Main Page new

Welcome to the CMU Department of Statistics and Data Science Computing Wiki! To get the most out of this resource, please note the following:

1. The main purpose of this wiki is to familiarize readers with computing resources provided by the department provided by the department. We encourage everyone, especially newcomers, to at least skim all of the articles in the Quick Start section below
3. This wiki is editable by any current member of the CMU Statistics department. If you find any small errors, feel free to correct them directly. If you have a question about a specific article, post it on the Talk section of that article.

Important Announcements

Date	Category	Description
2026-04-01	PSA	If you use VS Code and have been encountering problems with Python environments, look for an extension called "Python Environments" in your VS Code installation and uninstall this extension immediately
2026-04-01	Updated Article	The Linux and department servers page has been updated with instruction on how to use /scratch to avoid slowdowns due to excessive disk I/O. See Linux and department servers

Quick Start

• Beginner's Guide to Computation in Statistical Research
• Directory of Computing Resources for Statistical Research
• Miscellaneous Services

Support Resources

For assistance with issues not covered in this wiki, please reach out to the following contacts:

1. General tech support for department computing resources: remarks@stat.cmu.edu
2. Live assistance for research projects (Graduate Students Only): Alex Shen, PhD Computing TA.
   • Office Hours, Mondays 2pm-3pm @ FMS Interview Room 320
   • Direct inquiries over email (ajshen@andrew.cmu.edu) and slack
3. Live assistance for computing resource onboarding and troubleshooting (Graduate Students Only):
   • Carl Skipper: office hours by appointment, requested via email (skipper@andrew.cmu.edu)
   • Jake Gordon: office hours by appointment, requested via email (jacobg2@andrew.cmu.edu)

Department Contacts

Email Address	Description
events@stat.cmu.edu	seminars, conferences & workshops, and calendar updates
news@stat.cmu.edu	dept/dept member-related public news & announcements
lists@stat.cmu.edu	department email lists
webmaster@stat.cmu.edu	website updates
remarks@stat.cmu.edu	computer/tech requests
rooms@stat.cmu.edu	request space for meetings and TA office hours
reimbursements@stat.cmu.edu	travel and reimbursement requests

Old Computing Wiki Pages to be migrated

our "what resources when" article.

Managing servers and environments

Introductory Tutorials

Introduction to Basic Linux Commands

Virtual environments

• Why use virtual environments?
• Mamba (Conda) environments.
• R's Renv
• Python's virtual environments (2 options)
• Old instructions for conda with Python

Containers

• Introduction to containers
• Docker, and why-you-should-use-it-for-your-research
• Basic tutorial
• Running Docker locally and on Hydras

Department computing resources

Servers

• Department Servers.
  1. Software - overview of the software installed and ready for use.
  2. Monitor Server Usage

• PSC, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Free accounts and usage credits are available
  1. ACCESS
  2. Parallelization_on_PSC/Bridges-2
• Open OnDemand - StatDS
• Open OnDemand - Wright

Development guides

Package development

• R package development
• Python package development

Terminal automation. This wiki introduces approaches to automate Linux/OS command line calls.

• Bash files. This wiki presents potential uses of Bash files including automated file/folder creation, parallelization and much more!
• Make. This wiki presents potential uses of make and Makefiles including automated workflow and dependency tracking
• Jumping to frequently used folders and automating environment setups

Version Control

See the guide provided in the site of 36750 - Statistical Computing

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

1. VSCode
2. PyCharm
3. RStudio
4. Eclipse

See also the guide provided in the site of 36750 - Statistical Computing

Miscellaneous

1. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Python

General Department Computing Resources

• Fall 2021 Computing Seminar Resources (video and slides)

Ideas for the Wiki

Please see the TODO page to post suggestions and errata.

Using the Wiki

• Here is some Generic Wiki Information that you may be interested in, such as a users' guide and other resources for Wiki users.

Archived Pages

These area pages that are potentially useful for some users, but no longer reflect the computing resources of the department writ large.

Azure

1. Azure: getting started. This wiki walks you through the steps to create a virtual machine through Azure
2. How to obtain a virtual machine with a GPU
3. Attach a disk to a virtual machine

Delete me?

• Computing office hour usage (condensed into front page desc)
• Local PC Backup (replaced by official google help article)
• Bulding your website with Hugo (replaced by Jekyll)
• How to host your webpage under stat.cmu.edu (moved into misc services)
• Department GPU Servers (merged into main department servers article)
• Access PSC compute nodes directly from VSCode (just a link to external article, will have entire article about vs code remote)

Reference management

1. Zotero
2. Mendeley

Text Editors

1. Vim
2. Nano
3. Emacs
4. Atom
5. Sublime