LittleFe is a complete 6 node Beowulf style portable computational cluster which supports shared memory parallelism (OpenMP), distributed memory parallelism (MPI), and GPGPU parallelism (CUDA). These low-cost light-weight units are well-suited for institutions and teaching environments that do not have access to parallel platforms for parallel and distributed computing education. Teaching key concepts such as speedup, efficiency, and load balancing are much more effectively done on a parallel platform.
This award is to support hosting LittleFe buildouts as part of the HPC Educators Program at the SC13 and SC14. In total, this will enable the LittleFe project to place 16 additional LittleFe units at educational institutions throughout the United States during 2013 and 2014. These units will support parallel programming and distributed computing in the undergraduate CS curriculum at 16 additional colleges and universities. They will also support student programming contests which will be hosted at e.g. the XSEDE13 and XSEDE14 conferences, and outreach events at junior and senior high schools across the United States.
