as the person's USER ID. Subdirectories within the directory can be created and named as desired. Projects with Core Access can have a directory on /csda/projects. The directory should be owned by the Principal Investigator of the project. All files related to the project may be stored in that directory and its subdirectories. We have the general guideline of allowing faculty up to 100 megabytes, and students up to 25 megabytes of space to store files. Of course, we realize some projects require more disk space; therefore, exceptions can be made. If disk use exceeds these guidelines, CSDA staff may help you explore ways of reducing your disk usage. There are no established limits to the space for projects with Core access. Projects with Core access are those that have been approved by our funding agency (NICHD) to receive our full support. There are a few other directories that may be of interest to users. There is a directory /csda/help, that has sample programs and utilities. There are directories /csda/help/spss and /csda/help/sas with sample programs. The directory /csda/ipums has the 1998 version of the IPUMS data. The directory /csda/ipums/use has sample programs for using the IPUMS data. The directory /csda/data has subdirectories with data that may be of interest to more than one project. Storing data in this location allows multiple projects to use it without each project having to store the data separately. CSDA staff can store additional data in /csda/data if requested to do so. There are other disks available for temporary storage that may be used by projects. These disks are not backed up. The disks /tmp is erased daily. (Each machine has it own disk, which is named "/tmp".) Machines with a large /tmp disk areused for files created by SAS, SPSS, and other software for scratch files. If you login to a machine with a small /tmp disk, the disk /tmp2 is used. The disk /tmp2 is available from all CSDA UNIX machines. Files on the disk /tmp2 that are more than 72 hours old at 2:00 am are erased. This disk can be used for data that are needed temporarily. Also, putting files on this directory and giving read permission is a way of sharing files without having to give read access to your directories. Backups
CSDA's staff can help on a variety of PC applications - including spreadsheets, word processing, and graphics. We can also provide some support for MACINTOSH use. ACKNOWLEDGING CSDA'S HELPWe are able to provide help because of grants to the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at The University at Albany from NICHD, NSF, and support from The University at Albany. Please acknowledge help you receive from CSDA on publications that result from your research. For information on how to acknowledge our support, please see the document Acknowledgment of CSDA Support. |
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