Little Fe has grown quite a bit beyond its original design, as often happens with expansive ideas. Its no flux capacitor, but big things are quite possible from little things. To paraphrase Gavroche from Les Miserables:
Little clusters know, when
Little clusters fight, we
May look easy pickings
But we've got some bite!
So never kick a dog
Because he's just a pup
We'll fight like twenty armies
And we won't give up
So you'd better run for cover
When the pup grows up.
We have many plans to help the concept of Little Fe grow, but first lets go over the history.
Paul Gray (University of Northern Iowa), Charlie Peck (Earlham College) and Tom Murphy (Contra Costa College) were helping with the NCSI (National Computational Science Institute) sponsored seven day parallel programming workshop at the University of Oklahoma. Tom Murphy needed a portable PC cluster to take to local high schools to help market the CCC HPC program. The three brainstormed. Paul and a student intern designed and assembled the unit. Charlie has been working on revising internal factors. The weight needs to be dropped, which means losing the case and using just one power supply rather than eight. It also means redesigning airflow and air supply.
Little Fe is coming up on its first year of life.
Oh, by the way, you might be wondering why the name of this cluster is "Little Fe". Tom Murphy worked in the supercomputer field for over thirty years working for computer manufacturers. He helped sell "Big Iron". Tom Murphy and Paul Gray led a BOF (Birds of a Feather) session at SC2004 (SuperComputing 2004) entitled "HPC in the community colleges: little iron, technicians, and computational science". Hence the name for the cluster we debuted at the BOF.
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