You will use S-Plus a lot, as well as SAS, matlab, and mathematica (or maple). In general, windows versions of these software are easier to use. However, if you are daling with exceptionally large amounts of data (more than there is RAM on your PC machine), windows versions will not be able to handle it efficiently and you are better off using their UNIX counterparts. On the other hand, many of the newer PC's have much more powerfull processors than UNIX clusters and can utilize upto 3GB of RAM, as such extensive computations are much faster on PC workstations (provided you have sufficient resources). Plus, not having to share your processing time with dozens of users usually speed things up. Below we elaborate more on UNIX versions of these.
The University has licenses for windows versions of S-Plus and MATLAB that allow you to install both on your home (windows) computer. The S-Plus license requires you to be a student here, and the MATLAB license requires you to be connected to the Rice network (via a port at Rice, a dial up connection, or via a VPN connection (I am not sure about this option.)). To obtain copies of this software, submit a problem.
We run a shared networking system, and there will be other people trying to use the same computers you are using. Use the nice and top commands frequently, particularly if you are running large simulation jobs or Splus. That is to say, instead of typing Splus, try
nice +19 SplusIf you have a job that has been started but is running slowly (I doubt how you can tell), you can press Ctrl-Z to suspend it and
renice +10 job-pidFew things irk your cohorts more than trying to do something and having the computer either crash or work extremely slowly because you're running a huge job at top priority for a long time when you can't be found. The most likely outcome in such scenarios is that a systems administrator will be summoned to kill your process.