The Center for Statistical Consultation and Research can assist you.
They offer:
The ITS Statistics and Computation Service (SCS) offers a set of Linux-based servers to regular students, faculty, and staff of the University of Michigan to run computationally intensive or long-running programs. These vary from using mathematical and statistical programs to compiling and running custom programs.
If you have the University's standard computing services that is provided to all registered students, regular faculty, and regular staff, you can use the SCS. Access to the SCS is included in the package.
You must use SSH (secure shell) to connect to the SCS, and you must use SFTP (secure ftp) to copy files to and from the server.
The hostname for connecting to the SCS is
scs.itd.umich.edu
Connecting to this hostname will log you into one of the machines in the SCS pool. Depending on the program you're running and whether you're writing to the local disk, you may need to log into the same machine multiple times. To determine which machine you've logged into, type
hostname
at the command prompt.
To connect to a specific machine, point your SSH client at the hostname for that machine. For example,
gauntlet.gpcc.itd.umich.edu
For information about local file access for long-running jobs, and other ways to make running long jobs easier, please read the Long-Running Jobs page.
If your analyses require a lot of long term file space, please send a request via e-mail to scs-admins@umich.edu and we will create space in IFS for your use. There will be no additional fees for this space, provided that it is used for research purposes.
Because there are a limited number of SCS machines with a limited amount of memory, it is important to be conscious of your use of resources on these machines. Please do not run many instances of the same program on one machine. If you need to run four instances of a program, you should run one instance on each machine in the pool rather than running all of them on one machine, and using up all of the CPU and memory available on that machine. Also, when you are finished with a job, please make sure that you don't leave it running. An unattended process can run for weeks or even months, using up resources.
There is currently a memory limit of 8GB per login per user. This limit prevents a runaway process from accidentally consuming all of the memory on one of the machines. If you need to run a job that requires more than 8GB of RAM, you can e-mail scs-admins@umich.edu to arrange a temporary lifting of the limit for your account on one of the machines.
Comments, questions, or suggestions? Please e-mail them to scs-admins@umich.edu.
