LittleFe and BCCD as a successful on-ramp to HPC

The LittleFe/BCCD Project is a combination of hardware, software, and curriculum to facilitate the inclusion of high-performance computing (HPC), data-enabled science (DES), and computational science (CS) education in high school, undergraduate, and graduate settings. The hardware is a six-node computational cluster whose parts cost $2800, easily assembled by students in a day, and small enough to be checked on an airline. The software is a Linux distribution called Bootable Cluster CD (BCCD) that will configure a HPC cluster in under five minutes. BCCD was created in conjunction with LittleFe, and continues to be maintained alongside LittleFe. The curriculum modules are written by faculty who use LittleFe in their classrooms and cover a wide range of topics. The combination of these three has proven to be very effective in delivering HPC, DES, and CS education in this environment.