Teaching HPC Systems and Parallel Programming with Small-Scale Clusters

In the last decades, the continuous proliferation of High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems and data centers has augmented the demand for expert HPC system designers, administrators, and programmers. For this reason, most universities have introduced courses on HPC systems and parallel programming in their degrees. However, the laboratory assignments of these courses generally use clusters that are owned, managed and administrated by the university. This methodology has been shown effective to teach parallel programming, but using a remote cluster prevents the students from experimenting with the design, set up and administration of such systems. This paper presents a methodology and framework to teach HPC systems and parallel programming using a small-scale cluster of single-board computers. These boards are very cheap, their processors are fundamentally very similar to the ones found in HPC, and they are ready to execute Linux out of the box. So they represent a perfect laboratory playground for students experiencing how to assemble a cluster, setting it up, and configuring its system software. Also, we show that these small-scale clusters can be used as evaluation platforms for both, introductory and advanced parallel programming assignments.