The Department of Statistics computing facilities are mostly independent of the university's due to the specialized nature of our research. In addition, the department can access various resources at the Ohio Supercomputer Center for more compute intensive jobs, and we pool some common functions at the college and university level. Some examples of university-provided services are email, a course management system, cloud file sharing/storage, classrooms with projection systems and smart podiums, and extensive library services.
The Department of Statistics has two full-time embedded computing staff, and one student staff member to provide research, teaching and operational computer support. The computing staff are part of ASCTech, an organization of 70 staff who provide assistance in research computing, computer labs, Ohio State’s courseware system, tablet computers for interactive lecture capture and online courses, video conferencing, and general systems administration.
The department supports Mac OS, Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Centrally, the department maintains a Linux login server, as well as 11 Linux machines for long compute jobs, as well as GPU computing. Statistics researchers can access Unity, ASCTech's compute cluster, and The Ohio Supercomputer Center's resources. We also maintain a windows terminal server for long jobs. In addition, many faculty have workstations that are available for remote general compute. Faculty can access web servers for sharing information, including database facilities. We provide a backup solution for both in building and mobile machines. Many resources are available from anywhere via encrypted remote access.
We have four instructional computer labs for hands-on courses. In addition, the department has a graduate student collaboration lab in Cockins Hall with 18 Windows workstations, two Linux workstations and a Macintosh. There is access to color and monochrome printing, and scanning. Like most of campus, Cockins Hall has wireless access — including a guest network — to support mobile computing, up to a density of three devices per person.
The department works with the university to have needed software site licensed and available as widely as possible to faculty, staff and students, on and off campus. A non-exhaustive list of available software includes: R, Matlab, Mathematica, Minitab, SAS, JMP, SPSS and Microsoft Office.
For additional information, see the ASCTech Knowledge Base, which contains all ASCTech documentation (anything Statistics specific is prefaced with ‘STAT-‘).