Teaching undergraduates using local virtual clusters
Richard A. Brown, Elizabeth Shoop · 2013
We describe five years of experience using Beowulf clusters of virtual machines in teaching and research at liberal arts colleges. Each virtual node in each undergraduate student-managed cluster is hosted on a standard classroom/laboratory machine, otherwise dedicated to general computing in support a CS curriculum. Applications highlighted include teaching purposes ranging from introductory CS to advanced projects, research efforts including classical analysis of cluster performance, map-reduce computations in social-networking research, and numerous interdisciplinary applications in natural sciences and other fields. Recent developments and next steps such as portable design and multi-level heterogeneous computing are discussed.