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SSCC to be Merged into L&S Information Technology Services In February 2026 the Social Science Computing Cooperative will be merged into the College of Letters and Science Information Technology Services group (L&S ITS). We will continue to provide the same services to the same people as we did under the SSCC, including those outside of L&S. While there will be almost no changes in our day-to-day operations initially, some things will change in the following months. The L&S ITS Service Desk is currently learning about SSCC’s systems so they can replace the SSCC Help Desk. Endpoint support (i.e. support for laptops and desktops) is being reorganized throughout the College, and Cody Gerhartz and Ryan St. Peters will eventually be transferred to an L&S Departmental Support team that will support all the units we support now, but also some of the nearby units in conjunction with their current support staff. The SSCC will eliminate two staff positions before this shift takes place, as a result of funding cuts rather than the reorganization (more on that shortly). This will match our operating budget to our current revenue. Nothing can be guaranteed during this time of fiscal uncertainty, but there are no plans …

Summer Tech Update Downtime: August 9 9:00AM-5:00PM On Saturday, August 9th, all SSCC servers will be offline for our semiannual process where we update all of our servers and software. New software versions include R 4.5.1 and Stata 19. R and Julia users will probably need to reinstall all the packages you use after the update. Python users, we strongly recommend you create your own conda environment so your code will not be broken by updates to the system environment. ResearchDrive Migration in Progress The migration of data from SSCC storage to ResearchDrive continues–an essential cost-saving step in today’s fiscal environment. If you’ve received an invitation to migrate your data, please act on it. It will become mandatory eventually. If you haven’t received an invitation yet but are ready to go, reach out to the Help Desk and we’ll make it happen! Faculty, keep in mind that graduate students are not eligible for their own ResearchDrive space. Even if you don’t have substantial data storage needs, consider requesting your ResearchDrive space so you can make it available to your graduate student collaborators. Graduate students, talk to your advisor or another faculty member or PI about using their ResearchDrive. For all …

Mind Your Memory Linstat users may have noticed recent episodes of servers running slowly, caused by them running low on memory. At times the servers have had to kill jobs to keep from crashing. To reduce the frequency of these episodes, we will reduce the maximum amount of memory each user can use on Linstat from 500GB to 350GB on April 16th. We recognize this will require some jobs to be run in Slurm. You can reserve up to 1,000GB of memory in Slurm, and because it is reserved you never have to worry about the server running out of memory because someone else ran a big job. If you are running big jobs on Linstat, contact the Help Desk and the statistical consultants will be happy to show you how to run them in Slurm, or help you overcome any obstacles that are preventing you from using Slurm. One contributing factor is interactive interfaces like RStudio Server and OnDemand, which make it easy to open a program, load a bunch of data (using a bunch of memory), and then forget about it. Please sign out when you’re done using these tools, or at least close programs that use a …

SSCC Training It’s not too late to sign up for the SSCC’s qualitative data analysis workshops: Using Software for Qualitative Analysis, Introduction to NVivo, and Introduction to MaxQDA. Remember, Caitlin is only with us temporarily, so these workshops may not be taught again. Caitlin is also available for consulting on qualitative analysis. We’re also teaching more conventional workshops, including data visualization in R, regression diagnostics, and Stata macros and loops. Visit the training page for details and to register. Graduated? Make Sure We Can Reach You If you have graduated but are still collaborating on research at UW-Madison, be sure to change your preferred email address in our system to something you’ll be able to read when your UW email account is closed. Every spring we have our account renewal exercise, and if you don’t get that email and renew your account it will be closed automatically. (Also, you wouldn’t want to miss SSCC News, would you?) You can change your preferred email address using the self-service portal. Winter Tech Update All of the SSCC’s servers and software were updated on January 11. This included upgrading the Linux servers to Alma Linux 9, a major version upgrade. In a couple …

Spring Training The SSCC’s spring training schedule is now available. The core Data Wrangling in R, Stata, or Python workshops will be taught in mid-January, between semesters, and online so you can take them even if you’re not back in Madison yet. Other highlights include: Regression Review with R Introduction to Web Scraping with R Data Visualization in R Stata Workshop: Dates Stata Workshop: Presentable Bar Graphs Multiple workshops on using the SSCC’s computing resources for big jobs, especially Slurm Workshops are free, but registration is required. See the training schedule for details and to register. Staff Changes at the SSCC Mitchell Karam has left the SSCC, and we wish him well in his future endeavors.  Zach Heise will be taking over Mitchell’s duties as our primary administrator for Winstat. We are pleased to welcome Rebecca (Reba) Schmidt as the SSCC’s newest Windows System Administrator.  Reba is originally from Northcentral Wisconsin but has been in the Madison area for over six years. She has two cats, Luna and Mako, and a dog named Dandelion. In her spare time, she likes to play board games, tabletop RPGs, and video games, read, and enjoy the outdoors. She is a casual space fan, houseplant enthusiast, and an all-around nerd. Linstat Monthly …