STEM Outreach: Parallel Computing with the Raspberry Pi

Finally the day has come!

Today, High End Compute, as part of a STEM outreach event organised by Dr. Dave Topping of The University of Manchester, will present a morning of talks and hands-on activities designed to encourage school children in maths and parallel computing.

We start with a discussion of the role of prime numbers in the security of many of today's systems, whether banking, FaceBook authentication or ssh. The participants then look at a simple Python code for finding the prime factors of an input number, before we turn our attention to why a serial computer, how ever multi-core it may be, is not always powerful enough. 

The main activity will be schools building a parallel computer out of 4 Raspberry Pi cards, a £5 unmanaged network switch and the ubiquitous cabling. The children will learn about domain decomposition and use MPI to scale their prime factoring finding code to work across 16 cores on 4 Pi cards.

As well as learning about cryptology, parallel computing and MPI, the morning will cover the importance of energy efficient computing, including showing off the Innovate UK funded energy measurement board created by Embecosm. The children will also be able to examine an NVIDIA GPU card (achieving several TFLOPS/sec via its internal parallelism) and have the chance to win an Intel Galileo board. HEC thanks Embecosm, NVIDIA and Intel.

In the afternoon, the cryptology theme switches to the work undertaken at Bletchley Park and how mathematicians cracked the Enigma.

Part of a Bigger Picture

High End Compute is keen to roll out its modular outreach & training to other schools across the UK, and can taylor the event to focus on different forms of parallel computing, in a variety of disciplines and skill levels, and on determining the energy efficiency of various approaches.

For further information email us at enq@highendcompute.co.uk