A Case Study of Teaching Parallel and Distributed Computing Topics on a Computer Cluster

This paper presents the establishment of cluster computing lab at a minority serving institution that aims to provide computing resources to support undergraduate computer science curriculum. The computing resources of the cluster are managed by a job distribution environment that allows the users to upload, compile, and run their jobs. The job distribution software distributes the submitted jobs to the computing nodes of the cluster. The authors will present a case study of using this platform to teach parallel and distributed computing topics in the operating system course. The evaluation of the teaching effectiveness is presented thereafter.