SERVICES OFFERED BY THE COMPUTING/STATISTICAL CORE


The Computing and Statistical 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.)
 

Staff Member:

Phone:

Hours:

Hui-shien Tsao

442-4663

Mon.- Fri., 9:00 – 5:00

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, WORKSHOPS

CSDA's Information/Data Services Core maintains the CSDA Website - http://www.albany.edu/csda/. 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/Statistical Core offers classes and workshops in computer use and statistics. Notices of these are sent to people affiliated with the Center, and are posted on our Web Page.

CSDA UNIX CLUSTER

CSDA 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 Machines

Following 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; amount of Random Access Memory.

Name 

Type

CPU

Speed

RAM 

liska.csda.albany.edu

SunFire V490

4

1.5GHz

16Gigabytes RAM

malthus.csda.albany.edu

SunFire V215

2

1.5GHz

2Gigabytes RAM

euler.csda.albany.edu

SunFire V215

2

1.5GHz

2Gigabytes RAM

thomas.csda.albany.edu

SunUltra 45

2

1.6GHz

2Gigabytes RAM

halley.csda.albany.edu 

SunBlade 1500

1 

1GHz 

2Gigabytes RAM

pearl.csda.albany.edu 

SunBlade 100

1 

500MHz 

256Megabytes RAM

graunt.csda.albany.edu

SunBlade 100

1

500MHz

256Megabytes RAM

sanger.csda.albany.edu 

SunBlade 100 

1 

500MHz 

256Megabytes RAM

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:
Following is a brief description of some of the statistical packages that are available on our UNIX cluster. Other packages, such as MAPLE, are also available.

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:
                         stata

For more information, please see http://www.albany.edu/csda/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 got this software in an early release, and the company has not completed documentation for it.   And, the software does not work will 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.dta

For more information, please see http://www.albany.edu/csda/stattransfer.pdf and http://www.albany.edu/csda/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.
    Issuing the command    prelis  will invoke the software prelis.

6.    SPLUS- A data analysis and graphics program. Manuals are available for use in BA-B18. To use - type:
                        splus

Disk Space:
CSDA offers disk space to our users. We currently have approximately 120 Gigabytes of disk space for file storage, and can increase that amount if necessary. However, because we backup disks daily, disk space is expensive. We ask that people store files in compressed formats whenever possible. And, when files are no longer needed, CSDA staff will be happy to help people copy their files to a CD for long-term storage and remove them from CSDA disks.

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, and, 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".)  If you login to a machine with a large /tmp disk, this disks is used 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
Full backups of /csda, /csdas and /csdaf are made each Sunday night beginning at 8 pm and running all night.  Incremental backups are run Monday night thru Saturday night.  A monthly backup is done the 1st of each month and is saved for 6 months.  A yearly backup is done July 1st and is kept for 3 years.  If you accidentally delete a file (or files), you may request that it be retrieved by sending e-mail to apchelp@csc.albany.edu. Please include as much information about the file as you can (when it was created, when it was deleted, and full information about the name of the file and the directory it was in) and how we can reach you if we need more information. We will try to restore files within two business days, but when our work load is high, we may require more time.

HELP ON PCS AND MACINTOSHES

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 HELP

We 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".
 

Updated 7/16/2007 by Hui-shien Tsao