Abstract for Aotearoa New Zealand Software Engineering Conference, September, 2026

The Spartan supercomputer started its life as a small, experimental, general-purpose High Performance Computer at the University of Melbourne, facing significant financial constraints. An innovative design led to a Cloud-HPC hybrid following a needs analysis. Despite its small size, Spartan was extremely successful in terms of job throughput and attracted attention at several international conferences (including in Aotearoa New Zealand) and at various HPC centres in Europe. These early successes led Spartan to receive a substantial grant for a GPU partition for a consortium of Victorian universities, pushing the system into the same metrics as a Top500 system. Formal certification was applied for and received in November 2023, and Spartan has continued in that league ever since.

This presentation will outline the history of Spartan's architecture, the bespoke software design and implementation, and a number of user-management features, including Karaage, the Research Compute Portal, job stats, integration of graphical nodes, VS Code, ML/AI, and more. Further, Spartan has always offered an extensive training workshop programme, a Champions programme, and researcher presentations. With this range of features and activities, we provide software and management examples and opportunities for other HPC systems of diverse sizes for flexibility and performance.

Presentation slidedeck