HPCwire: LSU Hosts Beowulf Boot Camp

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June 09, 2009

LSU Hosts Beowulf Boot Camp

BATON ROUGE, La., June 9 -- Beowulf Boot Camp might sound like a summer reading program featuring the Old English poem, but it actually is a summer education experience that will give Louisiana high-school students a unique opportunity to work hands-on with advanced computing technology that is not usually available in a typical classroom setting.

The LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, will host the Beowulf Boot Camp on campus June 15-19, with 24 students from 10 Louisiana high schools participating. The students will meet from 9 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. in the Fred C. Frey Computing Services Center during the five days of the camp, working directly with LSU researchers to learn the basics of supercomputing and computational science research.

During Beowulf Boot Camp, students will work in small groups to build computer clusters from scratch. They will then connect the clusters from each group together to form a mini supercomputer. The students will develop and run basic applications on the clusters and will learn simple programming exercises. At the end of the camp, the students will run performance benchmark tests to see how the mini supercomputer they build measures up against the largest and fastest supercomputers in the world.

The camp is named after the Beowulf supercomputing cluster, which CCT and LSU Department of Computer Science Professor Thomas Sterling invented. Beowulf is now the building block of many of the world's supercomputers.

Sterling, a former NASA scientist who leads the CCT Systems Science and Engineering research focus area, developed the summer camp in collaboration with CCT faculty and staff. CCT hosted the first Beowulf Boot Camp in August 2007, with students and teachers from five Baton Rouge high schools participating. For the second offering of the camp, CCT has included more students from more high schools.

"It is important that university professors focus not only on college-age students, but reach out to students in the K-12 grades, inspiring them to attend college and making them aware of the possibilities in a field many have not considered or been exposed to previously," Sterling said. "With the Beowulf Boot Camp, the students will not only learn more about computational science, they will learn more about themselves. This camp helps them realize they can interact with professors and university researchers, and exposes them to new interests and opportunities for their future careers or academic studies."

In future years, CCT hopes to work with other universities through the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative to offer the summer camp outreach to more students throughout the state.

For more information on the camp or to see a complete schedule of activities, visit http://www.cct.lsu.edu/BeowulfSummerCamp.

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Source: LSU Center for Computation & Technology

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