While AI has only recently captured widespread public attention, it has been a serious and evolving field of computer science research for many decades. This distinction matters more than ever, a well informed public is essential to navigating the AI landscape responsibly. Understanding what AI actually is, rather than relying on sensationalized portrayals, empowers people to think critically about AI tech.

The University of Toronto’s CANHEIT 2023 conference brought together leading voices in technology, including Dr. Hod Lipson of Columbia University, who delivered a keynote address over the course of the event. A prominent figure in computer science, Dr. Lipson’s work centers on robotics and artificial intelligence, and his talk offered attendees a compelling, Computer Science grounded framework for understanding and categorizing AI.

Dr. Lipson’s waves organizes the AI tech in an order they are invented.

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The School of Computer Science (SCS) facilities are currently undergoing major renovations, including the entire HP5100 wing of the Herzberg Building. To allow construction work to proceed, the wing must be temporarily vacated and relocated. 

One of the most significant challenges in this process is moving the school’s server room facility. This infrastructure supports departmental servers, specialized research equipment, and the OpenStack cloud platform used by the school. 

The stakes are high. More than 2,000 undergraduate students rely on the OpenStack cloud for course assignments and laboratory work, with usage peaking during the fall and winter academic terms. At the same time, graduate students and researchers depend on the system around the clock to run Computer Science and Data Science experiments, simulations, and long-running computational workloads. 

This creates a difficult question: 

• How do you relocate a critical server facility in the middle of the winter term while supporting more than 2,000 students, faculty, and staff who depend on it 24/7, when the infrastructure runs one of the most complex cloud platforms ever created: OpenStack?

The School of Computer Science partnered with the university’s Information Technology Services (ITS), which offered temporary server space in the �Ӱ�ԭ�� Library to host the infrastructure during the renovation. 

With a relocation site secured, the team considered two primary strategies for moving the server facility. 

Option 1: Full Shutdown and Rapid Relocation 

• Under this approach, the entire server room would be powered down, physically moved to the new location in a single day, and then reassembled and brought back online. 
• The advantage of this strategy is speed. In the best-case scenario, the move could be completed within a day, resulting in only one to two days of downtime for users. 
• However, the risks were significant. If multiple servers failed to start after the move, or if a critical infrastructure node encountered problems, the entire OpenStack environment could remain offline for an extended period. In a worst-case scenario, service outages could stretch into days or even weeks, while systems were repaired and reconfigured. 

Option 2: Live Migration and Incremental Relocation 

•  The second option involved a slower, more deliberate process: migrating servers individually while gradually relocating hardware to the new facility. 
• Although this approach would take considerably longer, it offered a key advantage. Each server could be handled carefully and validated before proceeding to the next. If a problem occurred, it would affect only a single system rather than the entire infrastructure. 
• This incremental strategy significantly reduced the risk of a prolonged outage and ensured the OpenStack cloud could remain operational throughout the relocation. 

The SCS technical staff ultimately chose this incremental strategy. The effort was led by Andrew Pullin, who coordinated the migration plan and oversaw the relocation process.

Before any hardware was moved, the team first ensured the necessary network infrastructure was in place. The SCS subnet was extended between the Herzberg Building and the �Ӱ�ԭ�� Library, effectively spanning both locations. Because the OpenStack cloud requires its infrastructure nodes to reside on the same subnet, this network configuration was critical. 

With the subnet extended across both buildings, OpenStack could treat servers located in Herzberg and those in the library as part of the same environment, regardless of the physical distance between them. This allowed systems to be relocated gradually while remaining fully integrated with the existing cloud infrastructure. 

The OpenStack environment runs on a virtualized cloud infrastructure, where workloads exist as server images rather than being tied to specific physical machines. This architecture proved to be a major advantage during the relocation. 

Virtual machine images could be migrated to the library facility ahead of the physical move. Each night, servers in Herzberg copied their images to the library location. By morning, once the workloads had successfully migrated, the now-vacant physical server in Herzberg could be safely powered down, removed, and transported to the new facility. 

This approach significantly reduced risk. If an issue occurred during migration, it would affect only a single server rather than the entire cloud environment, allowing problems to be isolated and resolved without disrupting the broader system. 

