Stata on the FASRC clusters

Description

STATA, a powerful statistical software package, is widely used by researchers, analysts, and academics across various disciplines. Renowned for its versatility, STATA enables users to efficiently analyze, manage, and visualize data, making it an indispensable tool for both novice and advanced data practitioners. Its intuitive command syntax facilitates seamless data manipulation, regression analysis, time-series modeling, and more, empowering users to uncover meaningful insights from complex datasets. With its robust suite of features and user-friendly interface, STATA continues to be a cornerstone in statistical analysis and research methodology.

Examples

You can find examples on how to run STATA in both serial and parallel modes, in the FASRC User Codes GitHub repository.

Open OnDemand

STATA can be run from Open OnDemand (OOD, formerly known as VDI) by clicking on Stata icon or choosing it from the Interactive Apps menu, and specifying your resource needs. Hit Launch, wait for the session to start, and click the “Launch Stata” button.

• Cannon OOD
• FASSE OOD

You can also launch Stata from the Remote Desktop app on OOD.

Output file permissions

Stata appears to override filesystem-level permissions structures such as file-ACLs.  In a test using stata/14.0-fasrc01 the .dta files produced by Stata were consistent with the user’s umask, despite default file-ACLs that should have created different effective permissions.  It appears as though Stata is modifying the permissions after writing the file (i.e. after the default file-ACLs have been applied).  The solution for this should be to set the desired umask in the Slurm submission script or on the command line prior to submitting the batch job (though a ‘umask’ command in the Slurm submission script would be preferable in most cases).

Running Stata on FASSE

For how to set the proxies on Stata, see our FASSE proxy documentation.

Resources

These are some external resources with many examples on how to use Stata:

• UCLA Advanced Research Computing
• Stata has multiple resources for tutorials
• Data Carpentry
• University of Winconsin-Madison Social Science Computing Cooperative