The NUIT Social Sciences Computing Cluster (SSCC) supports the research and teaching activities of social sciences faculty and their graduate students. Customized for University researchers in the social sciences, the SSCC provides an advanced computational capability, a rich suite of analytical software applications, and a centrally-managed data storage service.

Accessing the SSCC

A user account is required to access the SSCC. Accounts are available at no charge to Northwestern social sciences faculty researchers and to their graduate students and research assistants and students in classes. An NU NetID is required. Accounts may be established by completing the SSCC Account Request Form.

All users of the SSCC must agree to the following:

• To use SSCC system resources only for social sciences research activities
• To use SSCC disk storage for storage of software applications, document files, image files, streaming media files, or other files related to social sciences research
• To schedule compute resources on the SSCC in a way that will allow other account holders on the SSCC shared use of the system

Computing Services

Computing services available from the SSCC include:

• Compute access to 260 AMD Opteron CPU cores, most running at 2.8Ghz. Each CPU core has 4 GB of memory. The batch cluster can execute up to 240 single-CPU jobs simultaneously
• An interactive Linux command-line work environment, but with X Windows support
• A wide selection of Analytical Software
• 14 Terabytes for common disk storage of datasets (which will be expanded as needed)

Recurring funding for the SSCC is provided by Office of the President, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Kellogg School of Management, and Northwestern University Information Technology.

Additional Information

Support Contacts

Questions about the SSCC may be directed to sscc-info@northwestern.edu.