Winter, however, introduced an entirely different challenge. 

This year Ottawa experienced a particularly harsh and snowy winter, so much so that the Rideau Canal remained open for 56 days of skating (that’s unusually long). Moving more than 55 servers across campus in freezing conditions is not a trivial task. 

Fortunately, �Ӱ�ԭ�� University has a unique advantage: its extensive underground tunnel system. 

The Supervisor of Operations at ITS, John MacGillivray, helped coordinate the move using the golf cart and trailer through the �Ӱ�ԭ�� tunnels. Moving the equipment in small batches allowed the team to safely relocate servers between buildings without exposing them to the winter weather. What might have been a logistical nightmare outdoors instead became an efficient relocation route beneath the campus.

Over the course of less than two months, Andrew Pullin and the SCS technical team successfully migrated the entire environment during the middle of the winter academic term. The move included: 

• 4 racks of equipment
• 25 compute nodes totaling 1,672 CPU cores 
• 24 GPU servers containing 138 GPUs 
• The full OpenStack infrastructure stack 
• Supporting networking and storage systems 

In the end, like magic, the SCS cloud was successfully relocated across campus in the middle of the winter term, transparent to end users, who continued their work without ever realising the servers themselves had physically moved across campus.

Modern network administration and virtualization technologies made this complex relocation possible. 

Of course, there is one small catch. 

When the renovations are finished… everything will have to be moved back.

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Did you know? 

• The school of Computer Science has five undergraduate computer labs that BCS students can use in the Herzberg building: SCS Computer Labs��
• HP3115 and HP4115 can be used as study space and group work by anyone registered in a COMP course. COMP students can also use HP4155 when its free.��
• Third year and above COMP students can use the Gaming Lab HP5151 for group work or study space��
• SCS has a linux network that has been in operation for more than 20 years. Any COMP student can create an account and use it. You can even create an old-school personal website.��
• The CCSS lounge is located in HP4135 – they welcome students and questions for just about anything computer science related

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The School of Computer Science opened its newly renovated Teaching Assistant (TA) laboratory during their Open House on Tuesday September 19, 2023.

The university has invested in upgrading the undergraduate Computer Science labs and resources. The changes include a renovated TA center and BCS laboratories as well as further investment in the SCS Openstack cloud. 

TA Center renovated

The TA Center has received a major upgrade. After a consultation process with students, lab coordinators and SCS staff the space was re-designed tailor fit for Teaching Assistant sessions. The new TA Center took inspiration from the popular Learning Lab at the Sauder School of Business at UBC (Image 2).  

There was also a philosophical move away from providing lab machines to using laptops and cloud services. The renovated labs do not have computers, instead they have group stations designed for TA hours or group work using laptops. 

The challenge was to offer hundreds of teaching assistants and a large number of students a space to efficiently run their TA hours. The teaching stations have been moved to the walls allowing easier flow of traffic in the center of the space (Image 1). The circular benching allows students to temporarily wait for their TA consultations. This will allow the space to accommodate many students and run TA hours efficiently.

The TA stations are equipped with USB and laptop power, back-lit lightboards, monitors and meeting cameras (Image 3). The lab has large south facing windows overlooking the scenic Rideau River. 

Openstack 

The Openstack cloud resources service many of the SCS courses with their computing needs. Physical computers in labs have been replaced by laptops and virtual machines (VM’s). Some of the VM’s can be run directly on the student’s laptop and some are offered by connecting remotely to the SCS Openstack cloud. 

The SCS Openstack cloud now runs 1,500 virtual CPU’s that are used by undergraduate courses at the school.  In addition, the school has 60 GPU’s available for teaching Data Science, AI and gaming courses (Image 4).

Each GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) is a video card capable of running NVIDIA’s CUDA platform and can be used in programming data science applications in areas such as computer and machine vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, audio recognition, social network filtering, bioinformatics, drug design, and medical image analysis. The video cards can also be used in online gaming and video game testing and design.  

The school of Computer Science Openstack cloud can support large number of students with their computer programming needs, something that would not have been possible using lab computers.

