Leveraging Teaching on Demand: Approaching HPC to Undergrads
This work addresses the lack of HPC education in undergraduate engineering curricula, but the approach is incremental and specific to a single university context.
The authors designed a non-mandatory course using Raspberry Pi clusters to teach HPC to undergraduate engineering students, and found that it increased students' HPC skills and confidence for professional use.
High Performance Computing (HPC) is a highly demanded discipline in companies and institutions. However, as students and also afterwards as professors, we observed a lack of HPC related content in the engineering degrees at our university, including Computer Science. Thus, we designed and offered the engineering students a non-mandatory course entitled ``Build you own Raspberry Pi cluster employing Raspberry Pi'' to provide the students with HPC skills. With this course, we covered the basics of supercomputing (hardware, networking, software tools, performance evaluation, cluster management, etc.). This was possible thanks to leveraging the flexibility and versatility of Raspberry Pi devices, and the students' motivation that arose from the hands-on experience. Moreover, the course included a ``Teaching on demand'' component to let the attendees choose a field to explore, based on their own interests. In this paper, we offer all the details to let anyone fully reproduce the course. Besides, we analyze and evaluate the methodology that let us fulfill our objectives: increase the students' HPC skills and knowledge in such a way that they feel capable of utilizing it in their mid-term professional career.