This is the September 2002 newsletter of the ITC
Research Computing Support Group. If you have any questions or concerns
regarding the information presented here please contact the ITC Research Computing
Support Group via e-mail to res-consult@virginia.edu,
or at the Research Computing Support Center (RCSC)
244 Wilson Hall, 243-8800. The RCSC is open 9 AM to 5 PM, Monday through Friday.
Now is the time to encourage your new colleagues and students to join us and
learn about research computing support at U.Va. We only send out an e-mail once
or twice a month to this maillist. Anyone can subscribe to this "itc-research"
maillist by sending an e-mail to: majordomo@virginia.edu
with these two lines:
subscribe itc-research
end
Please encourage your colleagues to subscribe to our Research Computing maillist
today!
The ITC Research Computing Support Group is presenting a series of talks that provide an overview of the computer resources available at U.Va. during the first couple of weeks in September. The aim of these talks is to provide researchers, as well as anyone at U.Va., with an overview and details about ITC computing resources that may help you to get a quicker start on your research and do your computing more efficiently.
You will also be able to pick up copies of software distributed by the ITC Research Computing Support Group such as SAS, Matlab, IDL, etc. after each talk.
Each talk is an independent session, just attend the talks that are of interest to you. Each talk starts at 3:30 in the Research Computing Support Center (RCSC), 244 Wilson, and will last 60 to 75 minutes. The schedule is:
We will continue our ongoing Brownbag Talk Series at Noon on October 9 and 23. Watch for details about these.
If you have any questions about these talks, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu or 243-8800.
We will be giving introductory workshops on the SAS, SPSS and S-PLUS statistical
packages. Preregistration is required, but there is NO fee for taking the workshop.
There is, however, a "no-show" fee charged for enrolling but not showing up
and not canceling your registration in advance.
Registration: To register for any of these classes, please send e-mail
to dot-reg@virginia.edu or call 243-5998.
Research Computing Support would like to hear from anyone interested in attending this SPSS Online Seminar. If a sufficient number plan to attend, we will arrange to host the seminar at no cost to you. Please let us know by contacting us by September 12 to indicate your interest and the number of people in your group who plan to attend. We will contact you by e-mail as soon as we know if we will be able to host the seminar. You can contact us by e-mailing res-consult@virginia.edu or telephoning 243-8800.
Date of Session: Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Time: 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT
SPSS Consulting is offering an online seminar: Planning and Designing Customer Satisfaction Surveys. The leader of
this live, interactive consulting session is Mark Rodeghier, Ph.D., an industry expert in survey research for more than 20
years.
The two-hour seminar will reveal expert tips and techniques to help you plan and design an effective customer satisfaction survey. The first 90 minutes will consist of a presentation and discussion of expert tips and techniques for survey planning and design. During the remaining 30 minutes, Mark will answer your specific survey questions.
At the end of this session, you should be able to accomplish the following critical tasks:
The next meeting of the Virginia SAS Users Group will be held in Richmond
at Dominion Virginia Power. "Tips and Techniques for PROC MEANS" by Andrew Karp
and "SAS V9 Overview" by Mark Jordan from SAS will be among the topics presented.
For the full schedule of presentations, visit VASUG at http://www.vasug.org
If you pre-register via the web, before September 15 and attend the conference,
you'll have a chance at a FREE SAS Book! To pre-register, visit:
http://www.vasug.org/ConferenceRegistration.htm
National Instruments, the maker of LabVIEW, will hold two hands-on seminars
in Charlottesville on September 20; an overview on the use of LabVIEW in the
morning and an overview on the use of LabVIEW's Measurement Studio in the afternoon.
The sessions are free but interested users must register at the URL below to
reserve a space because there are a limited number of seats. The specific event
information is as follows:
The Measurement Studio hands-on seminar looks at how Measurement Studio uses the proven capabilities of popular development paradigms, such as Visual Basic, C/C++, and COM/ActiveX. Measurement Studio integrates powerful measurement expertise into Visual Studio, such as advanced hardware connectivity, signal analysis, data visualization, and networking, to complete your mission critical test, measurement, or control application in less time.