The resources are flexible so you can spin-up 100’s of lightweight VM’s that have one core and four gigabytes (GB) of memory, or you can spin up a single VM on our most powerful server with 128 vCPU’s, one terabyte (TB) of memory and can attach up to 100TB of storage space on a single VM. We offer leading edge resources to students that would normally not have at home or would be expensive on the Amazon cloud.

The School of Computer Science has invested in Data Science and AI and now runs the world’s fastest GPU: the NVIDIA RTX 4090 (Image 5). These resources are designed to be spun-up on demand for individual projects and/or class assignments. The most powerful GPU flavour can spin up four RTX4090 GPU’s, 256 GB of memory and 1 TB of local disk space. This VM has comparable processing power (teraflops – Tflops) as IBM Roadrunner, the 2008 Supercomputing champ: a whopping 764 Tflops of computing power. 

T.A. Lab Slideshow

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IMPORTANT: VPN Changes Beginning Fall 2023

�䲹������ٴDz�’s&�Բ�����;Information Technology Services has decided that, beginning in Fall 2023, �Ӱ�ԭ�� University students that need to use VPN will have to setup the Microsoft Azure MFA (Multi Factor Authentication) for their student cmail account. The procedures to do this take a bit of time, so you should do this well in advance of needing VPN.
There are two ways to setup your Azure MFA access to use with VPN:

1. Permanent Azure MFA VPN Setup:
   Using this method, you can permanently setup your Azure MFA and VPN access for your cmail account. This method is more time consuming as it requires you to speak to an ITS help desk representative to complete the Multi Factor setup. The instructions can be found here:��Student Requiring VPN Access
2. Course Linked Azure MFA VPN Setup:
   This method can be completed more quickly, as it is based on your membership in a course that requires VPN access. However, once that course ends, if you have no other courses that require VPN access, your VPN access will be revoked. The instructions can be found here:��Students in Courses Requiring VPN

This most directly impacts students who are using the SCS Openstack, as the SCS Openstack can only be accessed via a �Ӱ�ԭ�� network. So from home you are required to use VPN to access the SCS Openstack.

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The SCS Linux network hosts have been updated to Xubuntu 22.04. The SCS linux network has been part of the school for more than 20 years! If you are a BCS student and taking a COMP course then you can use the SCS Linux network! Find out how.

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We strongly advise all �Ӱ�ԭ�� students and employees use �Ӱ�ԭ�� email for �Ӱ�ԭ�� business. We discourage forwarding �Ӱ�ԭ�� email or communicating via a non-�Ӱ�ԭ�� email provider.

It is important for students to communicate via their �Ӱ�ԭ�� email so that faculty and staff know the authenticity of the sender. Secondly non-�Ӱ�ԭ�� emails are subject to the terms that you have agreed to with said company. Some email providers do not adhere to privacy laws. �Ӱ�ԭ�� university’s email provider has privacy terms that have been approved and vetted.

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With the tremendous growth in computer science the School of Computer Science has made a notable investment in the OpenStack cloud platform. OpenStack is used by some SCS courses to provide students with their computing needs. Upper year courses have the option of learning to program OpenStack GPU servers. This year students can utilize the RTX 2019 Super cards, or can program on NVIDIA Titan V, or Geforce 1080 Ti cards. GPU servers can be used to train Artificial Intelligence models.

The schools OpenStack compute servers have increased to more than 1,000 vCPU’s, and over 6 TB of combined RAM capable of launching approximately 4,000 virtual machines. Researchers have embraced OpenStack and added their own compute and GPU servers.

In addition the school has invested resources to upgrade the OpenStack software and hire a permanent staff member to help in its operation.

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Symptoms of the VirtualBox macOS Security and Access Problems
Cause of the Problem
Solutions to the Problem

• Accessing Security & Privacy Settings
• SOLUTION 1: Allow Identified Apps to Access the System
• SOLUTION 2: Modify VirtualBox Permissions
• SOLUTION 3: Clean Re-install of VirtualBox

Still Experiencing Problems?

