Letter from the Director, Barry Schaudt
I have two roles, Director of Research Services, and Faculty Liaison, As Director of Research Services, I am working to build an organization that supports the use of computer technologies in faculty research. Please contact me with your research needs that involve computers, data (collecting, transferring, storage, backup, security, management, mining, analysis, publishing, sharing), or software. We are expanding and need to know and understand your research computing needs. The definition of research computing is very broad. For example, the Research Services staff: assists with databases and web interfaces to databases; provides technical expertise on a variety of software; will put together and give customized discipline specific classes on a variety of statistical research topics, Matlab, Mathematica, or GIS.
As Faculty Liaison, I will assist researchers in navigating the Information Technology Services organization, and be sure Information Technology Services is responsive.
I have been meeting with faculty members from many departments to determine how Research Services can best serve researchers at Boston College. I will continue to meet with additional faculty members. If you have comments, questions, concerns, or just want to introduce yourself, please contact me.
Please check this web page regularly. The Research Services web pages will be changing as we change and evolve.
I look forward to working with everyone at Boston College.
Barry Schaudt, Ph.D.
Director of Research Services and Faculty Liaison
617-552-0242
schaudt@bc.edu
Overview of Research Services
Research Services provides consultation, training, and tutorials to support computing and research at Boston College. The Research Services staff has expertise in Matlab, Mathematica, statistical packages such as Stata, SAS, and SPSS, Qualitative Research, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Scientific Computation, Data Analysis, and Visualization. The staff can also provide assistance with codes (writing, porting, debugging, tuning, optimizing, and parallelizing codes), databases, Web technologies, in integrating computer technologies into grant applications, and with setting up and managing surveys through the Internet.
Research Services Staff
The full-time staff consists of:
Constantin Andronache (GIS, Mathematica, Matlab)
Rani Dalgin (Statistics, Statistical Software)
Ronald Ko (Databases, Web Technologies)
Zhongze Li (Parallel Computing and Scientific Computation)
Barry Schaudt (Director, High Performance Computing, Data and Scientific Visualization)
In general, full-time staff members are available from 9:00 am - 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday.
The graduate students provide additional assistance:
Keith Chan (SPSS)
Francis Niestemski (Matlab)
Andriy Tsintsiruk (GIS, Mathematica)
Pinar Uysal (Statistics, Statistical Software)
The times that the graduate students work vary and are generally between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday.
Software Supporting Research
Researchers at Boston College have access to a broad range of software. Examples of software available to support research are: ArcGIS, Matlab, Mathematica, SAS, SPSS, and Stata. Research Services' software web pages describe each software package, gives information on where it is installed, and contains links to documentation. If you have questions about software for your research, please contact us (researchservices@bc.edu).
Tutorials and Workshops
Research Services offers tutorials and workshops every semester. We can also offer customized tutorials and workshops. The current tutorials are listed at: www.bc.edu/offices/researchservices/tutorials.
Web Surveys
Research Services provides assistance with on-line surveys. More information about on-line surveys is at www.bc.edu/offices/researchservices/surveys.
Hardware
Linux Cluster
Boston College has a Linux Cluster. This cluster is designed to run serial and parallel codes, in addition to public domain and commercial software. This cluster is available to the entire Boston College research community. The cluster consists of 26 compute nodes. Each compute node has 2 dual-core 2.6 GHz AMD processors. All but one of the nodes have 8 GB of memory, one node has 32 GB of memory.
Further information about the Linux Cluster is available at: www.bc.edu/offices/researchservices/cluster.
The Linux Cluster will be expanded in the Spring/Summer of 2008.
Web and Database Servers
In December 2007, Web and database servers, in addition to 10 TB of disk that is backed up nightly, were installed to support research data needs. Information about the data resourses is available at: www.bc.edu/offices/researchservices/dataresources.html.
Ladon7
Ladon7 is an IBM system. This runs Fortran and C codes as well as software such as SAS and Stata. It has three 1.65 Ghz Power5 processors and 16 GB of memory. It is running the AIX Operating System.