About Teaching Labs

What is it?

Courses offered by the Department of Computer Science on the St. George campus are supported by Teaching Labs. Teaching Labs sometimes supports a few courses in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Teaching Labs provides machines running a unix or Linux operating system, and, if the need arises, machines running the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Where is it?

The Teaching Labs are located in the Bahen Centre for Information Technologies, 40 St George St. The labs are located on the second and third floors in the south wing (above the College St. entrance). Access is available 24 hours a day seven days a week by the use of your student card (TCard).

Four of the labs in the Bahen Centre are used as tutorial rooms. Usage is restricted to tutorials when booked, but otherwise they are available. (Access by TCard.) The booking schedule is on the doors, or at https://www.teach.cs.toronto.edu/booking

How do I get an account?

If you have enrolled in a course supported by Teaching Labs, accounts are created automatically. The first time you take a qualifying course, an account will be created that you will use for all your subsequent Teaching Labs supported courses. You can set or reset your password on theย Account Management page.

Lab Workstation Information

BA3175 24 x Lenovo P330 six-core Xeon E-2236 with 32GiB of memory, and a RTX 2060 GPU
BA3185 24 x Lenovo P330 six-core Xeon E-2236 with 32GiB of memory, and a RTX 2060 GPU
BA3195 24 x Lenovo P330 six-core Xeon E-2236 with 32GiB of memory, and a RTX 2060 GPU
BA2200 18 x Lenovo P330 six-core Xeon E-2236 with 32GiB of memory, and a RTX 2060 GPU
BA2210 24 x Lenovo P350 eight-core Xeon W-1390P with 64GiB of memory, and a RTX A2000 GPU
BA2220 24 x Lenovo P350 eight-core Xeon W-1390P with 64GiB of memory, and a RTX A2000 GPU
BA2240 14 x Lenovo P350 eight-core Xeon W-1390P with 64GiB of memory, and a RTX A4000 GPU

Teaching Labs’ Mandate

The Teaching Labs are owned and operated by the University of Toronto in order to provide computing support for specific courses in Computer Science.  The University is not obligated to provide computing support for its courses (and indeed, there are many courses, even in Computer Science, for which Teaching Labs accounts are not issued).  But because access to computing facilities is useful for students enrolled in certain computing courses, the Department of Computer Science operates Teaching Labs in order to provide such access. 

However, access to Teaching Labs is considered a privilege, not a right, and the University is free to withdraw this privilege should it believe it prudent to do so.  In particular, the payment of tuition does not automatically give anyone the right to use Teaching Labs. Teaching Labs is not a computing service provider or a “common carrier”.  The University owns and operates the computing facility and carries a certain amount of legal liability for the content.  Hence, students are given access to the facility at the University’s discretion and there is no intrinsic right to a particular level of service, and no absolute right to privacy or ownership of files or accounts.  However, while the University owns all files on the Teaching Labs system, the University does not necessarily own the copyright for those files.