COMPUTER INFO
Information About Computing at the School of Statistics
The School of Statistics owns and administers 30+ SuSE Linux
workstations and servers for use of students and faculty at the school
of statistics. These are the main computers used for research and
course work. They have standard statistical and mathematical software,
including SAS, S-plus,
R,
Lisp-Stat,
MacAnova,
Arc, and Mathematica, compilers
and interpreters for standard languages, including C, C++, Fortran 77,
Fortran 90, Java, Perl, and Python, and text formatting tools, including
TeX and LaTeX.
The school adminsters an SGI UNIX server superior.stat.umn.edu
that is primarily used for instruction, specifically class accounts for
service courses. School of Statistics faculty all have accounts on this
machine. Graduate students are not automatically given accounts, although
they are given accounts if they have a need and will not interfere with
instructional use of the machine.
The school also provides a number of Macintosh and Windows
computers. They have standard PC software.
The University of Minnesota has an
Acceptable Use Policy.
It is unreadable legalese except for an appendix of Acceptable Use
Guidelines. For emphasis we repeat some of this here and
also add some UNIX-specific guidelines.
- Choose a good password for your account.
- Do not let other people use your account. Do not reveal your password
to anyone for any reason (this includes the system administrators).
- Security attacks on our computers or
anyone else's are strictly forbidden.
- You are responsible for understanding how
UNIX file permissions work
and using them to protect the privacy of information in your account.
- Regardless of any other considerations, cheating on exams and plagarism
are unacceptable. It is not a defense to claim that any files read in
the process of cheating or plagarism had
file permissions that made them
publically readable.
- Regardless of any other considerations, reading e-mail of other users
is unacceptable. File permissions prevent this if set correctly, but
it is wrong to attempt this even if file permissions are not set correctly.
- Tying up a computer for long periods of time is unacceptable.
- Don't leave a computer with the screen lock
on for a long time.
- Run big jobs at low priority using
the UNIX
nice and renice commands.
Use the lowest possible priority (nice +19
or renice -n 19) unless there are other competing
background jobs.
- Get permission before running big jobs on any the faculty machines.
- Do not run multiple jobs simultaneously
on any machine. Use a shell script that runs them
consecutively.
Questions About the Statistics Computer Hardware
Questions About Remote Access to the Statistics Network and Computers
Various Miscellaneous Questions
Last updated January 26, 2001
webmaster@stat.umn.edu.
