Cluster Files

These are the Student Pi and Parallella cluster files that I produced as part of my contribution to the Budget Beowulf session at SIGCSE'15. If you use them, please credit me and our SIGCSE special session:

Adams J, Caswell J, Matthews SJ, Peck C, Shoop E, and Toth D. “Budget Beowulfs: A Show-case of Inexpensive Clusters for Teaching PDC”. In Proceedings of the 46th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE’15). Kansas City, MO. March 6-8, 2015.

UPDATE: In 2022, I ported my website to a new hosting provider. As part of that transition, I stopped locally hosting a number of these SBC disk image files and uploaded them to CS-Materials. The disk image links below now will take you to an associated collection in CS-Materials. To download, visit the associated link and download the file specified in the link text.

Student Pi Cluster


A simple Rasperry Pi cluster that can be assembled in a single class period (1 hour):

Student Parallella Cluster


A simple Parallella cluster that can be assembled in a single class period (1 hour). Note: I STRONGLY encourage you to use a smaller SD card (8GB) to create the worker image file! Using larger cards will significantly impact the ability your ability to complete the cluster in an hour!