Broadcast

Major Expansion of SSCC’s Computing Resources We are thrilled to announce that the SSCC will soon be able to more than triple the amount of computing power available to SSCC researchers, thanks to a Research Core Revitalization Program grant from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education and additional funding from the Department of Economics and the Wisconsin School of Business. We’ll also be adding powerful GPU servers. The new servers will be made available in the SSCC’s Slurm cluster, where they can be used most efficiently, and may be available as soon as this year’s holiday season (barring supply chain issues). We encourage all SSCC researchers to ask themselves “What new things can I do because of this new computing power?” We are committed to making large-scale computing as accessible and easy to use as possible. That includes installing easy to use tools like RStudio Server and JupyterLab, teaching multiple workshops on how to use the SSCC’s computing resources, and creating a new Guide to Research Computing at the SSCC. The SSCC’s Statistical Consultants will be happy to answer questions and help you navigate using the new servers. Please don’t let the idea of using Linux servers …

Summer and Early Fall Training The SSCC’s summer training is well underway, but we still have upcoming classes in Python, web scraping, regression and regression diagnostics taught in both Stata and R, and running big research computing jobs. Visit the training page for details and to register. Then in late August, just before the fall semester begins, we will teach another round of Stata, R, and Python classes. All are welcome, but these are especially valuable to new graduate students. If you are in touch with incoming graduate students, please make sure they know about these classes before it’s too late for them to arrange their schedules so that they can attend! Account Renewal Deadline Accounts that were not renewed during the renewal period will be disabled shortly. However, if you’re still at UW-Madison it is not too late to renew your account. SSCC Members should fill out the account renewal form. Drop-in users should email the Help Desk. You’ll know you need to renew your account if you suddenly can’t log in.  New Data Storage Hardware The SSCC recently purchased new data storage hardware, as our old storage was both out of space and reaching the end of its expected life. …

Introducing Slurm We are very excited to announce the launch of a pilot Slurm cluster at the SSCC. Slurm (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management) is a powerful system for managing and scheduling computing jobs that is very popular at large-scale research computing centers. The SSCC is currently running a pilot with a small Slurm cluster as we all learn more about it, but we anticipate that it will become the main way SSCC researchers run large research computing jobs. The easy way to submit a job to Slurm is to log into Linstat and use the ssubmit command. For example: ssubmit –cores=32 –mem=20g “stata -b do my_do_file” Slurm will then find a server in the Slurm cluster that has 32 cores and 20GB of memory available, and run your Stata do file there. It’s possible your job might have to wait until those resources are free, but once it starts it is guaranteed exclusive use of them—no more having your job slow down or run out of memory because the server is busy. If you’re not sure how many cores and how much memory your job uses, Identifying the Computing Resources Used by a Linux Job will show you …

Winter Tech Update The SSCC implemented our Winter Tech update on 1/8/2022.  Alongside the usual updates for all of our servers and software, we are excited to announce that the web version of Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is now available on Winstat.  VSCode is a very popular editor for writing source code in many languages. SSCC VPN to Require Duo Authentication Starting this February, the SSCC will require the use of multifactor authentication (MFA) via Duo to access the SSCC network via VPN. Duo is the same MFA system you use for your NetID. Computers on VPN have direct access to SSCC resources, bypassing some security measures, so it’s important only authorized users be able to use it. We encourage you to set up your SSCC account in Duo now, so you’ll be ready to go when it becomes a requirement in February. You can do so at the SSCC’s Duo MFA portal. If you use Silo, you have already set up Duo and do not have to do so for VPN. More details will be announced before the change is implemented. Export Data from Silo Using Globus As of Wednesday, January 19th, Globus users will be able to export data …