My work experience week at EPCC

I spent a week doing work experience at EPCC, where I was given the goal of setting up and testing a homemade Raspberry Pi cluster ‘Wee Archlet’ using a set of instructions provided to me. I also helped find areas for improvement in the instructions by pointing out parts that I struggled to understand so that other people who have little experience with supercomputers can make a cluster too.

I made quite a few careless mistakes which made things harder later down the line, but I am actually quite glad that I made them. In the process of fixing the problems I had created I learned a lot more about how the cluster worked as well as becoming more confident with the command line.

I was able to connect the PIs together using ethernet cables and make them perform simple tasks such as sending the words “Hello World” from each processor core as well as identifying which processor core on which PI the message came from.

In my time at EPCC I have learned a lot and it has been a really great time. I greatly appreciate everyone who took the time out of their days for my benefit and would like to say thank you to them for welcoming me during my work experience.