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.
翻译:高性能计算(HPC)是企业和机构中需求极高的学科。然而,作为学生及后来的教授,我们观察到本校的工程学位课程(包括计算机科学)中缺乏与HPC相关的内容。因此,我们设计并面向工程专业学生开设了一门名为“利用树莓派构建自己的集群”的非必修课程,以培养学生的HPC技能。通过该课程,我们涵盖了超级计算的基础知识(硬件、网络、软件工具、性能评估、集群管理等)。这得益于树莓派设备的灵活性与多功能性,以及学生在动手实践中激发的学习动力。此外,课程还包含“按需教学”模块,允许学员根据自身兴趣选择探索的领域。本文详细阐述了课程的全部细节,以便任何人均可完整复现。同时,我们分析并评估了这一教学方法如何实现我们的目标:以使学生能够在中期职业生涯中运用HPC的方式,提升其HPC技能与知识。