Further information on the content of and registration for these seminars can be found at the following URL: http://digital.ni.com/sets.nsf/byregionform?openform&eventstate=Virginia&node=61110_us
Detailed information about the University's LabVIEW site license can be found at the following URL: http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/labview
If you have any questions about this seminar, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu
or 243-8800.
The Charlottesville Unix Users Group's will be conducting free Linux/FreeBSD Seminars beginning September 22. Plans are still underway. For the most recent information, check the web site at http://www.chuug.org/ Although many of its members are students at the University of Virginia, chuug is in no way affiliated with the University. All meetings are free and open to the public.
The Research Computing Support Center will host a seminar by representatives of the Comsol Group, maker of FEMLAB, a modeling and simulation software for scientific and engineering problems based on partial differential equations. The seminar is: "Multiphysics Modeling - An Introduction to FEMLAB 2.3" to be held on September 27, 10:00 - 11:30 AM in the Research Computing Support Center, 244 Wilson Hall.
The seminar will contain a presentation of the main functionality of FEMLAB and step-by-step live modeling by application engineers and developers from COMSOL. Models that will be available for presentation at the seminars are:
Chemical EngineeringThis seminar is open to the public, though the Comsol representatives request interested parties register at the following URL: http://www.comsol.com/seminars/usa.php
Packed Bed Reactor in 3D
MEMS Heat Exchanger
Electromagnetics
Photonic Micro Prism
Tunable MEMS Capacitor
Structural Mechanics
Earth Quake Model with Simulink
Socket for a guyed mast
Detailed information about FEMLAB can be found on the web site
http://www.femlab.com.
Trial licenses for FEMLAB are also available as described in our July newsletter
at the following URL: http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/news/newsletterJul02.html#FEMLAB
If you have any questions about this seminar, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu
or 243-8800.
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The following changes to the research computing software became effective in all ITC Labs at the beginning of the Fall semester:
Changes in the PC environment:
S-PLUS is an enhanced statistical program from Insightful, Inc., based on
the popular S statistical package. Local documentation is available at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/splus/
The state of S-PLUS development and current version number vary across operating systems. Our convention is to have the application name, in this case, "splus", refer to the current or most recent stable release, while "splus.old" refers to the second most recent release. Here is the current listing of the version numbers by platform and how they are called.
If you have questions or concerns regarding S-PLUS, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu or 243-8800.
The technical computing software Mathematica has been upgraded to version 4.2 on all of ITC's Unix platforms (RS/6000, Sun, SGI, and Linux) as well as on the PCs (Windows) and Macintoshes (Mac OS 9.1) in the ITC public computing labs and classrooms.
Key new features in Mathematica 4.2 include the following:
A detailed description of these enhancements can be found at the URL:
http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/newin42
Further information on how to access and use Mathematica 4.2 can be found
on the Research Computing Services Web page at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/mathematica/
Questions about the upgrade as well general questions concerning the use of
Mathematica, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu
or 243-8800.
ITC plans to upgrade the technical computing software Matlab to version 6.5
on the server jeeves.itc for the UNIX platforms it supports (RS/6000, Sun, SGI,
and Linux) on September 18 at 8:00 AM. At this time, any running Matlab processes
will be terminate in order for us to install new licenses for this version.
The servers that support the public PC Labs and classrooms will be upgraded
to Matlab 6.5 later this Fall or at the beginning of 2003. Matlab 6.5 for the
Windows (95/98/NT/2000) and Mac OS X platforms will be available on CDROM from
the Research Computing Support Center in Wilson Hall room 244. A detailed description
of this upgrade can be found at the URL:
http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/whatsnew.shtml
Further information on how to access Matlab 6.5 from either a UNIX workstation,
a PC, or a Mac, as well as help using Matlab, can be found on the Research Computing
Services Web page at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/matlab
Users who continue to use an older version of Matlab installed locally on
their computer will have to download the new license.dat file from the licensing
database at the following URL:
https://www.web.virginia.edu/rescomp/ldb/login.asp
Questions about the upgrade as well general questions concerning as the use of Matlab, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu or 243-8800.
