LittleFe: The high performance computing education appliance

Many institutions have little to no access to parallel computing platforms for in-class computational science or parallel and distributed computing education. Key concepts, motivated by science, are taught more effectively and memorably on an actual parallel platform. LittleFe is a complete six node Beowulf style portable cluster. The entire package weighs less than 50 pounds, travels easily, and sets up in five minutes. LittleFe hardware includes multi-core processors and GPGPU capability, which enables support for shared and distributed memory parallelism, GPGPU parallelism, and hybrid models. By leveraging the Bootable Cluster CD project, LittleFe is an affordable, powerful, and ready-to-run computational science, parallel programming and distributed computing educational appliance.