Teaching Labs: Workstations

here are approximately 256 workstations available in the teaching labs. Please note that timetabled lab and tutorial sessions have priority over all other uses; details are usually posted on the door of each of the rooms, if not, please check the room timetables.

The workstations are either dual boot 64-bit Microsoft Windows 7 and 64-bit Ubuntu 16.04 Linux (all PCs in 202 and 206), or have Linux with a Windows 7 virtual machine (the majority of PCs in 219). There are 12 graphics project machines in the central circle of the main lab (219), plus 6 Macs running MacOS X.10 in 206, managed by ICT.

General notes:

• At some times, the graphic machines may be allocated to specific students for project use - if so the affected machine(s) will not be available for general access.
• The sprite, matrix, point, edge and voxel machines feature discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 630 graphics cards.
• The graphic work-stations are fitted with more-advanced, Nvidia CUDA-capable or AMD OpenCL-capable graphics cards.
• The configuration may vary slightly from the above on some machines.
• All systems have flat panel LCD colour displays, and are networked via 1Gb/s Ethernet.
• The point, edge and voxel machines are single-boot Linux. Windows is normally available as a virtual service on these machines.
• See the Linux services page for information on remote login.
• New this year: the main purpose of room 210 has changed.  Last year it housed approximately 30 Graphics workstations with GPU cards for individual and group projects.  This year, after extensive discussions, the Teaching Operations Committee decided that room 210 should become a 41 seat Quiet Lab of general purpose lab PCs, that may occasionally be booked for lab sessions.  The Graphics workstations that used to be in 210 have been split: graphics 1 to 12 are now back in 219 in the central ring as listed above, the remaining 18 machines will be racked up in our machine room shortly and accessible only via ssh.  We'll announce this later.

Special Test software/services

• Wayne Luk's Custom Computing group have node-locked licenses for the Maxeler FPGA Hardware Compiler (see the Maxeler website) to run on some lab machines. The software itself lives in /vol/cc, and is intended to be used for MSc projects and practicals for the Custom Computing course, please email Wayne Luk for more information.