First iteration of the mini-cluster is now in production. Some takeaways and observations:
We did the first deployment of the mini-cluster, called "Sisunen" last weekend at the local science centre. We ended up developing the concept so that kids could actually construct the cluster. We held 7 build sessions, each with 10 participants, over 2 days. Each session took about 30min. This really made it a really tangible experience. Things went very smoothly, largely thanks to the really good team of HPC specialists that ran the workshops. Here’s a video of the end product: https://www.instagram.com/p/BCnGg0VI6q-A3ft1NjXe13uPhBxoS99WjcX3qM0/ We ended up with following demos: SPH from Tiny Titan - This was probably the most popular demo. We amped up the particle count by 10x compared to the Raspberry Pi version and got it working nicely. PiBrot from Tiny Titan - Helped show the difference in parallel performance between 1 and 10 nodes. Explaining fractals in simple enough terms was a bit challenging though. Game of Life - One of our standard MPI training projects, spruced up for the demos a bit. NAMD+VMD - It was nice to show a real world code (molecular dynamics). Finding a better input set might be useful. Blender 3D - We ran out of time with this a bit. Works but Still need to set up a nice scene to render with a good balance of amount of frames, wow-factor and render time. The codes will be made available here and hopefully we’ll release more in the future: https://github.com/sisunen We also welcome all contributions, of course :) In the future it would be nice to get an interactive deep learning demo set up. Possibly neural style (https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style) and/or Deep Dream (https://github.com/google/deepdream). If anyone is up for a nice ML project for themselves or possibly some grad student then productising these for demo cluster use might not be a bad idea. :) Also the blink(1) USB LED indicators really helped illustrate how things were parallelized by color-coding the different tasks and setting the LEDs to correspond. Any demo code should ideally have support for these. O-P ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Olli-Pekka Lehto" <olli-pekka.le...@csc.fi> > To: beowulf@beowulf.org > Sent: Monday, 1 February, 2016 17:57:30 > Subject: [Beowulf] Demo-cluster ideas > We're in the process of developing a demo Beowulf cluster in the spirit of > Tiny > Titan (http://tinytitan.github.io/). However, the one we are working on is > based on 10 Intel i7 small-form-factor boards with a fairly good per-core > compute capability. > > I'd be interested to hear if you have some ideas (or even pointers to code!) > for > demonstrating HPC concepts to the general public. Especially having an element > of interactivity would be nice. > > Couple of low-hanging fruits that we are already looking at are > Blender/povray-rendering and porting the existing Tiny Titan codes. > > Best regards, > Olli-Pekka > -- > Olli-Pekka Lehto > Development Manager > Computing Platforms > CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd. > E-Mail: olli-pekka.le...@csc.fi > Tel: +358 50 381 8604 > skype: oplehto // twitter: ople > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
