[Beowulf] Demo-cluster ideas

[Skylar Thompson]

Thanks for the report back! The color-coding is a nifty idea.
Skylar

On 03/07/2016 08:44 AM, Olli-Pekka Lehto wrote:
> 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