> Curriculum > Comming soon! Seriously...?
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Tiny Titan
21–30 of 70 posts
Re: Tiny Titan
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
the fact that it looks really cool likely has surprisingly strong effects on student motivation and work/attention levels, leading to more learning, which is the sole target here
Who are the students though? I'd assume that parallel computing is mostly interesting for university-grade "aspiring scientists", which is reinforced by the example software (a parallel 2D Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics(SPH) code and a parallel Mandelbrot set race). Do we assume that 18+ folks are only interested in parallel programming if it's assembled of shiny pipes?
Doesn’t seem like anyone assumes that. I’m interested in this stuff, but having it visual and physical like that would spark my interest even more. Seems like a no brainer that it makes students learn without studying a text book
Re: Tiny Titan
#23More descriptive title, e.g. ‘Tiny Titan, a $1,000 classroom supercomputer’ would be helpful.
How does this cost $1,000? The budget is clearly not being used efficiently. The only computing part, the 9 RPi's are 315$ all together. So what, 685$ of plastic and accessories. Hmm....
In all of my RPi projects, the RPi itself always ends up being less than half the price.
Case, sd-card, cables, power supply... It goes up quickly, especially if you don't cheap out on the quality.
Re: Tiny Titan
#24Check out the bitscope blade http://au.element14.com/b/bitscope for another take on this. You still need most of the peripherals, but it makes for a slightly neater setup.
Re: Tiny Titan
#25Well, at least they do wrote some code for simulations using MPI which is nice
I saw a few cases of "Hey, lets spend XXX USD for cluster of " and after that "Well we can't actually code anything for that so leave it rot/run BOINC to make it useful for anything at all"
Re: Tiny Titan
#26I'm thinking about building one, but with Pi Zero's and USB networking. The ClusterHAT guy wrote software to netboot the nodes off a cluster controller's SD through the USB network. With that, you don't even need an SDcard for each node.
I was thinking about also adding a LED bar with one LED for each GPU SIMD element, refreshing a couple times per second and lighting up for the units used above a certain threshold. The ARMv6 SIMD instructions don't look that encouraging.
The end result would be something that looks like a small Connection Machine.
Re: Tiny Titan
#27More descriptive title, e.g. ‘Tiny Titan, a $1,000 classroom supercomputer’ would be helpful.
How does this cost $1,000? The budget is clearly not being used efficiently. The only computing part, the 9 RPi's are 315$ all together. So what, 685$ of plastic and accessories. Hmm....
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Re: Tiny Titan
#28Why not just use virtual machines to sub out the RPis? Without the curriculum, it's not clear what they're trying to teach here. Assembly? Networking? Administration of the RPis?
the fact that it looks really cool likely has surprisingly strong effects on student motivation and work/attention levels, leading to more learning, which is the sole target here
The fact it looks really cool also helps with visitors / donors. Never underestimate the value of blinking lights to enhance your fund raising so you have more money to teach students.
Re: Tiny Titan
#29More descriptive title, e.g. ‘Tiny Titan, a $1,000 classroom supercomputer’ would be helpful.
How does this cost $1,000? The budget is clearly not being used efficiently. The only computing part, the 9 RPi's are 315$ all together. So what, 685$ of plastic and accessories. Hmm....
The suggested components also include 16-port switch, monitor and XBox360 controller. I think they have added everything you might need for the full set up and maybe rounded up.
Re: Tiny Titan
#30Check out the bitscope blade http://au.element14.com/b/bitscope for another take on this. You still need most of the peripherals, but it makes for a slightly neater setup.
Thanks for sharing this, looks interesting.