At a Glance

The Sloan Remote Lab is a Windows virtual computer for accessing a wide array of statistical software packages, e.g. Stata, Mathematica, Matlab, @Risk, etc. Anyone with a Sloan Account can access the lab via a web browser, but you’ll get better performance by downloading a software client.

For more information, refer to How to Use the Sloan Remote Lab.

Accessing the Remote Lab

  1. Launch a web browser (Chrome is recommended), visit sloan-remote.mit.edu, and choose the VMware Horizon Client or Horizon HTML Access.
  2. Log in using your Kerberos credentials.
  3. Your first login may take up to 2 minutes while your profile is created.
  4. Use the Start Menu Windows Icon in the bottom left corner to search and launch the desired program.

Commonly Used Applications

The Decision Tool Suite: @Risk

Note: @Risk is an add-in to Microsoft Excel.

The Decision Tool Suite is a complete risk and decision analysis toolkit for Microsoft Excel. It is used in courses such as 15.060 Data, Models, and Decisions. The DecisionTools Suite is an integrated set of programs for risk analysis and decision-making under uncertainty. It only runs on a Windows computer.

Screenshot of the @Risk Logo

Image by Palisade

 

Vensim

Industrial strength simulation software for improving the performance of real systems. Vensim’s rich feature set emphasizes model quality, connections to data, flexible distribution, and advanced algorithms. Configurations for everyone from students to professionals.

Screenshot of Vensim

Image by Ventana Systems, Inc

 

RStudio

RStudio is an integrated development environment for R and Python, with a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution, and tools for plotting, history, debugging, and workspace management.

Screenshot of RStudio

Image by Rob J Hyndman

 

Stata

Fast. Accurate. Easy to use. Stata is a complete, integrated software package that provides all your data science needs—data manipulation, visualization, statistics, and automated reporting

Screenshot of Stata

Image by StataCorp LLC

 

Mathematica

Widely admired for both its technical prowess and elegant ease of use, Mathematica provides a single integrated, continually expanding system that covers the breadth and depth of technical computing—and seamlessly available in the cloud through any web browser, as well as natively on all modern desktop systems.

Screenshot of Mathematica

Image by Wolfram

 

MatLab

MATLAB combines a desktop environment tuned for iterative analysis and design processes with a programming language that expresses matrix and array mathematics directly. It includes the Live Editor for creating scripts that combine code, output, and formatted text in an executable notebook.

Screenshot of MatLab

Image by The MathWorks, Inc.