Programming Support

We provide modern technological infrastructure to support your analytical and other computing or network-based needs. In addition to the technical support during your visit at NCEAS, our scientific computing team is available to discuss and advise on data science and scientific programming tasks, such as:

• Organizing and assembling your data
• Assistance with data collation and documentation through NCEAS’ student interns
• Structuring and integrating heterogeneous datasets
• Modeling and analysis of your data
• Scaling your analysis using NCEAS’ analytical server
• Scripting best practices and reviewing code
• Preserving and promoting your products on the Web - from derived datasets and terminological glossaries/vocabularies, to scripts, model codes, and interactive “web applications”

Contact our scientific programmers/analysts with your requests at SciComp@nceas.ucsb.edu

Access to NCEAS analytical servers 

Working groups have access to several high-performance computers at NCEAS, which provide advanced analytical, web, and database capabilities that far exceed the capabilities of desktop computers. We are available to set up and instruct you in the use of these Linux/Unix systems for demanding scientific analyses and modeling runs that benefit from lots of memory or storage, or access to multiple CPU’s.

Our most powerful system currently offers 384GB of RAM memory, along with 44 cores (CPUs), and several terabytes of fast storage. Several scientific software packages – such as R/RStudio, Python, Matlab, QGIS – are already installed. Ask us if you need us to install any specific analytical libraries or packages.

We can also set up shared storage space on our server to facilitate data sharing within your working group.

To request access to the NCEAS analytical server, please coordinate with your PIs and contact with your request.

Training

Aside from our main data science trainings, our scientific computing staff are happy to provide modular trainings to efficiently use any of these services, both during your working group meeting and the intervals in-between. These trainings can be done one-on-one or as a group, depending on the working group members’ needs.

Data Preservation

NCEAS is committed to practicing and promoting open science, making scientific research and its supporting data and information accessible to all levels of society. Therefore, we recommend that any input data used for your synthesis work be well documented and preserved in a long-term data repository.

It is required to document and preserve any products resulting from working group activities in a long-term data repository, such as the NCEAS-supported KNB Data Repository or the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) data repository, which are part of the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE).