Welcome New Members!
Hopefully, we've gotten to welcome each of you in person either at our orientation sessions last Wednesday and Friday or at the SSCC Consulting office. If we haven't though, please drop by Social Sciences 4226 to pick up a packet of information and to sign up for a 45 minute computer orientation session. School of Education members should wait for group orientation sessions yet to be announced. The amount of computing resources available at SSCC can be overwhelming and a 45-minute orientation is time well spent even for the most experienced computer users.
Consulting Office Experiencing Delays
Due to the large volume of requests we are currently receiving in our Consulting office, expect a longer than usual delay in hearing back from the SSCC staff person assigned your problem. This is especially true for PC support requests which may take several days. We are usually able to tend to other requests within one business day. If you wish to inquire about the status of your request, contact Nancy McDermott, Director of SSCC.
SSCC's Fall Training Schedule
SSCC's Fall training schedule is now available on SSCC's training web pages. Once again we are teaming up with Sociology 365, Computing in Social Research, so you'll find many topics offered Tuesday/Thursdays, 11:00-12:15, including several SAS classes. Remember that all SSCC training sessions (including Soc 365 sessions) require preregistration.
Improved Windows Update Notifications for Primo Users in Social Science Building
Currently, we push out Microsoft Windows security updates "silently" to PCs that connect to the PRIMO network in the Social Science Building using a product called Systems Management Server (SMS). No notifications are given when your PC receives an update and the updates don't take effect until you reboot your PC. With the new SMS release now in effect, we are able to provide notification so that you will know you need to reboot your PC. A "balloon" message next to the system tray on your desktop will pop up telling you that updates have arrived.
Please keep in mind that these updates cannot take effect until you reboot your computer. We would like you to leave your PC powered on, however, so we can push out updates overnight. Simply tell your PC to restart when you're leaving for the day, and it will be ready for you to log in when you arrive in the morning.
New Condor and Interactive Linux Servers
This week we added four more CPUs (two dual core 3.0GHz Xeons) to Condor, each with 4GB of RAM. This gives our Condor flock a total of 20 virtual machines. For more information about Condor, see An Introduction to Condor. You can also submit Stata jobs to Condor from the web.
Earlier this summer SSCC's interactive Linux servers, Hal, Kite and Falcon, were replaced. All three now have two Quad Core Intel Xeon processors (for a total of eight physical processors) running at 3.0GHz. Hal and Kite now have 10GB of RAM, and Falcon has 14GB. In our testing, the new servers completed computational tasks in 1/2 to 2/3 the time the old servers required. Visit July's SSCC News for the full announcement.
The SSCC's Linux servers provide additional computing power for those who need it. If your statistical job is taking more than a few minutes on Winstat, it would probably run more quickly on a Linux server. If you're interested in learning Linux, see Connecting to SSCC Linux Computers, Running Linux Programs Using Windows (Mostly) or our Linux Handbook.
New/Upgraded Software on Winstat
We recently installed two new software applications on Winstat:
- Latent Gold 4.5 including the LG-Syntax module. Latent GOLD is a latent class and finite mixture program. Visit Latent Gold's web site for more information.
- IrfanView 4.2 (which is already on the lab PCs). IrfanView is a freeware image viewer/converter.
We also recently upgraded Scientific Word to 5.5, Stata to 10.1, Endnote to X.2, Firefox to 3.0.1, Acrobat to 9.0, and SmartDraw to 2008.
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