Budget Beowulfs: A Showcase of Inexpensive Clusters for Teaching PDC

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.

Most CS educators would agree that providing students with hands-on experience improves their students' learning. Given the ubiquity of multicore processors, it is quite easy to give today's students hands-on experience developing software on shared-memory architectures. By contrast, providing students with hands-on experience developing software for distributed architectures has typically required access to a Beowulf cluster, the price of which was beyond the reach of many institutions. However, hardware manufacturers have recently begun producing a variety of inexpensive --system on a board multiprocessors. Creative CS educators are using these multiprocessors to design and build inexpensive Beowulf clusters, and using them to provide students with hands-on experience with shared-memory, distributed-memory, and heterogeneous computing paradigms.

In this special session, several PDC educators will bring, present, and demonstrate their innovative Beowulf clusters; each designed and built using a different inexpensive multiprocessor board.