PiBrain — A cost-effective supercomputer for educational use

The availability of low-cost, high-power, single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi has allowed construction of large cluster computers at low cost. This paper sets out an economic and straightforward route to providing students with supercomputer programming experience without resorting to simulation or visualization techniques. An Example prime search program designed to run on a multinode cluster is presented with run-times to allow the readers to understand to advantages of writing programs to take advantage of parallel computer architectures.