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Welcome to the CALS OIT Virtual Computer Lab (VCL) service! Our goal with this article is to provide, or help you find, information you will need pertaining to our VCL service. While this information is primarily for faculty new to the service, it can be used as a refresher for faculty who have used the service before.
Our VCL service is meant to serve the teaching and learning needs of CALS faculty and students by providing a consistent and high-performance computing environment, on-demand. This service is meant to serve as an alternative to, or replacement for, physical computing lab spaces and address the challenges of installing required course software on student's personal computers. The VCL service also provides the following benefits:
- Always On/On Demand: access to computing resources around the clock
- Convenience: remotely connect to the virtual computing environment any time instead of needing to find a free computer in a physical computer lab
- Performance: virtual computing environments can be adjusted to provide the necessary performance software packages require
- Ease of Use: utilizing the service makes preparing the computing environment easy for faculty and students as the requisite software packages can be installed without needing to guide students on that process for their personal computers
Process Overview and Expectations: What You Need to Know
If you have been identified as a potential candidate for this service, a survey will be sent to you approximately one month before the start of the semester. The survey will ask you to provide key details about your class and virtual computing needs. Once your survey is received:
- A ticket will be created and assigned to a CALS-OIT technician
- The technician will schedule an intake meeting with you to review your request
- If the technician determines the service is a fit, a server reservation will be created according to your specifications
- You will receive reservation details and instructions to forward your class roster and server reservation details to biohpc@cornell.edu. To, request that access to the server be granted for the provided class roster.
- You will receive further communication about your virtual computing reservation directly from BioHPC
Information and Links
For technical assistance during the semester, please contact support@biohpc.cornell.edu.
If you need help with extending or changing your reservation, please submit a ticket at help.cals.cornell.edu.