Computing Resources (Students)
This page lists a summary of Computing Resources provided by Computer Science IT Services for students.
The computing resources page for faculty, student faculty, and staff is located here.
The Computer Science IT Services group consists of CS systems engineers who work with the CS Education Technology committee and the CS Computing committee to support the technology needs of faculty, staff, and students.
Questions? Please contact us by sending an email to cscihelp@colorado.edu with your University provided email address.
This will create a case in OIT's ServiceNow system and assign it to our group to serve as formal tracking for assistance.
Computer Science IT Services SLA
Hours of Coverage, Response Times & Escalation
Dedicated support hours of operation are 9:00AM to 6:00PM Monday-Friday for requests and incidents.
Weekend support is limited to incidents only, with a response time within 4 hours.
These hours of operation for the "Requests" category exclude university holidays and official closures.
You can contact CS IT Services via OIT's ServiceNow system. Please email cscihelp@colorado.edu.
| Service | Requests | Incidents | Afterhours / Weekend Incidents |
|---|---|---|---|
| Managed Linux Instances | 2 business days | 2 hours | 4 hours |
| JupyterHub (CSEL Coding) | 2 business days | 2 hours | 4 hours |
| OpenStack (CS Cloud Platform) | 2 business days | 2 hours | 4 hours |
| Cloud Object Storage (CS Red Hat Ceph S3) | 2 business days | 2 hours | 4 hours |
| VDI Course Environment (CS vSphere) | 4 business days | 2 hours | 4 hours |
| Moodle LTI Activities to Canvas | 4 business days | 2 hours | 4 hours |
| CS Legacy Faculty Home | 4 hours | 2 hours | 4 hours |
| CS Legacy Student CSEL Sites | 2 business days | 8 hours | n/a |
| URL Redirector Service | 2 business day | 2 hours | 4 hours |
Department Provided Software Licensing
As of July 1st, 2021 you must be enrolled in a course requiring VMWare. Your instructor will then enroll you for IT Academy with instructions to download VMWare products. We can no longer accept individual requests outside this scope.
Once your instructor has created your account; you will receive login details and can request software in the below portal. You must use your IdentiKey based email (identikey@colorado.edu). This will be a separate password as this service is not Federated with CU Boulder's Identity Provider at this time.
Piazza is a forum-based LMS with moderated anonymous posting capabilities for discussion and classroom engagement.
A department-level Piazza license is available to CSCI, CSPB, and CYBR courses.
If features of the paid model are desired, please send us a message via cscihelp@colorado.edu.
This will license all courses you teach in Piazza.
To get started, you will need an instructor Piazza account which can be created via Canvas.
- Login to Canvas and Navigate to your Course
- Click "Settings", and open the "Navigation Tab"
- Enable Piazza, which will now be in Course Navigation.
- Create your Piazza course in Canvas
Computer Science Education Lab (CSEL)
The new Computer Science Education Lab is located at ECCS 114.
CSEL Ambassadors are present here from 9AM - 8PM during weekdays.
Private study rooms are available for reservation.
To book a room, please contact cselambassadors@colorado.edu at least 24 hours in advance.
The remote lab is a legacy set of hosts for general remote work. In order to connect; the UCB VPN is required.
This service is deprecated, it is recommended to use newer cloud computing resources offered by the department.
Student websites will remain but the compute nodes may be decommissioned in the future.
All active IdentiKey users on the CSCI career track have access to this service. SSH into elra.cs.colorado.edu, which consist of the following hosts running Ubuntu 20.04:
- elra-01.cs.colorado.edu
- elra-02.cs.colorado.edu
- elra-03.cs.colorado.edu
- elra-04.cs.colorado.edu
You can either SSH into the round-robin address (elra.cs.colorado.edu) or directly into a specific node. All nodes share the same home directory.
In addition, there is a separate node that runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
- elra-sql.cs.colorado.edu
A shell can be set globally in the IdentiKey Portal. This is /bin/bash by default.
Data Retention Policy
All data saved to your home directory is retained as long as your IdentiKey remains active (enrolled in some course) or if you have a public_html directory present.