ITC has licensed the IMSL Fortran 90 MP Numerical Library (F90 MP) Version 4.0 for the Linux (RedHat) platform. The IMSL F90 MP library is already licensed on the following UNIX platforms: RS/6000, SGI, and Sun. The IMSL numerical libraries are a collection of over 1000 FORTRAN routines that implement algorithms useful in mathematical and statistical analysis. Our site license now has 2 compile-time and 25 run-time floating network licenses for the Linux platform in addition to the 2 compile-time and 25 run-time floating network licenses for the RS/6000 (AIX), SGI (Irix), and Sun (Solaris) platforms.
The use of the Linux version of IMSL F90 MP libraries requires the Portland
Group (PGI) FORTRAN compilers, also licensed by ITC as described on the following
URL:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/pgi
The numerical algorithms of the F90 MP Library can be accessed using FORTRAN
77 or using FORTRAN 90 language constructs. In addition, the IMSL F90 MP Library
allows users to easily take advantage of parallel computing through the library's
underlying use of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) libraries on those platforms
where the MPI libraries are installed, e.g. the IBM SP. A detailed description
of the IMSL F90 MP Library can be found at the URL:
http://www.vni.com/products/imsl/imslf90.html
Further information about using the new IMSL F90 MP Library as well as the
older FNL and CNL Libraries can be found on the Research Computing Services
Web page at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/imsl
Questions about this upgrade as well general questions concerning as the use
of the IMSL Libraries, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu
or 243-8800.
ITC has purchased a PGI Server license which provides a 10-user network compiler licenses for the Linux platform. This includes Portland Group, Inc's (PGI) full suite of parallelizing F77, F90, HPF, C and C++ compilers and development tools as well as their OpenMP parallel debugger/profiler. These licenses are available to any Linux workstation or cluster that mounts the PGI compiler installation from ITC's UNIX server.
The PGI compiler suite is also available on CDROM for installation on Linux
machines from the Research Computing Support Center in 244 Wilson Hall 244.
These machines must be connected to the network either on- or off-grounds to
communicate with the PGI license manager on ITC's UNIX server. A detailed description
of the PGI compilers can be found at the URL:
http://www.pgroup.com/products/serverindex.htm
Further information on how to access the PGI compilers as well as documentation
on installing and using the compilers can be found on the Research Computing
Services Web page at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/pgi
Questions about the PGI Server license as well general questions concerning
the use of the PGI compilers, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu
or 243-8800.
ITC has licensed the TotalView Debugger Version 5.0.0-5 for the Linux (RedHat) platform. TotalView is already licensed on the RS/6000, SGI, and Sun UNIX platforms. The University site license now has a two-user network license for the Linux platform in addition to a two-user network licenses for the RS/6000, SGI, and Sun platforms.
TotalView is a full-featured, source-level, graphical debugger for applications
written in C, C++, FORTRAN (77 and 90), assembler, and mixed source/assembler
codes. It is a multiprocess, multithread debugger that supports multiple parallel
programming paradigms including MPI, PVM and OpenMP. A detailed description
of the TotalView debugger can be found at the URL:
http://www.etnus.com/Products/TotalView
Further information about accessing and using the TotalView debugger can be
found at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/totalview
Questions about this upgrade as well general questions concerning as the use of TotalView, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu or 243-8800.
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While we have site licenses for three popular statistical software packages, SPSS, Minitab, and LISREL, the license conditions do not permit any of these packages to be installed on a student's home computer. In cooperation with e-academy.com, the vendors of these statistical packages are making their products available for rent. Qualified individuals from the US and Canada can now download these rental version. In all cases they provide a full-version of the package identical to the U.Va. site license version. Different length rental periods are offered for each package, ranging from a free 15-day trial period to a perpetual license.
The software package, cost for a semester rental, and URL are:
All three packages are also available in a "student version",
which is a scaled-down, limited version of the full package. For some of these,
the student version is free, such as LISREL. Details of the LISREL student version
are available in the next newsletter item below. SPSS student version is available
from U.Va.'s Cavalier Computers
Minitab student version is an older version, 12, and information is available
at Minitab, Inc at:
http://www.minitab.com/products/student/index.htm
If you have questions about this announcement, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu or 243-8800.
