With the support from Texas A&M Institute of Data Science, Texas Engineering Experiment Station, and Texas A&M High Performance Research Computing, Dr. Jian Tao at COE-HPC will teach a special topic course – ENGR 489 section 504 (CRN 36736) to undergraduate students on various subjects in High Performance Computing (HPC) and Big Data analytics in Spring 2019.
In this course, students will learn the fundamentals of HPC and parallel programming in a hands-on and project-based manner. In addition, they will build a functional HPC system with Raspberry Pi’s and run some benchmarks and real world applications. Each student will have access to one Raspberry Pi. After spending a week or two to get familiar with the Linux operating system and network management, students will form teams and start building smaller clusters and run some simple benchmarks. An introduction to Python programing language will be given to the students with a focus on its applications in scientific and engineering research. Students will be encouraged to practice computational thinking throughout the course. Two more weeks will be dedicated to introductory level Message Passing Interface (MPI) programming. Students shall then be able to write, compile, and test their MPI programs on their team clusters. By the end of the middle term, students will build a big cluster by linking all the Raspberry Pi’s together. In the next two weeks, students will carry out benchmark runs, discuss scheduling mechanisms to share such a cluster and learn to submit jobs managed by a queuing system. By the end of the semester, students will run some scientific and engineering applications on the cluster and carry out some performance analysis and tuning.
More about the course can be found here.