Symptoms of the VirtualBox macOS Security and Access Problem

Multiple people have reported VirtualBox having a variety of issues running VirtualBox and its Virtual Machines on macOS (Catalina and newer).
The reported issue is happening in at least two circumstances:

• New installations of VirtualBox on newer macOS will install successfully, but attempting to run a Virtual Machine will fail
• VirtualBox and the Virtual Machines were working fine, but then stopped working after upgrading macOS (to Catalina and newer)

Some Common Symptoms:

• VirtualBox and/or the Virtual Machine crashes immediately or may crash while your are interacting with the VM or when you deselect the active instance window
• The Virtual Machine freezes seemingly at random or has very slow performance (compared to pre-MacOS upgrade)
• Some features such as copy/paste and drag-and-drop between the host OSX and guest Virtual Machine is not working, or causes freezing or crashes
• Shared folders stop working (if you were using them)

Cause of the Problem

In Catalina and higher macOS, how applications manage their permissions as well as how kernel integrations are handled has been changed. Some applications will no longer function with certain permissions and will no longer function without certain permissions. Also, if VirtualBox was already installed and an update to MacOS is performed, this can break existing kernel integrations and permissions that were previously working. In our testing, we have found that different users have experienced both of these types of issues with VirtualBox (and other software such as VMWare). From the user’s perspective, the symptoms of both the permission issue and kernel integrations issue are similar, and the solutions are related. Below are some steps to try and repair your VirtualBox installation. However, we recognize that this may not solve all permissions issues with VirtualBox and Catalina (and higher), and some additional research and tweaking may be required.

Solutions to the Problem

Due to the nature of the problem, and how it can be caused by different circumstances, there are a number of different solutions that may be able to help. We encourage you to go through the solution below in the given order. They are roughly in order of how challenging and disruptive they are, with the first solutions being the quickest and least disruptive to your setup.

• Accessing Security & Privacy Settings
• SOLUTION 1: Allow Identified Apps to Access the System
• SOLUTION 2: Modify VirtualBox Permissions
• SOLUTION 3: Clean Re-install of VirtualBox

Accessing Security & Privacy Settings

Several of the below solution require accessing macOS Security & Privacy settings. You can do that following these instructions:

SOLUTION 1: Allow Identified Apps to Access the System

MacOS Catalina and newer puts more restrictions on what apps can run on the system. We have to make sure that software by Oracle America, Inc, the current developers of VirtualBox, are permitted to run their software on your system.

1. Completely quit out of VirtualBox
2. Follow the steps from Accessing your Permissions Settings above to get into the General Tab of the Security & Privacy settings window. You should see a window that looks like the image below.
   
   

   

   
   
3. Unlock the General Tab to permit changes by clicking on the lock icon. You may need to enter your password
4. In the Allow apps downloaded from: section indicated by the GREEN box in the image above, make sure App Store and identified developers is selected.
   
   NOTE: If it is NOT selected, then you must select it, leave the Security & Privacy settings, and run VirtualBox again to see if it works. If it does not work, close VirtualBox and come back into these settings and continue with the next step.
   
5. If this problem applies to you, then you will see the warning System software from developer “Oracle America, Inc.” was blocked from loading. with an Allow button beside it, highlighted by the RED box in the image above.
   
   Click Allow so that VirtualBox will be able to run properly
6. Again, leave the Security & Privacy settings and attempt to run VirtualBox and the Virtual Machine again to see if this fixes the error.

If the error is not fixed, try one of the other Solutions to the Problem…

SOLUTION 2: Modify VirtualBox Permissions

These steps have been used to help fix the VirtualBox permission issues on macOS Catalina and higher, although different users have reported that they must change different permissions. Did you find permissions changes that fixed your crashing on Catalina, which aren’t listed below? Let us know!

GRANT Permissions for VirtualBox

In the ideal case, VirtualBox and its various services work best if all four (4) of the required permissions are granted.

1. Completely quit out of VirtualBox
2. Follow the steps from Accessing your Permissions Settings above to get into the Privacy Tab of the Security & Privacy settings window. You should see a window that looks like the image below, and notice the RED box indicating the Privacy Tab being selected.
   
