A Portable Cluster for Each Student
Dave TothUniversity of Mary Washington → Centre College
Teaching Challenges
• Hardware is expensive• Expensive hardware is well defended ;)• Labs are often in demand and sometimes closed• Many students procrastinate• Many students commute• Students step on each other when there’s limited
hardware• I’m not a sys admin and I’m not fixing the server at
1 AM!
Solutions
• Time slots for everybody during business hours – don’t be late!
• Everybody lives on campus• Students can kick others out of labs• Dedicated hardware for the course
• Everybody buys their own portable cluster!
Inspiration
Microwulf [1] & LittleFe [2]
4 node, 8 core, 8 GB RAM 6 node, 12 core + GPU capability, 12 GB RAM
[1] http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/photos/Microwulf-Pages/Image3.html[2] http://littlefe.net/sites/all/modules/brilliant_gallery/image.php?imgp=L2dhbGxlcnkvMDA2LmpwZw==&imgw=1000&imgh=669
The Candidates
• Android TV boxes• Raspberry Pi• Merrii Hummingbird• Cubieboard2• ODROID U3• Intel NUC and other similar systems
The Personal Portable Cluster
Boxed Up
Parts List
Minimum Cost Parts List
*
* bulk discount for 50 boards and no packaging
Assembly
1. Unbox all items.2. Peel off protective paper from case.3. Assemble case using provided standoffs4. Flash image on 2 micro SD cards.
~ 11 minutes per card with class 4 cards5. Insert cards.6. Connect all cables.7. Power on & boot!
TSP Performance
Drawbacks
• Doesn’t illustrate scalability by itself– I recommend XSEDE education grant
• Never enough cores!– Working on other options (quad option, soon 8)
• Still expensive– Distribute open source book with it (slight delay)
Future Work
• Get price down• Try for quad core (or 8-core)• Find board with GPU that supports CUDA or
OpenCL• Benchmark different boards• Add more example programs to image file• Enhance documentation• Integrate boards into other courses (organization
and operating systems)
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