Beowulf bootcamp: teaching local high schools about HPC

Abstract

The Beowulf Bootcamp is an initiative designed to raise the awareness of and interest in high performance computing in the high schools the area of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The goal is to familiarize students with all aspects of a supercomputer, giving them hands-on experience with touching or assembling hardware components. No less significant to the High Performance Computing adventure was an understanding of the software. Students not only installed the operating system and ran benchmarks, but they learned how to program. Our goal for the programming section was ambitious but focused: we sought to give the students a basic understanding of MPI.