Statistics and Statistical Programming (Spring 2019)/Quest at Northwestern

What is Quest?
Northwestern provides students and faculty with free (limited) access to their high-performance computing cluster called Quest.

For the purposes of this class, most of you will not need anything more than the analytic nodes. These are perfect if your data is in the tens of GB range (they request that you don't use more than 60GB of RAM).

If you have a larger dataset than that, then you will need to use one of the compute nodes. You can talk with Jeremy about how to do that.

Requesting an Account
In order to use Quest, you need to request an account here. Part of this process is writing a short statement about what you want to use the node for - briefly explaining your research should suffice. It is very, very likely that you will only need a Research I allocation.

It will probably take a few days for your request to be approved.

Using RStudio
Login to the Rstudio server on Quest. This will give you a version of RStudio in your browser. Quest provides some documentation on basic things like uploading data, installing packages, and troubleshooting.

Note that if you want to create RMarkdown documents, you will need to install a bunch of packages. When you try to create a new RMarkdown file it will tell you this and offer to install the packages.