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January 31, 2012

Announcing Farmshare: a Shared Computing Environment for the Stanford Community

There’s some good news on the horizon for social scientists working with large or complex datasets. As of January 20, 2012, IT Services has launched Farmshare, a shared research computing environment, that is available free of charge to current faculty, staff and students.

Farmshare provides Linux access for general and research computing tasks, and all the machines run the Ubuntu operating system. There are three types of computing environments available through Farmshare, and you can log-in to whichever one is most suited to a specific computing task, or to your computing needs:

* The cardinal machines are for low-intensity uses such as accessing email, chat or newsgroups;
* The corn machines can be used for interactive general computing and research computing tasks that take less than a day to run;
* The barley machines are available for non-interactive, high-intensity tasks that have higher memory and processing requirements. The software installed on these machines includes R, SAS, Stata and MATLAB.

To learn more about Farmshare and how to gain access, go to: http://farmshare.stanford.edu
You can also find out more about Farmshare at: http://itservices.stanford.edu/service/sharedcomputing

Anyone who is interested in learning how to use Farmshare can contact SSDS software consulting at consult-ssds-software@stanford.edu.

An introductory guide is also in the works, so check the SSDS blog for more updates!

Posted by ronbo at 02:04 PM

January 30, 2012

From Stanford GIS list: Invitation for Open source GIS tool demo

gvSIG (http://www.gvsig.org) is a Java based Geographic Information System (GIS), designed for capturing, storing, handling, analyzing and deploying any kind of referenced geographic information in order to solve complex management and planning problems. gvSIG is known for having a user-friendly interface, being able to access the most common formats, both vector and raster. It features a wide range of tools for working with geographic-like information (query tools, layout creation, geoprocessing, networks, etc.).

Please join us for a remote demo by the developers from Spain.

When: Thursday Feb 2nd, 9 - 10:30am
Where: Meyer 220 (Meyer library second floor)

Claudia A Engel
Department of Anthropology
Stanford University

Posted by ronbo at 05:46 PM