Legion: A K-12 HPC Outreach and Education Cluster
Caughlin Bohn, Carrie A. Brown · Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing · 2020
Outreach and education of High-Performance Computing (HPC) concepts pose the challenge of explaining and clarifying complex ideas and bringing them to a more digestible format. The current outreach done by the Holland Computing Center (HCC) of the University of Nebraska includes workshops, training, and tours with activities for groups ranging from K-12 students to researchers. The Legion Raspberry Pi cluster is a tool created to aid training and outreach HCC conducts with the Nebraska University and research community. The Legion cluster aids in demonstrating concepts such as what a computing cluster is and what its components are, the characteristics of different types of jobs ran on high-performance systems, and to expand outreach possibilities for HCC further. The cluster accomplishes the goal through scripted animations of lights on Raspberry Pis to demonstrate load, and through a series of LED bulbs ”connecting” the Pis in a representational network of a cluster environment. Using the cluster as an addition to existing outreach activities and events can then further aid the education of High-Performance Computing concepts.