Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Igor Crk and Mark McKenney attended the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking and Storage Analysis (SC13) held in Denver during late November. The SIUE computer science faculty members returned to campus with a LittleFe computing mini-cluster to enhance classroom experiences.
Crk and McKenney are both assistant professors of computer science in SIUE’s School of Engineering. At SC13, they participated in a build-out event and brought back one LittleFe mini-cluster to SIUE. During the workshop, they assembled and configured the hardware, and discussed and tested existing and potential educational modules for classroom use with the LittleFe.
“The mini-cluster is largely intended for use in instructional activity involving high performance computing (HPC), parallel programming, and computational and data-driven science,” Crk said. “Its portability, due to its small size, makes it ideal for classroom demonstrations.
“LittleFe is a welcome addition to the computer science department, where it will be a valuable resource for teaching distributed computing concepts that today’s data scientists in both the industry and academia find essential.”
According to its website, LittleFe originated in 2005 as an idea by Paul Gray from the University of Northern Iowa, Kean University’s Dave Joiner, Tom Murphy of Contra Costa College and Earlham College’s Charlie Peck. While the faculty members were teaching computational science education, they realized their curricula depended on local computing resources that were not always present.
During November 2010, the LittleFe project was awarded a grant from Intel. The grant’s purpose was to build 25 clusters to be given to faculty members across the United States. These computational science educators, would use their LittleFe clusters to improve or develop curricula for their students, and ultimately for such globally available resources as HPC University (HPCU) and the Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD).
Crk and McKenney are currently developing learning modules to be used as classroom projects involving cluster computing both at SIUE and within the LittleFe community.
They received support from the SC13 HPC Educators Program and the LittleFe Project to attend the conference.
Photos: Igor Crk (upper right) and Mark McKenney (lower right).