Welcome to the Economics Laboratory

The Economics Laboratory, located at 1115 E. 58th St. in room 302, has recently undergone some major changes aimed at increasing productivity through greater processing power, as well as providing greater flexibility and convenience for potential users. Graduate students in Economics are invited to apply for an account for the lab to take advantage of these new benefits.

Lab Profile

  1. Great Processing Power
    Core statistical applications (SAS, Stata, Matlab, S-Plus, & R) run on a Sun Fire x4600 M2 server consisting of eight 2300MHz AMD Opteron quad-core CPU processors and 256GB of RAM, appreciably reducing program execution time.
  2. Large Storage Space
    User disk quotas are set at 30GB per user (faculty 100GB). File storage on the SunFire server will also provide great stability, as well as allow remote access to user files.
  3. Remote Access
    As a result of the transition of files and applications to a UNIX environment, users can not only run programs without tying up workstations needed by other users, but can access these files and applications remotely from any machine with an SSH or Windows Network client. Now users who prefer to work off-campus can still reap the benefits of the new server hardware.
  4. New Dell Workstations
    The Lab has been outfitted with 17 new Dell GX520 workstations running Windows XP Pro with 2.8GHz processors, 2GB RAM, CDRW/DVD drives, & flat panel screens to provide greater desk workspace.
  5. Roaming Profiles
    In addition to file storage, the server also stores roaming profiles for each lab user. What this means is that users can now save their own settings for the appearance of the desktop, program shortcuts, environment variables, etc. and have these settings load automatically when logging in to any of the 17 workstations. *Note that roaming profiles only apply when logging in to a lab machine, not when logging into the server remotely.
  6. Laptop Access
    An exciting addition to the new lab space is the installation of a small laptop area supported by a wireless network, allowing users to access files and programs on the University network from their own machines. In the lab there are AC plugs and space available for up to 5 simultaneous users.
  7. Printing
    NSIT now provides printing services for the lab. Please click here for more information including printing FAQ's and NSIT contact information.

How Do I Get An Account?

To obtain an account on the server you must first have an account with the university (a CNet ID). If you need to find out your CNet ID or you need to create one, you can do that here.

Once you have a CNet ID you can apply for an Econ Lab account.

Your account on the Econ Lab server (athens.uchicago.edu) will provide access to the following services:

Authentication

This server houses accounts for the lab. An account on this server will allow you to log into all the computers in the lab as well as access your files on the server and run programs, both from within the lab and by connecting remotely.

File Services

Each individual with a server account has 30GB of available file storage. When you log onto a lab machine your space on the server is automatically mapped to your My Documents and your Z Drive. You may also connect to the server from outside the lab.

Processor Services

The central purpose of this server is to provide access to powerful software packages for performing statistical analyses and other computationally intensive tasks. Previously you may have used some of these programs as local Windows applications. In order to run these applications on UNIX using an XWindows environment you must first establish a secure X Windows connection with the server. X Windows is a protocol for displaying the graphical output of a program. Generally this is used to run a program on a remote server and have that program display it's output to a local monitor.

Then from the xterm command line you may start any of the programs. Simply type the name of the program (matlab, sas, splus, spss, xstata, or r). If you wish to continue using the command line while the program you have chosen is running simply add a & after the name of the program. For example:

sas &

This command will start SAS and leave your command line free to execute other commands.

You can click here for additional help with running statistical applications in UNIX.