Photo credit: NVIDIA
College students from Southern Methodist University (SMU) used 16 NVIDIA Jetson Nano modules to build a supercomputer mini cluster, or ‘baby supercomputer’ as the team likes to call it. Unlike other supercomputers, this one fits on a desk, while a touchscreen displays a dashboard showing the status of all of its nodes.
Unfortunately, there are no kits to build this type of supercomputer, so everything had to be fabricated from scratch. This entailed learning how to strip wires and then putting everything together, power units included, which resulted in a small fire. Why NVIDIA Jetson Nano modules? They were the only ones with onboard GPUs for more AI and machine learning tasks. However, there’s still lots of work left to do, as the team is now working on developing the mini cluster’s software stack using NVIDIA’s JetPack software development kit.
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I started studying computer science in high school because programming fulfilled the foreign language requirement. Doing those first projects as a high school freshman, I immediately knew this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” said Conner Ozenne, a senior computer science major at SMU.
