Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

even the physics labs i worked in looked like this

The physics computer lab in Chamberlin Hall at UW in the 90's was a secret treasure trove of idle NeXTstation Turbo machines in an almost always empty room cooled to near refrigeration temperatures. I used to light up at least half of that room to run distributed simulations. There's probably still a 30 year old key to that lab in a junk drawer somewhere.

Eventually I realized that it just made sense to suck it up and get my own hardware, as it was either going to be esoteric "workstation" hardware with a fifth of the horsepower of a Pentium 75 or it was going to be in a room like the UPL jammed with CRT's and the smell of warm Josta.

How do students operate these days? Unless one is interacting with hardware, I'd be very tempted to stay in "fits on a laptop" space or slide to "screw it, cloud instances" scale. Anyone with contact in the last 5 years have a sense of how labs are being used now?

I can only speak for the UPL, but, yeah, it was a hallmark of labs at the time that one of the benefits you were getting was the equipment. Nowadays, most people just come in with their laptops -- we have a kubernetes cluster for projects, but most of the actual computing equipment is brought in by students when they want to hang

In my university you could technically use any computer but must ensure that your code would work/compile on lab PCs cause that's where TAs would check it. As a result, during labs most people would just use computers there(too much hassle otherwise)

I went through community college about 6 years ago. And they still had bona fide computer labs with in-person tech support.

Computers were also ubiquitous in places like the coffeehouse, the library, practically every classroom, etc. And, of course, there were ubiquitous WiFi and USB charging ports, so that students with BYOD could get by (although WiFi was often overloaded and contentious.)

Within the main computer lab I was using, there was also a networking hardware lab, with genuine Cisco equipment such as routers and switches. The Cisco certification prep classes would go in there and do experiments on the hardware, so that students could get accustomed to seeing it in action, however outdated it may be.

The lab itself was chock-a-block with both Apples and Windows PCs, as well as scanners and printers available, and even headphones you could borrow from the desk attendant. You'd need to sign in and sign out. There were strict rules about silence and not leaving your station unattended. There was always space for more users and a generally relaxed atmosphere, where people could feel comfortable studying or doing homework.

I believe that there was also an A/V lab where students could get access to cameras and recording equipment, as well as software for that kind of thing.

The library, in addition to allocating lots of space for Windows PCs and Apples, would also loan out Chromebooks to any student, and I believe they had other things for loan, such as WiFi hotspots, for kids who couldn't afford to carry around their own Internet.

There were also Tutoring Centers, such as the Math one, where most of the desks featured a computer where you could log in to your collegiate account, and access your online course materials.

And the Testing Center was essentially a big computer lab, with cameras and in-person proctors monitoring it. It was partnered with Pearson and CompTIA, so I took more than one certification exam in there.

There is a fully-staffed IT Help Center on campus, so during office hours, you could count on a 1:1 in-person interaction to help you get logged in, debug your device's WiFi, or whatever.

Despite having a great computer setup in the comfort of my own home, and plenty of online courses on my schedule, I still appreciated the immersion of collegiate computer labs, and especially the relaxed coffeehouse access, where I could use Apple systems to work on my English homework and essays.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, all this went topsy-turvy, and a lot of these labs closed down, or took extreme health precautions, and of course, a lot more classes went online-only. But I was done with classes by that time.

> Unless one is interacting with hardware, I'd be very tempted to stay in "fits on a laptop" space or slide to "screw it, cloud instances" scale. Anyone with contact in the last 5 years have a sense of how labs are being used now?

In my recent physics experience, this is basically what it was unless you had to rely on some proprietary software only on the lab machines like shudders LabView

It's been nearly a decade now, but we shared a machine with 128 newish physical cores, a terabyte of RAM, and a lot of fast disk. Anyone with a big job just coordinated with the 1-2 other people who might need it at that level and left 10% of the RAM and disk for everyone else (OS scheduling handled the CPU sharing, though we rarely had real conflicts).

It's firmly in "not a laptop" scale, and for anything that fit it was much faster than all the modern cloud garbage.

The other lab I was in around that time just collected machines indefinitely and allocated subsets of them for a few months at a time (the usual amount of time a heavily optimized program would take to finish in that field) to any Ph.D. with a reasonable project. They all used the same in-house software for job management and whatnot, with nice abstractions (as nice as you can get in C) for distributed half-sparse half-dense half-whatever linear algebra. You again only had to share between a few people, and a few hundred decent machines per person was solidly better than whatever you could do in the cloud for the same grant money.