Social Science Computing Cooperative

SSCC News November 2022

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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:

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 Downtime

Starting in January, Linstat will have a downtime each month like the SSCC’s other servers. This will allow SSCC staff to apply patches in a more timely manner, improving security in today’s hostile computing environment. You can still run long jobs by submitting them to Slurm.

Linstat’s monthly downtime will be every 3rd Wednesday of the month from 6am-8am.

Slurm Update

We’ve made a couple of tweaks to the Slurm configuration based on what we’ve observed about how it’s used:

  • The maximum job length for most partitions has been increased from 7 days to 10 days.
  • A new long partition allows jobs to run for up to 30 days. Contact the Help Desk if you need to run jobs for longer than that.

Now that Linstat will be rebooted once a month, the Slurm long partition is the place to run very long jobs at the SSCC. If you’re still running long jobs on Linstat, it’s time to move them to Slurm.

The new servers purchased through the Research Core Revitalization Program are currently being installed and we hope to put them into production in one to two months. The Slurm cluster will then have over 5,000 cores and two powerful GPU servers.

We are eager to help all our researchers take advantage of all the computing power the SSCC makes available. Read the new Guide to Research Computing at the SSCC, sign up for a workshop, or set up an appointment with any of the Statistical Consultants to learn more.

Computer Classroom Reservations and Software Requests

If you plan on using our computer classroom (3218 Sewell Social Science Building) for teaching, we are currently accepting lab reservations for the upcoming Spring 2023 semester.  If you would like to reserve a spot in our computer classroom or use our mobile lab laptops, please contact the SSCC Help Desk or email the SSCC instructional email at instruction@ssc.wisc.edu

We are also finalizing our software list for our Winter Tech update, so if there is any software that is needed for the spring semester please contact the SSCC Help Desk as soon as possible so that staff can plan accordingly.

Mac OS Version 10.15 (Catalina) at End of Life

Mac OS version 10.15 (Catalina) has reached its end of life and is no longer supported.  SSCC services (including VPN) will no longer work on any machine running 10.15 or older.  Anyone running 10.15 or older will need to update their OS version by upgrading to Mac OS Ventura.

NIH Data Management & Sharing Policy

Sharing scientific data can accelerate research discovery, enhance research reproducibility and provide accessibility to unique datasets. As the short time to COVID vaccine development showed the world, sharing of scientific data can also expedite the translation of research results into products and procedures to improve human health.

It’s based on those benefits that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a new requirement for grantees to ensure sharing of data whenever possible.

Effective for applications starting Jan. 25, 2023, and after, all NIH-supported researchers producing scientific data will be expected to submit a data management & sharing plan as part of their proposals under the Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy.