The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
LittleFe - The High Performance Computing Education Appliance.
Authors: Charles Peck (Earlham College), Kristin Muterspaw (Earlham College), Mobeen Ludin (Shodor Foundation), Aaron Weeden (Shodor Foundation), Skylar Thompson (University of Washington), Tom Murphy (Contra Costa College), Ivan Babic (Earlham College), Elena Sergienko (Earlham College)
Abstract: Many institutions have little to no access to parallel computing platforms
for in-class computational science or parallel and distributed computing
education. Key concepts, motivated by science, are taught more effectively
and memorably on an actual parallel platform. LittleFe is a complete six
node Beowulf style portable cluster. The entire package weighs less than 50
pounds, travels easily, and sets up in five minutes. LittleFe hardware
includes multi--core processors and GPGPU capability, which enables support
for shared and distributed memory parallelism, GPGPU parallelism, and
hybrid models. By leveraging the Bootable Cluster CD project, LittleFe is
an affordable, powerful, and ready-to-run computational science, parallel
programming and distributed computing educational appliance.
