This is a brief overview of the capabilities of the NBER Unix cluster for experienced users of Unix systems. There is an alternative Aging cluster with separate servers and stricter security.
Compute Servers
There are 10 Linux computers for general use, ranging from 12 cores and 66 GB of memory up to 32 cores and 256 GB of memory. The compute servers are:
| nber0.nber.org | 256 GB | 24 cores |
| nber1.nber.org | 66 GB | 24 cores |
| nber2.nber.org | 132 GB | 32 cores |
| nber3.nber.org | 2 TB | 32 cores |
| nber4.nber.org | 256 GB | 12 cores |
| nber5.nber.org | 66 GB | 24 cores |
| nber6.nber.org | 397 GB | 12 cores |
| nber7.nber.org | 529 GB | 32 cores |
| nber8.nber.org | 66 GB | 24 cores |
| nber9.nber.org | 132 GB | 16 cores |
There is one Linux computer for SAS:
| sas1.nber.org | 32GB | 2 cores |
Connecting to the compute servers
You can connect to the servers either through a Remote Desktop or Terminal Client.
RDP
Most users will prefer a GUI interface and therefore should use a Remote Desktop Client. To connect to our research network using RDP, you will first need to set up FortiClient VPN and have an active VPN connection to access these servers.
Once your VPN is connected, you can connect to these servers using the built in RDP client for Windows. or install an equivalent client for Mac. More details can be found in Connecting using Remote Desktop.
Terminal Software
To connect using your terminal, you will need an encrypted terminal client to log in to any of these systems. The MacOS comes with ssh (open a terminal window and enter "ssh user@nberN.nber.org") and there are several Windows ssh clients [ssh.nber.org] available. For file transfers, ssh, sftp and scp are available on all servers. Please keep in mind that all our restricted data use agreement do not allow for the data to be taken our of our server environment.
Your desktop can serve as an adequate X-Windows terminal. We find X-windows/NX and Mobaterm work well in Windows and XQuartz is available for the Mac.
Other information
Comprehensive technology support for research computing can be found at technology support.
Large jobs
If you have a large memory job - more than 20 GB, please visit our Notes for Big Users page. If your job will last many hours, consider how it will checkpoint itself so that it can be restarted if necessary. Please reach out to it-support@nber.org if you are unsure how best to use our computing resources for your large jobs.
Disk space
The default user home directory quota is 10GB, which Mohan can increase within reason. If your needs are in the double digits, you should allow us to plan ahead. In the home directories daily snapshots are kept for 14 days and backups are done every several days. Snapshots may may be accessed with the "snapshots" command.
Each machine has a large RAID0 /tmp disk, which is a good place to leave temporary files. This is local storage (which is fast and cheap) but not shared across machines. There is no backup of /tmp, and files may be erased without notice, but generally stay around for several weeks or months.
Passwords
You can change your password at https://passwd.nber.org. We enforce some complexity requirements, but we endorse xkcd's explanation of password complexity which is on that page.
Your NBER email address is userid@nber.org. Complete information about our email system can be found here, but you can probably make any configuration changes you need at https://back.nber.org/user-setup . We recommend that researchers with a home institution forward their email to their email account at their home institution.
Cross-system access to files
Login ids are common across systems and all disk storage (except /tmp) is shared - all files are available from all computers. Your Unix disk space is accessible from Windows PCs at the NBER if you browse "network neighborhood" and and map a drive letter to "\\1050-fileserver\userid". You will be asked to log in with the same userid and password as you use on the unix servers - it is automatically synced.
Your contact information
Your phone number and sponsor/supervisor at the NBER (if you don't have a bureau affiliation yourself) should be in the .plan file of your home directory. You can edit this on the user-setup page. This is chiefly so that we can contact you if we want ask you to cut down on disk space, or warn you about a runaway job, etc. If you don't answer email, your account is liable to be blocked.
Internet links
We have redundant fast links to the outside internet but they are small compared to the typical university link. Gigabyte files can generally be transferred in a few minutes but may take longer if the other end is slow or far away. Please consult Mohan before tranfers of more than single-digit gigabytes. Please do not download more than a couple of large files simultaneously.
Software
Quite a bit of software is available, and we can generally install any open source or not too expensive software on request. Currently we have Python (2.x and 3.x) SAS, Stata, Rats, limdep, TSP. R, Octave and Scilab available. Users of Matlab and Gauss generally take advantage of their university (Windows) site license via a VPN.
Data
A great deal of micro-data from the BLS, Census, IRS, NCHS and elsewhere is available in /home/data. See Internal Collection for more information. Additional data may be added on request - contact data@nber.org.
For support, please email it-support@nber.org.