In March 2016, as part of our general outreach programme, High End Compute (HEC) ran a session on behalf of our client, Dave Topping, at the "Crypto Compute" event he had organised to promote STEM activities to Greater Manchester schoolchildren. The HEC elements comprised explaining encryption and its role in today's technological society   discussing the role of prime numbers in cryptology and encryption   discussing how supercomputers, parallel programming and MPI can be used to accelerate searches for prime factors and prime numbers   a number of hands-on sessions where schoolchildren programmed a Raspberry Pi using Python to determine factors of a given input, and building a small cluster of Raspberry Pis which they then used to run parallel Python to reduce the time to find the factors

Michael Bane, of High End Compute, helping schools build a parallel Raspberry Pi cluster

Intel kindly donated a prize of one of their Galileo boards, which was well received by the winners! Well done to Royton and Crompton School!

Feedback from the teachers was very positive and HEC & Dave are looking to run the event a few more times around the country - please email us a request for a Crypto Compute near you!

Comments from the Day

• "I enjoyed using Python today"
• "I learned more about coding"
• "I have enjoyed doing new things on the computers"
• "It was all very well done"
• "I learned how to use the Pi"
• "Great emphasis on maths with STEM"
• "I have taken lots of resource ideas"

Do it at your school!

Further information on the exercises is available upon request but we provide an outline on the infrastructure and are happy to advise further for schools and colleges on building a cluster and using it efficiently. We are also designing a series of modules based around boards such as the Raspberry Pi to explain programming, algorithms and supercomputing to children of all ages. Email us for more information