SIGCSE 2016 Special Session:

The Micro-Cluster Showcase: 7 Inexpensive Beowulf Clusters for Teaching PDC

10:45 AM - 12 noon, Thursday March 3, 2016
Mississippi Room

Presenters:

Joel Adams, Calvin College
Jacob Caswell, St. Olaf College
Suzanne Matthews, U.S. Military Academy
Charles Peck, Earlham College
Elizabeth Shoop, Macalester College
David Toth, Centre College
James Wolfer, Indiana University, South Bend

Summary: Just as a micro-computer is a personal, portable computer, a micro-cluster is a personal, portable, Beowulf cluster. In this special session, six cluster designers will bring and demonstrate micro-clusters they have built using inexpensive single-board computers (SBCs). The educators will describe how they have used their clusters to provide their students with hands-on experience using the shared-memory, distributed-memory, and heterogeneous computing paradigms, and thus achieve the parallel and distributed computing (PDC) objectives of CS 2013.

Most CS educators are aware of the Raspberry Pi, but many have never heard of more powerful SBCs, such as Adapteva's Parallella, the Nvidia Jetson, or the ODROID C1+ or XU4 . In this session, our primary objective is to give CS educators the opportunity to:

  1. See clusters that their peers have built using SBCs.
  2. Hear how their peers are using their clusters to teach PDC. 3. Interact with those peers on a personal basis.

A secondary objective is to inspire other CS educators to create their own clusters. By showcasing these clusters and exploring how they are being using in the classroom, we hope to catalyze a wave of innovation in PDC education.

Schedule and Materials

To appear