   

   

   
   
3. Unlock the Privacy Tab to permit changes by clicking on the lock icon (see the YELLOW box in the image). You may need to enter your password
4. Go through the four (4) permissions indicated in the GREEN box and make sure that in each case, VirtualBox appears in the Allow the apps below to control your computer list (in the BLUE box) and that the checkbox is checked
   
   NOTE: In some cases the VirtualBox app may not be modifiable (greyed out). It SHOULD still have a checkmark. If not, you may need perform the Clean Re-install of VirtualBox as indicated above
5. If VirtualBox is missing from any of the four permissions, you can add it manually:
   • Press the + (found in the PURPLE box in the image above)
   • Navigate to Applications > VirtualBox and click Open – This should add it to the list. Make sure you check the checkbox

Once you have granted all four permissions, lock the Security & Privacy window by clicking the Lock icon (YELLOW box) and then Open VirtualBox and test your Virtual Machine. If problems (crashing, etc) persist, go back into Security & Privacy and start to REVOKE Permissions for VirtualBox (see below).

REVOKE Permissions for VirtualBox

If you are still having issues with VirtualBox, particularly unexpected crashes, then you can try revoking some permissions as this has been found to help some users. Using the image from the above section GRANT Permissions for VirtualBox for reference, start revoking permissions. Go through the four (4) permissions we granted as indicated in the GREEN box.
For EACH permission, follow these steps:

1. Select ONE of the permissions (start with Accessibility) and uncheck VirtualBox
2. Lock the Security & Privacy window by clicking the Lock icon (YELLOW box) and then Open VirtualBox and test your Virtual Machine.
3. If problems (crashing, etc) persist, go back into Security & Privacy and try unchecking VirtualBox on another Permission.
4. Repeat these steps for all four permissions one at a time, ideally following this order (and testing after each change):
   1. Accessibility
   2. Input Monitoring
   3. Files and Folders
   4. Full Disk Access

If the error is not fixed, try one of the other Solutions to the Problem…

SOLUTION 3: Clean Re-install of VirtualBox

The most reliable solution we have found to both the permission issue and the kernel integration issue is to do a clean re-install of VirtualBox:

1. Uninstall VirtualBox using the VirtualBox_Uninstall.tool found in the VirtualBox Installation Package (.dmg file). If you don’t still have the install package, you can just download it again from the (you don’t need the .dmg for your installed version, any new version is fine).
   
   When you open the VirtualBox Installation Package, you will see the VirtualBox_Uninstall.tool in the bottom right (see the RED box in the image below)
   
   Right-click the VirtualBox_Uninstall.tool to get the file action menu. Then go into Open With and click the Terminal option to open this uninstall script in a terminal window.
   
   The script will start determining what VirtualBox files are installed, and will then ask you to confirm removal by typing Yes
   
   

   

2. Reboot the system in Recovery Mode to clear the permissions. This can be done by restarting the system and holding the COMMAND + R keys until the Apple logo appears. You should then boot into the mac OSX Recovery Mode.
   
   Click on the Utilities menu and select Terminal to open a recovery terminal window.
   
   Run the csrutil clear command to clear existing permissions. Then reboot the system.
3. Install a fresh copy of VirtualBox using a recent VirtualBox Installation Package version (you can use the dmg from the step above if suitable)

Hopefully VirtualBox will now work properly. However, if not, you can continue with more troubleshooting options below.
If the error is not fixed, try one of the other Solutions to the Problem…

Still Experiencing Problems?

If you have gone through all of these steps, you can try to look up additional information regarding the recent macOS VirtualBox. Finally, you can submit a Virtual Machine Support Request

In the interim, you can try some of the alternative virtualization options available outlined in this article:
M1 Mac Devices & Other Non-Virtualization Capable Devices Not Supported by SCS

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Did you know that the SCS has a number of labs that can be used by Comp. Sci. students? If you are currently registered in a COMP course your campus card will give you access to HP4115 and for Sr. undergrads HP5151. The labs are a great place for group work or study in between classes and can be used exclusively for Computer Science course students.

SCS Computer Labs: /scs/tech-support/computer-laboratories/

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