About The Department

Computing Resources

The Economics Department's IT Team (Econ-Systems) provides computer support for over 300 users in the department, including all faculty, students and staff. The team currently consists of three full-time IT Professionals, and graduate lab TAs. Our goal is to provide the economics community with state-of-the-art technical resources and support services. Please let us know how we can better serve you.

Economics Computing at MIT

The Department supplements MIT’s computing resources with it’s own cutting-edge systems designed to support learning and research. Our graduate computing lab grants students access to powerful Windows-based virtual machines, which run a full suite of econometric and statistical software packages. The lab is open 24 hours a day and is also remotely accessible, allowing students to connect using their personal computers from anywhere in the world. Additionally, we provide multiple Linux-based research computing servers, including a 200+ processor high-performance computing cluster. These systems allow students to work with massive data sets and easily manage long-running jobs. Our computing infrastructure is backed by a robust and secure fiber-optic data storage system which provides user-accessible backups of datasets and documents.

Three full-time professionals, Carl Anderson, Andy Dorner, and Mark Leary, support our extensive IT operation. Graduate students may also look to user consultants for assistance and direction. These consultants, drawn from the ranks of current economics PhD students, train new users and help with data management and programming.

The Department offers a student-taught programming course designed to acquaint both graduate and undergraduate students with popular programming languages. Students often take this class in preparation for empirical projects and work as faculty research assistants. Other important computing resources for MIT economists include MIT’s Geographic Information Systems Laboratory, housed at Rotch Library, and the virtual Harvard-MIT Data Center. This Spring we launched an agreement with the Census Bureau’s Research Data Center (RDC), located at the nearby National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), allowing all of our students and faculty to access confidential government microdata sources for approved projects at no cost.