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.
Index Terms—Cluster, e-learning, Internet, parallel
computing, high performance system.
Yul Chu is with Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of
Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, TX, U.S.A. (e-mail: chuy@utpa.edu).
Jin Hwan Park is with Computer Science, California State Univeristy,
Fresno, CA, U.S.A. (e-mail: jpark@csufresno.edu).
Cite: Yul Chu and Jin Hwan Park, "An Effective Model for Computer System Building Projects in Computer Engineering and Computer Science," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 432-436, 2015.