Repurposing computers as a cluster for academic institutions Over the past few years, MCAST has been increasing its commitment towards research, yet a common limitation is the availability of processing power by our researchers. Whilst funding is available for the setting up of classroom computers, there isnxe2x80x99t enough funding for highend processing infrastructure for research purposes. We have thus undertaken a research project to explore the possibility of repurposing existing computer systems and have them work in a cluster during outofoffice hours to address just this need. In this initial phase of our research, we are presenting our findings on a simple proof of concept using seven singleboard computers benchmarked as a Beowulf and Dispy clusters. The intention is to further this research by testing up to 25 singleboard computers then to migrate our setup and findings to 120 computers. Our findings in this research are very encouraging and justify the next phases of this project.

Building a Lightweight ContainerBased Experimental Platform for HPC Education HPC (High Performance Computing) is of great significance due to its excellent performance in computing acceleration. However, unlike other techniques in computer science, learning HPC requires advanced computing resources such as largescale clusters which directly increase the cost of study for students. To help students to learn HPC programming easily, we design and develop a lightweight containerbased experimental platform to provide students with easily accessible and customizable HPC practice environments. In our platform, we integrate multiple practical functional modules for students, teachers, and administrators respectively. It is convenient for a user to access highperformance computing resources via a web portal, use highly customizable basic environments and have nice graphical handson interactive HPC learning experiences from our platform.