The free student edition of LISREL 8.52 is available as a single, self-extracting
executable file from Scientific Software International, Inc (SSI) at
http://www.ssicentral.com/other/entry.htm
In addition, a self-extracting file containing the Word document "Getting
Started with the Student Edition of LISREL 8.52" (June 2002) can be downloaded
from the same page along with accompanying example files. The Word document
and files are available as a single, self-extracting executable.
For current licensed users of LISREL 8.51 on Windows, an upgrade patch is available
at http://www.ssicentral.com/other/lispatch.htm#Download
UPGRADE852.EXE to update LISREL 8.51
The free student edition of HLM 5.0 is available as a single, self-extracting
executable file from (SSI) at
http://www.ssicentral.com/other/hlm.htm
HLM is SSI's product for hierarchical data analysis.
SSI has announced the availability of documentation, syntax, and data files
concerning the following topic which should be of interest to all researchers
working with longitudinal data and with data from couples in which members of
the couple are distinguished from each other. The title of the article is:
MULTILEVEL MODELING OF REPEATED MEASUREMENTS UTILIZING DUMMY VARIABLES: EXAMPLES
FROM GROWTH-CURVE ANALYSES WITH INDIVIDUALS AND SPOUSES FROM MARRIED COUPLES.
The authors of this SSI contribution are Lawrence A. Kurdek from Wright State
University and
Stephen and Mathilda du Toit of Scientific Software International, Inc.
For details about the article and to download the documentation (available as
a PDF document) as well as the syntax and data files, please visit:
http://www.ssicentral.com/other/kurdek.htm
The SAS "OnLineDoc", which is all SAS documentation, was
restricted to network addresses within the ".virginia.edu" domain only in August
at the request of SAS Institute in order to comply with our software license
terms and conditions. After further discussions with them, they have agreed
to allow access to the SAS "OnLineDoc" via our U.Va. Proxy
server. If you need to use SAS OnLine documentation from off-grounds, you may
either configure your web browser to use the U.Va. Proxy server or stop by and
pick up the SAS "OnLineDoc" CD. Directions for configuring
your browser to use the U.Va. Proxy server are available at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/proxy
If you have bookmarked the old location for the SAS "OnLineDoc",
you will need to update your bookmarks. The new location is:
http://central.itc.virginia.edu/manuals/sas8
For a short time, an automatic re-direct will be in place.
If you have questions about this announcement, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu or 243-8800.
Insightful, Inc, makers of S-PLUS, recommends that you use stricter convergence
criteria in analyses that use the GAM and GLM functions than the defaults provide,
by providing these additional arguments to gam() and glm():
epsilon=1e-7, maxit=30, bf.epsilon=1e-7, bf.maxit=30 (only the first two are
required for gam()).
These will be the defaults in the next release of S-PLUS. For versions of S-PLUS
up to 6.1, you can easily change the default values of these control parameters
by redefining the functions gam.control and glm.control. For details, visit:
http://www.insightful.com/support/faqdetail.asp?FAQID=139&IsArchive=0
Users of statistical and mathematical software are reminded of the importance of checking convergence criteria as it relates to your particular application when convergence algorithms are employed.
If you have questions about this announcement, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu or 243-8800.
RSI (Research Systems, Inc., makers of IDL) is pleased
to announce a new User-Contributed Library Web site at: http://www.rsinc.com/codebank/index.asp?p=1&WID=1096326&s=988
The RSI User-Contributed Library is a tool for sharing code, images, data, and
even technical white papers with other members of the RSI Software community.
Submitting and retrieving files is a simple process. There are already a number
of ENVI and IDL programs submitted by long-time users. They hope that you will
enjoy the site, and that you will check back often as the collection grows.
While the Web site is provided by RSI, the files in the library are provided
by users of our software. When you contribute files to the library, your files
still belong to you, and you will retain the ability to update or remove them.
For more information, please read RSI's recent press release: http://www.rsinc.com/pr/detail.asp?p=1&PRID=76&WID=1096326&s=988
If you have questions about IDL or this announcement, please contact us at: res-consult@virginia.edu or 243-8800.
Wondering what all the talk about "printless" is, what your "printing quota" is and why there is one. For information you need to print documents in ITC Student Labs and ITC-supported classrooms, please visit: http://www.itc.virginia.edu/printless