Berserkr: a Beowulf Cluster Emulator for Teaching Parallel Programming

Parallel programming is an intrinsically creative activity. The programmer is forced to consider the algorithms in a completely different way from the standard way of thinking commonly used for sequential machines. The application must come first, followed by the cluster architecture. Most of the time the application leads to the construction of the architecture itself. Universal, general purpose parallel machines simply do not exist. We present a tool that can be used on standard linux boxes to implement Beowulf clusters of User-Mode Linux (UML) virtual machines, where students can test their parallel programs. We also describe some examples of exercises and a method used to compute the emulated throughput and speedup of the system.