Leveraging Teaching on Demand: Approaching HPC to Undergrads

TL;DR

This paper presents a hands-on Raspberry Pi cluster course with a 'Teaching on Demand' approach to enhance undergraduate HPC skills and motivation.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, student-driven HPC course using Raspberry Pi clusters, with detailed reproducibility and evaluation of its effectiveness.

Findings

Students gained practical HPC skills and confidence.

The course increased motivation and interest in HPC.

The methodology effectively improved students' professional readiness.

Abstract

High Performance Computing (HPC) is a highly demanded discipline in companies and institutions. However, as students and also afterwards as professors, we observed a lack of HPC related content in the engineering degrees at our university, including Computer Science. Thus, we designed and offered the engineering students a non-mandatory course entitled ``Build you own Raspberry Pi cluster employing Raspberry Pi'' to provide the students with HPC skills. With this course, we covered the basics of supercomputing (hardware, networking, software tools, performance evaluation, cluster management, etc.). This was possible thanks to leveraging the flexibility and versatility of Raspberry Pi devices, and the students' motivation that arose from the hands-on experience. Moreover, the course included a ``Teaching on demand'' component to let the attendees choose a field to explore, based on their own interests. In this paper, we offer all the details to let anyone fully reproduce the course. Besides, we analyze and evaluate the methodology that let us fulfill our objectives: increase the students' HPC skills and knowledge in such a way that they feel capable of utilizing it in their mid-term professional career.