International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract

E-learning has become an important part in education in this digital era. We developed an effective eLearning model for system building projects in the disciplines of computer engineering and computer science, and applied it to a project of building a high performance computer system, Beowulf cluster. The aim of the practice is to elevate the level of students’ knowledge and technology to build a clustered computer system by facilitating on-line resources, including related research outcomes and open-source software. The project is designed for team working and students in a team collaborate to complete both hardware setup and open-source software installations based on the manuals and guides accessed from Internet sources. The project was actually conducted in Parallel Computing course in UTPA and Parallel Processing course in CSU, Fresno, and the resulting systems were tested with a number of benchmark parallel programs for performance. Based on the successful outcome of our students, we believe that the developed eLearning model is highly effective for system building projects in the disciplines of computer engineering and computer science.