ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the US Department of Energy

Tiny Titan Jack Wells Director of Science Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility Oak Ridge National Laboratory Carolyn Lauzon, Ph.D. ALCC Program Manager Advanced Scientific Computing Research U.S. Department of Energy BoF12: Motivating, Engaging & Educating the Young into the HPC World: High-Performance Communications for High-Performance Computing ISC 2015 15 July 2015

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Acknowledgements • OLCF User Assistance & Outreach Group, Ashley

Barker, Leader –  Robert French, Adam Simpson, Tony DiGirolamo,

• Sponsor’s passion for outreach: DOE/ASCR Facilities Division –  Barbara Helland (ASCR Facilities Division Director) –  Christine Chalk (OLCF Program Manager) –  Carolyn Lauzon (ALCC Program Manager)

This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725.

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Titan is a U.S. DOE supercomputer – the fastest computer for open science. It has:

18,688 NVIDIA K20X GPUs 299,008 AMD Opteron CPUs 27,000,000 Gigaflops of computing power

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Outreach Challenges

• OLCF performs 100’s of tours each year –  Approximately 700 performed in 2014

• Determined anecdotally that students (K-12) found the OLCF computing tour boring

• Tradeshow / exhibit outreach was limited to posters, movies, and handouts

•  In general, lay audiences do not understand what it means for computers to collaborate, i.e., parallel computing –  No frame of reference outside of HPC

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Outreach Challenges

• To explain importance of HPC, need to convey how supercomputers: –  Break tasks apart –  Share information with co-worker processors – Work together to speed up a problem

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9 Raspberry Pi Nodes Nearly 1 Gigaflop of computing power

Hours of challenging fun

•  Interactive •  Fun for kids

–  E.g., Playstation controler •  Explains HPC concepts

–  Decomposition –  Communication –  Scaling

•  Visually appealing –  e.g. has blinky lights

Tiny Titan is an interactive toy supercomputer.

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Here’s how to build a Tiny Titan

•  9 Raspberry Pi Model B+ units •  3 Anker 60W USB Chargers •  9 ThingM Blink1 USB Lights •  1 Netgear 12-port Ethernet Switch •  9 Ethernet cables •  1 Microsoft Xbox 360 Controller

Tiny Titan is a do-it-yourself educational research project. Building your own tiny supercomputer is a challenging and rewarding project. Documentation for building and configuring Tiny Titan, as well as a list of common sticking points, is available on our web page at https://tinytitan.github.io.

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TINY TITAN SUCCESS STORIES

Public Communication and Outreach

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Tiny Titan in OLCF Overlook

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Local Television – June 2014

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Computational Physics students – June 2014

“I kinda want to go into biology… but I’m thinking about physics now that I’ve come here [OLCF].”

– Danielle McNabney, student at APSU Comp. Physics summer course

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National User Facility Organization (NUFO) / National Lab Day

Dr. Pat Dehmer, Acting Director of the Office of Science

Secretary of Energy, Ernie Moniz, Rep. Johnson (TX), Sen. Murkowski (AK)

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Popular Science – September 2014

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Works for all ages

Reached ~150 1st – 6th grade students at ORNL’s “Take your child to work” day

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Works for all ages

Used in over 100 K-12 or University tours since June 2014

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Building and Sharing TinY Titan: Beyond the computing facility

• DOE Germantown MD (Carolyn’s office) • American Museum of Science & Energy in Oak

Ridge

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BUILDING AND SHARING TINY TITAN BEYOND THE LABORARY COMMUNITY

Public Communication and Outreach

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DOE Germantown

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Building Tiny Titan The team build included members from ASCR, HEP, IT Support, and Office of Nuclear Safety

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Sharing Tiny Titan

DOE Minorities in Energy Science Event (Smithsonian, Feb 2015)

Tiny Titan demonstrating principles of supercomputing to student attendees. Booth attendees also learned broadly about DOE Office of Science user facilities and were provided take-home sheets with science outputs from ASCR HPC facilities.

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American Museum of Science & Energy

Titan Exhibit, featuring Tiny Titan

AMSE Tiny Titan’s first

user

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CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Tiny Titan

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Challenges and Opportunities

Other opportunities to share Tiny Titan -  May 2015 Science Bowl -  Discussions for exhibit in DOE museum (Forrestal) -  Request from SC Feds to borrow for outreach

activities

Tiny Titan as DIY classroom tool: -  Teachers at events express interest in translating to

classrooms -  Partner schools willing to work with OLCF team -  Challenge: once a school invests in a build, no kid-

friendly programming environment to teach kids simple parallel programming concepts

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National Science Bowl Presentation

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