I am graduating, and so the following information (currently on my school website) will disappear at some point. I suppose the following will also give other people who are going into economics graduate school a sense of what the computer environment might be like.
Graduate Computing at the UCSD Economics Department
Terminal Servers
Graduate students have access to various terminal servers. Using the Remote Desktop Connection program in Windows XP or Windows Vista, you can connect to:
acms-app-srv.ucsd.edu for Gauss, Matlab, and R
acs-sas-srv.ucsd.edu for SAS
acms-stata-srv.ucsd.edu for Stata IC
The operating system on these computers (at least on acms-app-srv.ucsd.edu) is Windows Server 2003 R2, Enterprise x64 Edition. When I started in the PhD program, it was a tradition then to make life difficult for the first years, and so I did not get access to the servers by default. Should the tradition continuous to carry on even to today, ask Rafael for help.
These computers are organized in a way to make running scripts across different analytical programs difficult, since each of the major programs (Matlab, SAS, Stata) are hosted in separate servers. These servers also do not have internet access - so you cannot download fresh data files directly and process them. Finally, they also do not have Microsoft Office (and Excel in particular), so that Matlab cannot open xls files on the server.
If you want to access files on your own computer while working remotely, see my notes here.
Economics 200 Lab
The economics graduate student lab requires a key code or your ID card to enter. You can get the key code and set up your ID card for access with Rafael. On the first floor at Econ 100, there is also an undergraduate economics lab.
ACMS (formerly ACS) maintains a list of software in the computer lab as well as the computers' hardware specifications.
There are four computers with higher hardware specifications in the lab that you can reserve for projects.
VPN
If you are connecting from home, or somewhere outside the UCSD network, you will need to use VPN to 'log' into the UCSD intranet before connecting to the remote servers. Connecting to the VPN also allows you some security when you use the internet over an unsecured network like when you use the internet in Starbucks, McDonalds, or the UCSD-Guest access point. Make sure you choose the "allthruucsd" group when you connect using the VPN program to encrypt all communications. Using the VPN also allows you to run a local copy of Matlab on your desktop with the school network license (see the Matlab section below). To set up the VPN, you can go to the VPN site for more information.
If you have an iPad or iPhone, you can setup VPN for it as well. I highly recommend this, since wireless security on most mobile device are quite weak - particular when you access sensitive personal information via an app over an open network (like Starbucks or McDonalds). Information on setting up VPN connect on your ipad or iPhone is here.
Other Network Access Information
UCSD has both unencrypted internet access points (UCSD-Guest) and encrypted access points (UCSD-Protected) The steps to set up access to the UCSD-Protected access point is somewhat involved, but instructions are here. An alternative is to use the unencrypted access and use VPN over it.
If you want to set up a computer in your office and use a wired connection - the instructions are here. I am under the impression that the IP is static - so if you run a server for your research (say web-scrapping financial data from the Wall Street Journal), you can remote connect to it knowing that your address will not change. (In addition, if the IP address is dynamic, you can always use a dynamic DNS service like NO-IP to get around the issue.)
In each office (or at least in the Economics Building), there are supposed to be two outlets with four jacks each. The A and B jacks of each outlet are active.
Update 20120118: Got the following email when I try to setup a new wired connection for my computer: "All computer registrations to campus need to come from SSCF. We are required to do this by campus in order to verify they meet the campus security standards. Mainly that they have current antivirus software and the operating system is patched. Please call ext. 22423 and arrange a time to bring your laptop by SSB 142 to have it registered."
File Access
Generally, you will have access to an ACMS directory (that all registered students have) and a separate economics directory (that graduate students have). The ACMS directory has very little storage, and is rather useless. The economics directory is slightly better - as you need more space for your research, you can request it via Rafael. You will need your advisor to ok the request - so you cannot request extra storage just to store your mp3s. (If that is what you want, just use Amazon Cloud Drive.)
You can find more information on how to access the directories from your own laptop or computers here.
Briefly, if you just need read access to the ACMS directory, you can access it from any web browser via the url: https://webdrive.ucsd.edu/~(Your username). If you need write access as well, you can install a program called "WebDrive" that the university provides for free. The ACMS page provides instructions on setting that up.
Your Very Own Professional Looking Website
You can get the official UCSD Economics Department sanctioned template from econwebmaster@ucsd.edu. Note that simply downloading your classmate's HTML file does not quite work. You need to also know enough about HTML to download the supporting CSS/image files and to figure out the directory structure that the HTML code assumes. If you are not so good with HTML, look at the HTML code of your classmates as references would help. To see the HTML code, use Ctrl+U in Firefox and Chrome. Because Internet Explorer is special, (or at least IE 9 is), I do not believe Ctrl+U works. For IE9, you need to use the drop down menu. Access that by hitting the Alt key, and the select View -> Source.
To have your website at econ.ucsd.edu instead of, say, iacs5.ucsd.edu, you need to use the dss.ucsd.edu server instead of the iacs5.ucsd.edu server. Either way, you would want to put your HTML code under the directory named public_html. Note that by convention, index.html is your home page.
You can upload your HTML files to the server using something like WinSCP, or the WebDrive program. The former is free, and the latter is free for UCSD students (download and install instructions here). For the latter, the settings in the picture below should allow you to map the remote directory as your U:\ drive.
WRDS Access
You can request access via the WRDS website. However, UCSD has a rather limited set of access. (For example, I would really like to get access to daily Treasury quotes.)
You can access data via the web interface. However, you can also ssh into wrds.wharton.upenn.edu and access the data via SAS on the Linux terminal. If you want to access the SAS GUI via the Linux network, you can use an X-client like Xming, which is installed on most UCSD computers. Unfortunately, this is really really really slow.
If you have a Windows version of SAS running on a computer with internet connection, you should use PC SAS Connect instead.
Linux Servers
As of August 2010, the UCSD Unix servers (iacs5.ucsd.edu for example) have Mathematica 7 and Matlab R2009a installed. I vague recall trying to run a CPU intensive Matlab program and it triggered a kill. Therefore, it is not clear to me that you can do anything intensive via Linux remotely. However, try and see if this is important to you.
Matlab
In addition to having it on most computers on campus, you can also have Matlab installed on your own computer. The version available is very current, and someone from the department usually email out the license key when a new version is available. I believe you can still get the installation CDs in the Economics 200 lab, but for the past few versions, students have been able to download the ISO images from a network location directly. As an economics PhD student, you should get an email with instructions when new versions are released. Alternatively, if you are new, ask the staff or older year students. The email would also include the license key you need to install Matlab. With this, you can run Matlab on your own computer as long as you have an active internet connection *from the campus* (either directly or through VPN).
Of course, the more important thing for Matlab is what toolkit licenses are available. You can find the information here. (You need to find "matlab" in the drop down menu.) More general information about our Matlab license is here.
X-Windows
The following instructions allow you to connect via X-windows to the Unix server, so that you can run SAS on the WRDS Linux server in graphics mode. However, this is purely for fun, because it is just too slow to be practical. Like all economist, I have a penchant for impractical things - though I do my best to be practical in my own research and focus on mostly empirical matters.
- Make sure you have access to Xming and Plink, which are installed on most computers on campus. If not, both are freeware and can be easily located via Google.
- Plink comes as a standalone executable file. Xming you will have to install.
- In a command prompt, run:
xming :0 -multiwindow -clipboard
plink -X login@wrds.wharton.upenn.edu xterm - For the plink command, login@wrds.wharton.upenn.edu specifies your login and server name, and xterm is the path and name of the xterm program. Once you are connected, you can start SAS.