- First
and second year students doing coursework in the department have access
to machines leased from HSPH IT that are upgraded on a three-year
cycle. These machines are located in the small department computer
lab on the fourth floor of Building Two. In addition, second year
students with offices on the fourth floor have the opportunity to
request a leased machine on their desk. If a student expects to primarily
use their own laptop, we request that the student not ask for a desktop
machine so that more machines can be made publicly available. The
leased machines are maintained with standard software including MS
Office, R (statistical program), SAS, XEmacs (text editor), SecureCRT
(telnet/ssh), AbsoluteFTP (file transfer), Xmanager (X-Window emulation
software), as well as other useful software. Machines on student desks
may be customized; the machines in the lab are frozen and additional
software can not be installed permanently on them. The microlab in
the lower level of Kresge is also available for student use.
- For
students in their third or later year doing thesis research, computing
resources are provided by their advisor. Students should discuss their
needs with their advisor, who will provide the necessary resources,
usually in the form of a desktop or laptop dedicated for the student's
use. While it is not necessary that the machine be new (e.g., it may
be passed on from a previous student), ordinarily it will not be more
than 2 to 3 years old. If a new machine is necessary, appropriate
prices are those of the basic machines priced as listed on the Harvard
IBM/Lenovo website. Purchase of a higher-level machine is at the discretion
of the advisor. Use of the Linux cluster (see below) may be more appropriate
for intensive computing than purchasing a dedicated high end machine.
If the student has concerns about computing that cannot be resolved
with their advisor, the student should contact the department chair
or department computing committee members.
- Each
student has a designated space on the Novell network P: drive, accessible
from Windows machines. There is no limit on the number of files, however
space is limited to 100 Mb. In addition 100 Mb of space is available
on the HSPH UNIX server. Both of these areas are backed up frequently
by HSPH IT. Please do NOT save anything to C: drive of machines in
the departmental lab, since everything is removed from it on a daily
basis. Additional space may be purchased from the IT department for
a relatively small fee, and the computing committee recommends that
advisors provide this additional space to students as needed to encourage
saving important research files on backed up space. Details can be
found on the HSPH
IT Forms webpage. In addition, we expect that large amounts of
backed up space (on the order of 100s of gigabytes) will soon be available
for purchase from HSPH IT as part of the Linux cluster, and more information
can be obtained from the departmental computing committee.
- All
students engaged in thesis research have the opportunity to obtain
an account on the Linux cluster. Students should contact a member
of the departmental computing committee. Students not yet engaged
in thesis research but who are involved in a research project requiring
substantial computing power can request an account by contacting the
departmental computing committee.
- (For
advisors) Computing funding should come from the supporting grant
whenever possible. Some training grants may not have the funds to
cover this funding. In these cases, such funds would ideally come
from projects that connected to the training grant on which the student
is working, such as a related R01. In rare cases when this is not
possible, the department will provide the necessary supplementary
funding. This situation should be very rare.
- Other
policies may apply for students with offices located outside HSPH,
such as CBAR or the DFCI.
- Questions
or concerns about these policies should be directed to the departmental
computing committee.
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Last updated: 07/28/2009 |
