Virtual clusters for parallel and distributed education

Authors:
Elizabeth Shoop;Richard Brown;Eric Biggers;Malcolm Kane;Devry Lin;Maura Warner
Affiliations:
Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA;St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, USA;Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, USA;Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, USA;Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, USA;Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
Year:
2012

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Abstract

The reality of multicore machines as a standard and the prevalence of distributed cloud computing has signaled a need for parallel and distributed computing to become integrated into the computer science curriculum. At the same time, operating system virtualization has become a common technique with open standard tools available to any practitioners. Virtual machines (VMs) installed on available computer lab resources can be used to simulate high-performance cluster computing environments. This paper describes two such virtual clusters in use at small colleges, demonstrates their effectiveness for parallel computing education, and provides information about how to obtain the VMs for use in an educational lab setting. We have used these clusters to introduce parallelism into several courses in our undergraduate curriculum.