Learning Cluster Computing by Creating a Raspberry Pi Cluster

The study of cluster computing and its applications are vital to the future of computer science. By linking a group of computers to provide more processing power than one computer can alone, this is the principle upon which modern supercomputers are built. This short paper describes a student's learning experience in cluster computing. As part of the Texas Woman's University's Quality Enhancement project, the student received funding to purchase computing components to create a low-cost cluster computer using 5 Raspberry Pis. The data collected from experiments running on the cluster computer is compared to those from a single Raspberry Pi. The results from those experiments are presented in the paper.