Hands On High Performance Computing: Developing A Cluster Computing Course For Real World Supercomputing
Thomas J. Hacker · 2020
High-performance computing (HPC) based on commodity hardware and open-source software has become the dominant paradigm for supercomputing today.1,2 Thus a great unmet need exists for skilled students and practitioners who can design, develop, deploy, and operate HPC-based systems to support discoveries in industry and academe.To address these needs, we have developed two courses in HPC, one for undergraduates and one for graduate students, that provides students with hands-on experience in designing, developing, and testing commodity-based supercomputing systems.In this paper, we describe a costeffective and scalable approach that we developed for this course, which has been successfully delivered over several semesters.We describe the curricular context, pedagogical approach, and outcomes along with a detailed description of the approaches and strategies we used to develop a hands-on laboratory component that can be replicated by others seeking to develop similar courses.We believe that our results will be useful to departments and institutions interested in developing curricula to answer the increasing needs presented by HPC and cyberinfrastructure.