Biology Computer Resource Center
372 Morrill Science Center
The BCRC is a Computing Facility in the Department of Biology (372 Morrill Science Center, Building IV South). Macintosh computers are available for use by Life Sciences students and faculty. If you have questions, please send email to bcrc-help@bio.umass.edu or call 545-3631.
During the academic year, the BCRC is staffed by student consultants Monday through Friday from 8am - 9pm. Summer and intersession hours are unofficial, but the facility is usually open anyway. The Director, Steven D. Brewer, collaborates with faculty and students to develop resources and course websites. Don't hesitate to contact us if you're looking for technical support in using instructional technology!
The BCRC offers resources and documentation to help you get stuff done.
We build Course Accounts each year starting in August -- just set a password to start using it. If we haven't already built an account for your life science class yet, ask if we can build one for the course you are taking.
After an extended tour of the Lederle Lowrise and OIT, Provizonta has returned to the BCRC to great acclamation.
In other words, printing is available again -- thanks for your patience.
Provizonta had to be hospitalized after its fuser seized up. But I am informed it is recovering nicely and will be up and about in just a few days and ready to print your documents in no time.
UPDATE: Provizonta should be back to work sometime on Friday April 20. We're still waiting on hardware support. :-(
I have recently installed the command-line version of structure which "implements a model-based clustering method for inferring population structure using genotype data consisting of unlinked markers." The program is on your PATH if you open a terminal window and type "structure". To run the program, you really need the "mainparams" and "extraparams" files -- the original ones are in /usr/local/share/structure, if you need to start with something.
I have also set up the workstations to run structure in an automated way, if you have many analyses you want to run -- contact me to get directions on how to use that. Or if there are similar analyses you would like to run using the BCRC computers.
I have installed Octave via macports in the BCRC. Just start a terminal and enter "octave" at the command prompt...
There are many resources to getting started with Octave, including this brief introduction and this programming tutorial. This Reference Card handy.
There are many extensions to octave with additional functions and tools. I've installed the octave-bioinfo tools already, but others may be of interest.
Someone asked me recently if there was an easy way to synchronize folders between two computers. Unfortunately, the easy ways tend not to work very reliably. But here is a method that's a little more complicated, but should be extremely reliable. You'll need to do some unix things and you'll need a place on the server where you can keep all of the files.
Note: You could avoid using the server as an intermediate space, but then you'd be limited to a system that only works inside the building. Or, rather, making it so it would also work outside the building would make it a lot more complicated.
We'll assume you're going to keep a folder in your home directory on a laptop and a desktop synchronized with a folder located on a lab hard-drive on marlin. Don't try to set this up with a folder in your home directory unless you've made prior arrangements with the technical staff, unless you only want to use it for tiny things.
Read more to learn how.
Biology Department Video
