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 [1].

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment has created a suite of software designed to facilitate the local management of computer clusters for scientific research and integration of such clusters with the US open research national cyberinfrastructure. This suite of software is distributed in two ways. One distribution is called the XSEDE-compatible basic cluster (XCBC), a Rocks Roll that does an “all at once, from scratch” installation of core components. The other distribution is called the XSEDE National Integration Toolkit (XNIT), so that specific tools can be downloaded and installed in portions as appropriate on existing clusters. In this paper, we describe the software included in XCBC and XNIT, and examine the use of XCBC installed on the LittleFe cluster design created by the Earlham College Cluster Computing Group as a teaching tool to show the deployment of XCBC from Rocks. In addition, the demonstration of the commercial Limulus HPC200 Deskside Cluster solution is shown as a viable, off-the-shelf cluster that can be adapted to become an XSEDE-like cluster through the use of the XNIT repository. We demonstrate that both approaches to cluster management - use of SCBC to build clusters from scratch and use of XNIT to expand capabilities of existing clusters - aid cluster administrators in administering clusters that are valuable locally and facilitate integration and interoperability of campus clusters with national cyberinfrastructure. We also demonstrate that very economical clusters can be useful tools in education and research. Categories and Subject Descriptors Theory of computation - Parallel computing models; Computer systems organization - Grid computing; Computer systems organization - Special purpose systems.

In response to the shift to multicore processors, the ACM-IEEE CS2013 curriculum recommendations [1] include parallel and distributed computing (PDC) as a new core knowledge area. Some of the key concepts in PDC are the distinctions between shared-memory, distributed-memory, and heterogeneous system architectures.

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.

LittleFe buildout events are training and infrastructure opportunities for teams of accepted faculty and students from educational institutions across the United States to assemble LittleFe educational appliances (http://littlefe.net) and learn to use them in the classroom to teach parallel programming, cluster computing, and computational/data enabled science & engineering (CDESE). The buildout consists of participants assembling their LittleFe unit from a kit; installing the Bootable Cluster CD (BCCD, http://bccd.net) software on it; learning about the curriculum modules available for teaching parallel programming, High Performance Computing (HPC) and CDESE; and learning how to develop new curriculum modules for the LittleFe/BCCD platform.

In 2002, we first brought High Performance Computing (HPC) methods to the college classroom as a way to enrich Computational Science education. Through the years, we have continued to facilitate college faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines to stay current with HPC methodologies. We have accomplished this by designing and delivering faculty workshops, hosted in a variety of lab settings, as well as by developing tools supporting the technical infrastructure necessary for HPC education, all this without requiring access to traditional HPC computing platforms. In all, we have so far presented 16 professional development workshops for close to 400 predominantly undergraduate STEM faculty. This paper presents the result of internal formative evaluation by workshop instructors and the materials and tools developed during that process.We did this work as part of the National Computational Science Institute (NCSI) and in collaboration with the following groups: