Pi's-To-Go

Contributed by Jacob Caswell, St. Olaf College, Richard Brown, St. Olaf College (caswell@stolaf.edu, rab@stolaf.edu)

Pi's-To-Go provides students, both CS and non-CS alike, with an affordable, engaging, and familiar environment to learn the hardware and software principles of Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC). Costing $450 in total, Pi's-To-Go provides modular hardware that helps students learn to apply PDC to their fields, to prepare them to handle the next generation of web servers, data centers and supercomputers.

PPP Characteristics

Languages Supported: , Python, C++, C, Java
OS Compatibility: Linux
Physical Resource Support: Local Cluster, Local Multicore
Computational Model: Fully Distributed, Message Passing

Context of Use

Pi's-To-Go serves as a capable instructional tool for distributed technologies such as MPI, as well as parallelized tools such as OpenMP and Cray's Chapel.

Thanks to modular hardware, Pi's-To-Go also helps students explore how the use of different network topologies, use of computational nodes, and disk space affects distributed or parallel computations.

Resources

Pi's-To-Go System Developer Documentation

Pi's-To-Go End User Documentation