Using LittleFe to introduce parallel and distributed computing in the curriculum
Many institutions and teaching environments do not have access to parallel platforms for parallel and distributed computing education. Teaching key concepts such as speedup, efficiency, and load balancing are much more effectively done on a parallel platform. LittleFe is a complete 6 node (12 core) portable computational cluster which supports shared memory parallelism (OpenMP and Pthreads), distributed memory parallelism (MPI), and GPGPU parallelism (CUDA or OpenCL). This tutorial will show how the LittleFe cluster is constructed from commodity components, and how it can be used in the undergraduate curriculum to teach these important concepts. Examples of modules for use in such courses as CS/2, Computer Organization, Algorithms, and Operating Systems will be given.