Resources

Facility

The UT Dallas Education Research Center operates a visitor lab with seating for nine concurrent visiting researchers. The Education Research Center facility is access-controlled, and external researchers are assigned an access card for the duration of each visit upon check-in. During periods of excess demand, it may be possible to accommodate additional visitors in our internal lab seating, space permitting. It is extremely unusual for researchers to experience any difficulty scheduling desired times for visits to the ERC.

Computing Environment

All research at the Education Research Center is performed on our Education Research Center server, which is accessed via IGEL thin clients from the secure education research center lab areas. The network by which the clients connect to the server is sequestered, and does not provide access to the internet. Visitors are invited to bring personal devices for general use requiring access to the internet while visiting the Education Research Center, and will be able to access the guest wireless network at UT Dallas.

The characteristics of the ERC research server environment are as follows:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with a graphical desktop environment available (xfce, providing navigation by icons and menus as in Windows), and graphical applications.
• 2TB memory to accommodate working with large files and the estimation of large models.
• 7TB of fast tier 1 storage (each project is allocated a directory in this area for active analysis, limited to 250GB).
• 20TB of tier 2 storage (each project is allocated a directory in this area, limited to 450GB).
• Data backed up nightly to a separate backup server.
• Current versions of Stata, R (with R Studio) and Python available for all users. Additional software can be supported as needed if platform compatible, but must be licensed by the researcher if commercial.
• Productivity applications provided by LibreOffice (Microsoft Office compatible word processor and spreadsheet applications).
• Our computing environment at present has ample capacity to support a large number of researchers concurrently performing substantial analyses. Researchers do not typically encounter binding computing capacity or storage constraints at the UTD ERC, or performance degradation due to concurrent use.

Learn more about becoming an approved researcher by visiting our Conducting Research page.

Learn more about our data holdings.

View our fee schedule.

View synthetic education data files.

View data documentation.