Spartan: A New Architecture for Research Computing
Submitted by lev_lafayette on Fri, 07/01/2016 - 13:15Thursday July 30th, at the Gryphon Gallery at the University of Melbourne, was the official launch of the 'Spartan' high-performance computing and cloud hybrid. Speakers at the launch included Dr Stephen Giugni, Director, Research Platform Services., Prof Margaret Sheil, Acting Vice Chancellor of the University of Melbourne., Professor Richard Sinnott, Director, eResearch and Professor of Applied Computing Systems., Mr Bernard Meade, Head of Research Compute Services, Research Platform Services, and yours truly, in my role as HPC Support Engineer, Research Platform Services.
As I argued in my presentation, the great advantage of Spartan is that it is designed around what users need. Based on research from the previous general compute resource, Edward, most people wanted to submit lots of jobs with a relatively small core count and memory footprint with data parallel approaches, but some really needed a large core counts with a fast interconnect. Putting the two types of users of the same system was not ideal. Also, engineers tend to want performance from a system, whereas managers want flexibility. Spartan provides both through its partitioning system. I am convinced that this will be architecture of future research computing.
Spartan's launch has received extensive media coverage, including high ranking sites such as HPC Wire, Gizmodo, and Delimiter. In addition to the aforementioned speakers, particular thanks must also be given to Linh Vu, Daniel Tosello, and Chris Samuel for their engineering excellence in helping put together the system, and to Greg Sauter for his project management (and for his photography). Welcome to Spartan!