STATA: Installing into your home directory

The STATA Data Analysis package (http://www.stata.com/) is not installed centrally. However, the University of Iowa provides a pathway to an academic license so users may purchase a copy for individual use. See this page for more information: http://its.uiowa.edu/campus-software-program/stata-se-v14

Once you have acquired a copy of STATA, and want to run it from your home directory, you will need to use the following steps. 

1. Get your copy of STAT up to the cluster system. You'll need to copy the entire contents of the STATA DVD into a folder in your home account. You can achieve this by either mounting your home drive on a local computer that has a DVD drive (see: Home Accounts for instructions), or use sftp or Globus Online (see: Globus Online) to transfer the files. 
2. Once you have the STATA install software in a folder inside your home account, you will need to create another folder that will contain the installed product. Log into your account (if you are using a desktop login, open a terminal window). For example purposes, assume install files are in ~/stata-install. 

[user@hpc-login]:$ mkdir stata
[user@hpc-login]:$ cd stata
[user@hpc-login]:$ sh ../stata-install/install

     3. Next, you will see installer prompts. Follow the prompts to install Stata into the ~/stata directory. Make sure the install directory (listed as "Current Directory") is the directory you created above. Below are example screenshots of an install: 

Next you should see the installer working. Once the install is finished, you will need to activate the software by executing: 

[user@hpc-login]:$ ./stinit

Enter the license information you received when you purchased STATA. Finally, you can add the freshly installed STATA program into your path variable so that it's executable from outside your ~/stata directory. To do this, edit your ~/.bash_profile directory, and edit the path line as below: 

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:$HOME/stata

 When you log in again, you'll be able to simply execute stata or statax: 

[user@hpc-login]:$ stata

While it is possible to run STATA interactively, which can be especially useful for prototyping a job, please remember that login nodes are a shared resource and are intended for launching jobs or prototyping smaller versions of jobs you intend to run. It is not advisable to use interactive sessions for long-running, compute-intensive jobs unless one uses a qlogin session to do so. 

You can run STATA in batch mode, and there is information on doing so here: http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/unix/batch-mode/. Note that this assumes you are familiar with using STATA's do-files, which are scripts with series of STATA commands that you can feed to STATA to run automatically. To become more familiar with what do-files are and how to use them, please consult: http://www.stata.com/manuals13/u16.pdf. You'll first want to build a STATA do-file, then submit that to SGE using qsub. Please refer to the following pages on submitting jobs for how this works, and also for how to request needed resources: Basic Job Submission and Advanced Job Submission. Note that not all versions of STATA are MPI-enabled, so depending on which version you have purchased, you may or may not be able to make use of parallel processing in STATA.