HPC Boot Camp

Recently I was involved in an effort, sponsored by CCT at LSU to teach high school kids about supercomputing. Five local high schools were involved, each of which sent a teacher and about four specially picked students.

Each school’s team did the following:

1. Connected 5 nodes to form a mini supercomputer
2. Installed the Operating System (Win 2003 Compute Cluster)
3. Heard lectures/tutorials from:
   1. Dr. Thomas Stirling, inventor of the commodity cluster or Beowulf computer
   2. Dr. Peter Diener, who uses supercomputers for Relativity Research
   3. Dr. Mayank Tiaga, who uses supercomputers for Computational Fluid Dynamics Research
4. Learned to program in Python
5. Learned to program MPI (Message Passing Interface) via PyMPI (course materials are here).

It was a monumental effort and has left me exhausted. But I think it was worthwhile, and I think it made a difference.

You can find a writeup about the event in HPC Wire.