Little Fe:Why is Little-Fe Useful?
Besides being fundamentally cool, Little-Fe's principle edge is resource availability for computational science education. To teach a realistic curriculum in computational science, there must be guaranteed and predictable access to HPC resources. There are currently two common barriers to this access. Local policies typically allocate HPC resources under a "research first, pedagogy second" prioritization scheme, which often precludes the use of "compute it now" science applications in the classroom. The second barrier is the capital and on-going maintenance costs associated with owning an HPC resource, this affects most mid-size and smaller educational institutions.
While relatively low-cost Beowulf style clusters have improved this situation somewhat, HPC resource ownership is still out of reach for many educational institutions. Little-Fe's total cost is less than $2,500, making it easily affordable by a wide variety of K-16 schools.
Little-Fe's second important feature is ease of use, both technically and educationally. Our adoption of the BCCD as the software distribution toolkit makes it possible to smoothly and rapidly advance from bare hardware to science. Further, we have minimized ongoing maintenance since both hardware and software are standardized. Paul Gray from the University of Northern Iowa has successfully maintained the BCCD for many years now via a highly responsive and personable web presence directly benefiting all BCCD users.
The BCCD also provides a growing repository of computational science software and curriculum modules. We are committed to expanding these modules to enhance the use of Little-Fe. More important, we seek to advance the amount of quality computational science woven into the classroom, into laboratory explorations, and into student projects. As others build their Little-Fes, our efforts will leverage their support through the development of additional open source curriculum modules.
Portability is useful in a variety of settings, such as workshops, conferences, demonstrations, and the like. Portability is also useful for educators, whether illustrating principles in the K-12 arena or being easily passed from college classroom to college classroom. Little-Fe is an immediate, full-fledged, available computational resource.
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