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

Purpose & Contribution

• The main purpose of this wiki is to familiarize readers with the computing resources provided by the department. We encourage everyone, especially newcomers, to at least skim all of the articles in the Quick Start section below.
• 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 or suggestions, please leave a comment on any page in the wiki.

Important Announcements

Before using any department computing resources, please see Research Computing Dos and Don'ts

• [2026-04-10] New Article: Introducing Globus, a tool for sharing large files within and between institutions.
• [2026-04-01] PSA: If you use VS Code, look for "Python Environments" in your extensions and uninstall it immediately due to environment conflicts.
• [2026-04-01] Updated Article: The Linux and department servers page has been updated with instructions on how to use /scratch to avoid disk I/O slowdowns. See Linux and department servers#Using /scratch.

Quick Start

Beginner's Guide to Computation in Statistical Research
The essential starting point for understanding how to scale your statistical workflows and choose the right tools for your research.

Directory of Computing Resources for Statistical Research
A comprehensive index of all available clusters, servers, and computing environments accessible to department members.

Miscellaneous Services
Additional department tools, software licenses, and specialized computing services.

Article Catalog
A comprehensive list of articles organized by topic

Support Resources

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

General Tech Support
For general issues with department computing resources:
Email: remarks@stat.cmu.edu

Research Project Assistance (Graduate Students Only)
Live assistance from Alex Shen, PhD Computing TA, for project-specific computing questions:
Office Hours: Mondays 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM @ FMS Interview Room 320
Contact: ajshen@andrew.cmu.edu or reach out directly via Slack.

Onboarding & Troubleshooting (Graduate Students Only)
Live assistance for setting up and troubleshooting computing resources:
Carl Skipper: Office hours by appointment. Request via skipper@andrew.cmu.edu
Jake Gordon: Office hours by appointment. Request via jacobg2@andrew.cmu.edu

Suggestions Box and Todos

This sections contains work in progress and future suggestions for the wiki. If you would like to leave a suggestions, you may:

• Directly contact the Computing TA
• Leave a comment on a specific wiki article with your suggestions
• Leave a comment on this page with your suggestions

• [New Article] Beginner's Guide -> Scaling -> Version Control -> Experiment Management
• [New Article] Beginner's Guide -> Scaling -> Big Data Management -> Articles about file formats and compression
• [New Article] Beginner's Guide -> Software Development -> Package Creation -> Writing Documentation
• [New Article] Beginner's Guide -> Software Development -> Package Repositories

Old Computing Wiki Pages to be migrated

our "what resources when" article.

Research Computing Dos and Don'ts

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

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

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