LittleFe 2013 - LittleFe and the Bootable Cluster CD - An Education and Outreach Appliance

LittleFe and the Bootable Cluster CD - An Education and Outreach Appliance
Presenters - Charles Peck, Jennifer Houchins, Mohammad Mobeen Ludin, Ivan Babic, Aaron Weeden and Skylar Thompson.
Description -
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 computing platform. LittleFe is a complete six node Beowulf style portable cluster. LittleFe is a six node cluster built with multicore CPUs and GPGPU chipsets, supporting shared and distributed memory parallelism, GPGPU parallelism, and hybrid models. By leveraging the Bootable Cluster CD project and curriculum modules, LittleFe is an affordable, powerful, and ready-to-run computational science, parallel programming, and distributed computing educational appliance. The workshop will focus on use-cases for LittleFe in education, outreach and training, and on developing curriculum modules for the LittleFe/BCCD platform. LittleFe is used in both the pre-college and college settings, we plan to have sufficient workshop staff to divide the participants by educational level when appropriate so that each group can focus on techniques and resources specific to their educational level.