January Downtime for Active Directory Migration
On Monday, January 4th, and Tuesday, January 5th, 2027, all SSCC servers and services will be offline for our migration to the campus Active Directory. (Information about this campus mandate can be found here.) We’ll also use this time for software updates. When the servers come back online, you’ll use your NetID password to sign in to them, not your SSCC password. Of course, if you make your NetID password and SSCC password the same, you don’t have to keep track of which one to use.
We’ve never had a two-day downtime before, but this is a massive project. We encourage you to take the downtime into account as you make your holiday plans.
Spring Training
The SSCC’s spring training schedule is now available. Topics include introductions to R, Stata, and Python, data wrangling in R and Stata, data visualization, using the SSCC Linux servers, and more.
If you’re a new graduate student and want to get good at R or Stata, not just get by, give us the week of January 11th and we’ll help you do just that.
Supporting Research Use of AI
The SSCC’s statistical consultants are not AI experts (yet) but we are learning. And what we learn has always been guided by the questions you ask. So if you have questions about using AI in research, whether that’s as part of your analysis or as a tool for writing the code that does your analysis, let’s talk. Hopefully we can help you; you’ll definitely help us better understand how SSCC researchers are using or want to use AI. Visit the statistical consulting page to make an appointment. Russell Dimond is currently the primary person for AI questions.
One of our top concerns is making sure an error in AI-generated code doesn’t lead to a career-damaging paper retraction. It doesn’t take AI to make a mistake in writing code, but AI lets you generate more code that could contain a mistake with less time to catch them naturally. Come to our Testing Data Wrangling Code workshops, now in R and Stata, to learn some simple but powerful techniques for finding them.
Silo Users: Change Your NetID Password
Silo users must change their password once a year, and one consequence of the Active Directory migration is that starting on January 5th this requirement will apply to your NetID password. If you have not changed your NetID password in the last year, you will not be able to sign into Silo. As veteran Silo users know, we send emails to those who will need to change their password soon. Starting in mid-November those emails will be based on the age of your NetID password.
If you use Silo, your NetID password also needs to be at least 15 characters long.
Change to Name, Email Address Used by SSCC
Another consequence of migrating to the campus Active Directory is that, starting December 2nd, SSCC will use personal information from the campus directory rather than storing our own version. This includes your official campus name, “name in use” (preferred name), and email address. The next SSCC News will go to whatever address you have set there. More importantly, so will your invitation to renew your SSCC account in the spring. Please make sure that’s an email address you actually check!
Don’t Overload Linstat
Modern servers have many cores (processors), and modern computationally intensive programs will often break up their work into pieces and run one piece on each of the server’s cores. That can make the job run much faster. However, if you run more than one of these programs at a time, each core will have multiple tasks to run and will switch back and forth between them frequently so it can make some progress on all of them. Switching tasks takes time, which slows down the server for everyone. If you have to run many multi-core jobs on a single server, it’s actually faster to run them sequentially.
Do not run more than one computationally intensive job at a time on the interactive servers (Winstat, Linstat, WinSilo, or LinSilo). Submit them to Slurm or SlurmSilo instead, where they can run on separate servers. The Slurm chapter of the Guide to Research Computing at the SSCC will show you how, or sign up for one of the Using the SSCC Linux Servers workshops.