Technology Resources for Research
Introduction
The history of research at CSUN is ever-evolving and reflects the leaps and bounds made by higher ed in decades past, and the development of a culture of research. CSUN has a wide variety of research tools available to support statistical analysis, computational research and more. This page is a compilation of the tools and resources available to you at little to no cost.
Resources for Computational Research
Grant-funded resources already available to CSUN researchers.
Nautilus on the National Research Platform (NRP)
Started at UC San Diego as the “Pacific Research Platform” with a focus on that region, eventually becoming the NRP as it expanded to the rest of the nation and then around the world.
Computing Resources available from more than 50 distributed institutions across the country and around the world, providing more than 20,000 cores; 1,300 GPUs, 10 Petabytes of Storage, based on Kubernetes containers.
If you are interested, please contact research.tech@csun.edu for more information.
Technology Infrastructure for Data Exploration (TIDE)
NSF grant for High Performance Compute, dedicated to the CSU physically installed at San Diego State.
Although many of the resources are still being configured, and will be made available to the CSU at a later date (including through NRP), currently JupyterHub instances are available.
Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS)
Started in 2011 across 16 institutions, with funding for 5 years, but has been continually renewed since then, as the need for this has only grown.
To access, you need to request credits based on needs. In working with CSUSB, we have requested and now have access to some credits. If you are interested, please contact research.tech@csun.edu for more information.
Open Science Grid
Originated at University of Wisconsin – Madison, it has now expanded to be nation-wide Distributed Computing platform
To access, you can submit a request to sign up to the Open Science Pool and submit your workloads.
Jetstream
Provided by Indiana University, through a grant from NSF, provides access to research compute with a focus on ease of use and broad accessibility.
For access, visit the Get Started page to create an account, and request a computing allocation.
Tools for Research/Statistical Analysis
One of the most important requirements to your research is the use of appropriate statistical methods and analysis. Whether you are doing quantitative or qualitative research, statistical analysis will be an indispensable part of your workflow. There are plenty of research tools available that allow you to do a wide variety of statistical analysis for your research. Many of these tools are available at low or no cost to you.
Tools
Research in a secure cloud service environment, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery, and other functionality to help you move faster, scale and lower IT costs. CSUN's AWS is the way to go.
Collaborate and share from an unlimited secure file storage space. Take your files with you using myCSUNbox.
CSUN On Premises Data Center
Support computationally intensive research computing in a managed campus data center which provides controlled physical access, availability of uninterruptable power supply (to sustain power for short intervals of power loss), monitored power distribution, air conditioning (humidity, filtering, cooling), fire suppression, and more!
Hi-Speed Internet Connectivity
Connect to an ethernet-based data communications network with high-speed 100 Gbps connection to CENIC's California Research and Education Network, an advanced network serving the vast majority of research and education institutions.
Access myCSUNsoftware, e.g., SPSS, SAS, R software and more!
Easy-to-use, intuitive survey tool. Qualtrics allow you to track participation and export to a spreadsheet or SPSS.
- GraphPad QuickCalcs allows you to run statistical analyses quickly and directly in your browser.
- Daniel Soper provides free statistic calculators.
- Social Science Statistics provides statistics calculators that are intuitive and easy to use. Included are a variety of tests of significance, plus correlation, effect size and confidence interval calculators.
- SurfStat is a Matlab toolbox for the statistical analysis of univariate and multivariate surface and volumetric data using linear mixed effects models and random field theory.
Google Scholar is a free online research tool offered by Google. This tool allows users to search for academic literature, scientific articles, journals, white papers, and patents across the web. This is an excellent tool for research. It not only searches well-known databases, but it also looks for articles in university repositories, so your chances of finding the full-text PDF of the research article you are after is very high. You can set up keyword alerts so that Google Scholar notifies you when there is a new article in your field or from your co-authors.
You can manage multiple libraries of papers. You can label paper or article, and Google Scholar will organize them for you. Google Scholar displays vital information about the article such as citation number, versions and other articles citing the current article. Google Scholar also alerts you if somebody else has cited your paper. You can download citations in a wide variety of formats – MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, – and you can easily export the citation to EndNote and other bibliography managers. Overall, Google Scholar is an indispensable tool for researchers.
Digital Scholar offers a suite of low cost/no cost tools for research:
- Omeka provides web publishing platforms for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits.
- Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research. Available for Mac, Windows, Linux and IOS
- Take control of your research photos with Tropy, the tool that shortens the path from finding to using sources.
- PressForward enables individuals and collaborative teams to gather, edit, and publish web-based content.
- Connect with researchers at remote archives for the documents you need. Sourcery, your sources, like magic.