The Creation of a Low-cost Raspberry Pi Cluster for Teaching

Parallel programming is a computing model in which the computations are run on multiple processors simultaneously. In order to teach or learn parallel computing, there is a need for a computer system on which parallel programs can be executed. One such computing system is cluster computer in which a group of individual computers networked together to run multiple processes concurrently. Providing step-by-step instructions on building a cluster computer using 20 Raspberry Pi 3s, this experience report describes a low-cost cluster for teaching parallel computing in the undergraduate and high-school computing classrooms. The main contribution of this report is the detailed explanation on the software configuration including MPI (Message Passing Interface) when setting up the cluster. The MPI library described in this paper is Open-MPI.