Once you are no longer active with CU Boulder, data is retained for one academic year following your last semester. It will then be archived and no longer accessible. If you have a public_html directory, that will be retained indefinitely.
Please contact us for data retrieval requests from the archive.
Application Services
Students can setup a self-service personal website, located at https://csel-web.cs.colorado.edu/~IdentiKey
To begin, login to any Education Lab Remote Access (ELRA) node and create a public_html directory in the root of your home.
# create a public_html directory in your home directory root
mkdir -p ~/public_html
# Add html content
echo "hello world" > ~/public_html/index.html
If you receive an unauthorized or permission denied error when visiting your site, make sure the web server has permission to read this directory.
# Repair Permissions
chmod o+x ~; chmod o+rx ~/public_html
JupyterHub server for Jupyter notebooks provides a web-based environment within a per-user sandboxed pod. Several environments are available, such a web Visual Studio IDE.
Data Retention Policy
All data saved to your home directory is retained as long as your IdentiKey remains active (enrolled in some course). Quotas are 2GiB.
Once you are no longer active with CU Boulder, data is retained for one academic year following your last semester. Unlike ELRA where data is archived, JupyterHub home directory data wlll be deleted and no longer accessible after this period.
VMWare Workstation or Fusion is required to run this image.
Usage of the CU CS VM is now discouraged in favor of cloud-based solutions, such as JupyterHub.
The Fall 2020 CU CS Virtual Machine is a VMWare prebuilt image with several course binaries preinstalled for Linux 4.10 kernel compilation exercises related to various courses. It also includes compiled time series analysis binaries.
Please note that certain upgrades are disabled in this image. The image operates Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with the 4.10 kernel. Upgrading the kernel will create variances in course assignments and may make it impossible to complete, so it is discouraged.
Managed Instances are virtual servers that operate out of the east campus datacenter.
The definition of "managed" in this context means that your instance has a standardized configuration as its base performed by our configuration management platform. This includes authentication and authorization (via OIT IAM Grouper), networking, automated patching, backups, routine authenticated vulnerability scanning from OIS, etc...
When a long term server is required for hosting, etc... this is the recommended option. Completing the following form will create a GREQ with us which you can track in ServiceNow.
Should an unmanaged instance be desired instead for short term use or experimentation, please view the OpenStack Cloud Computing Platform service below to spin up unmanaged servers.
OpenStack is an open source cloud computing infrastructure solution for in-house clouds. It functions similar to cloud platforms such as AWS, but comes with no cost (other than electricity).
The cloud platform provides the self-service ability to spin up a variety of operating systems and attach them to the CU Boulder Science Network. All active CU Boulder Employees will automatically be joined to a Demo project and can spin up Generation 2 instances.
This computing resource is provided free of charge, and is hosted with university resources. It is intended to only be used for university related buisness. Please review the Acceptable Use of CU Boulder's IT Resources page for more information. OIS has full access to this platform.
*Students must be part of a project setup by a faculty, student faculty or staff member in order to spin up cloud instances.
Additional Resources
This list includes a number of resources for students who want to teach themselves C++ or who feel that they would benefit from a C++ review before going from an introductory programming class into CSCI 2270 (Data Structures). Please note that we do not officially endorse these websites. However, most of these resources have been recommended in the past by the instructors who teach our CSCI 1300 (Intro to Programming) and CSCI 2270 courses as of summer 2020.
If you have specific questions about the content covered in either CSCI 1300 or CSCI 2270, please reach out to the faculty member who is teaching the course during the current (or previous) fall or spring semester. Please note that these resources are not just for computer science majors; we want anyone who will be taking CSCI 1300 or CSCI 2270 to feel free to access them.
Top Resources
- C++ for CSCI 1300 (YouTube)
- Buckys C++ Programming Tutorials (YouTube)
- HackerRank
- GeeksforGeeks
Other Resources
For students who have AP or community college credit for CSCI 1300, but in a language other than C++, we recommend that you reach out to your academic advisor to discuss your options and determine if you are ready to move on to CSCI 2270.
Please see our Career Resources page for a list of recommended resources for preparing for a career in computing.