Facilities

ACCESS: Monday to Friday 08:00 to 18:00.

The PC laboratories in the Polly Vacher building provided by the Department of Computer Science are:

• • G56, Computing Lab
    • 135 PCs with Windows 11 and Linux operating systems in dual boot.
    • 34 hub monitors for laptop use.
  • G45, Computing Lab
    • 35 PCs with Windows 11 and Linux operating systems in dual boot.
    • All except 10 of these machines are configured in a slightly older (2022) design: Intel Core i7-12700, 32 GB RAM, NVIDIA RTX 3060 (12GB), 512GB SSD
  • G46, UG Student Study Room
    • 5 PCs with Windows 11 and Linux operating systems, discussion and meeting spaces with television display
  • G43, PGT Student Study Room
    • 10 PCs with Windows 11 and Linux operating systems, including an older, but high-spec IN WIN machine. Discussion/meeting areas are available.
    • Enhanced computing resources have arrived and will be installed shortly.
    • This space houses high-performance workstations, including 5 with Intel i9 variants, 64GB RAM, NVIDIA 4000 Ada, 4080, and 4090 GPUs, and 2TB SSDs
  • G44, Group Work Room 1
    • 2 dual boot PCs and a television display.
  • G47, Group Work Room 2
    • 2 dual boot PCs
  • G49, Group Work Room 3
    • 2 dual boot PCs

G45 and G56 labs also provide printing facilities via your Campus Card.

Services provided to students of the Department

The Department of Computer Science offers additional services and software to the students of computer science.

• • We offer the CSGitlab for hosting Git Projects; you can create and manage your own projects and share it with your peers.
  • 10 PCs in G45 can be accessed remotely via the Remote PC software on AppsAnywhere. [See instruction document: parallelsRemoteAccess.pdf]
  • To remotely access more generic system images, you may use:
    • The UoR Student Desktop, mirroring the experience of a generic University lab PC, via AppsAnywhere (see below).
    • The NX server allowing to run Linux applications (instructions)
  • Testing WiFi to connect robots and other devices.  The network is only available in Polly Vacher.  Speak to Nick Gurr for access (he is located in the room embedded in G56).
  • Virtual machines for hosting final year projects. A VM in Linux or Windows is provided and can be modified.  It is available to the internal UoR network only.  Speak to Nick Gurr for access (he is located in the room embedded in G56).
  • External web hosting via cPanel useful for final year projects.  There is no automatic signup procedure, please submit a ticket to DTS to request an account.

Storage Options

• • There is additional storage capacity on the laboratory machines in the form of a 400 MB Windows home directory (can be increased on request).
  • Windows and Linux research storage spaces are available for PGT projects. Contact Todd Jones for access and quota allocation.
  • The X:drive provides 10 GB of central data storage automatically mounted via DTS-managed Windows PCs (under `This PC`).  For students without VPN access (all UG), this is only available on University devices. This will display as:

\\rdg-home.ad.rdg.ac.uk\research\silver\xdrive\xy123456

• • A 10 GB Unix home directory is provided to users with access to the RACC/arc-ssh.
  • A 1 GB Windows profiles drive, accessible from the File Explorer under `This PC`, visible on all University PCs and the UoR Student Desktop.  For students without VPN access (all UG), this is only available on University devices. This will display as:

\\dts-pclabs.rdg.ac.uk\profiles$\xy123456

• • • • When addressing this path from a PowerShell, you can use:

Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::\\dts-pclabs.rdg.ac.uk\profiles$\xy123456\Documents

Access to Software

In addition to the software available for teaching and supporting laboratory machines, the following products are also available for student use:

• • Microsoft Azure Dev Tools for Teaching providing access to various MS products for free, for example:
    • Windows 10
    • Windows Server
    • Visual Studio
  • Office 365 software suite from Microsoft
    • Provides Word, PowerPoint, etc. in the Browser
    • Additionally, calendar and Mail via Outlook on the web
    • To use, login to install on your own Windows or Apple machine (also login on Office365).  On the landing page where all apps are listed, you can click “Download Office 365” and then install it on your machine.
  • MATLAB software in labs and online
    • To use online, register with your University email address.
  • Instructions for Creating Ubuntu VMs.  These will help you to run Linux on your Windows PC or Mac. Ask your module leader for information about specific software versions needed in your module.

• Project Support

  For student projects, we provide further IT resources:

  • Virtual reality facility, including Oculus Rift hardware
    • Use is restricted to study purposes. Email Tim Poulter to book a time (Mon to Fri 8.30am to 5pm).
  • 6 Raspberry Pi devices, various models
  • 7 Mobile phones for app development
  • 2-node CPU/GPU (32-core/V100) compute cluster.
  Contact Todd Jones for access to the above resources. We are generally flexible about acquisition of additional resources and support students individually, providing hardware and software depending on the needs of projects.  Please ask your project supervisor for more information about acquiring specialised resources.

Services provided by the university

The University’s Digital Technology Services (DTS) provides several services to all students, including:

• • Access to an additional number of PC labs, some providing 24/7 access
  • Wireless access via Eduroam
  • 5 TB OneDrive storage space as part of Office 365
  • The Reading Academic Computing Cluster (RACC) is a Linux cluster  consisting of 2048 CPU cores over 32 nodes. These provide free resources for interactive research computing via batch jobs submissions.  Students should raise a ticket to DTS to obtain access, if not already available for your account.  The legacy RACC has a couple of GPU and compute nodes, but this machine is being phased out.
  • Drop-in Academic Computing Sessions for Students and Staff: particularly for help in navigating the Linux systems.
  • cPanel Web Hosting: for PHP pages with a local MySQL database
  • LapSafe: 100 Microsoft Surface Pro 7 (i7/16GB/256GB) laptops are now available to students for 8-hour loans from the library during their operating hours.
  • See the DTS Student Hub for more information.

Access to Software

DTS manages a variety of applications for student use through AppsAnywhere, which can be accessed via https://appsanywhere.reading.ac.uk/.  The University’s software store provides some additional commercial software for free and often with price reductions.

• • If you find that you are unable to launch certain applications directly from AppsAnywhere, search for its “UoR Student Desktop” application to launch a Windows VM in your browser.  This provides a view of a generic University lab PC, but does not provide access to the Xdrive or CS lab-specific software.  Some software for teaching and learning is only available in Polly Vacher PC labs (full list).

Support

It is important that you report technical issues of the lab PCs as soon as possible via the DTS self service portal which you can use to report issues, faults, ask questions and also give feedback.

• • Select the “Report an Incident” option, then fill out the form with as much information as you can gather (nature of incident, where it happened, on which machine, screenshots of errors, etc.).

There is also support for software and installation via the self-service portal.  DTS manages a general IT knowledge base, providing detailed information about a variety of University IT resources.

Student Laptop Recommendations

For an undergraduate Computer Science student, having a laptop that can handle a variety of tasks including coding, compiling, running virtual machines, and sometimes even light gaming or graphics work is frequently beneficial. Follow the link to see the Department Student Laptop Recommendations.