Victoria
University of Melbourne
Spartan is the University of Melbourne high-performance computer. It is free for research staff and graduate researchers, and it runs both CPU and GPU jobs. You need a Melbourne login and a project with an eligible academic owner.
Spartan
No direct charge for University of Melbourne research staff and graduate researchers.
Spartan is a Linux cluster for batch work: many jobs at once, not a faster copy of your desktop. The university describes a large CPU system and a large GPU system. A 2024 survey put Spartan near 14,200 cores, with GPUs that were mostly A100s. The portal is only reachable on campus or on the university VPN.
How to get it
- You need a University of Melbourne username. External collaborators need the university to sponsor an account. They cannot sign up alone.
- On campus, or on the GlobalProtect VPN, open the Research Computing Portal and request an HPC account.
- Join a project, or ask your supervisor to create one. The project needs an eligible academic owner, called an RCAO on the Melbourne forms. One-line project descriptions are declined.
- Connect from a terminal once the account exists. Windows-only programs will not run. If you need those, ask about the Melbourne Research Cloud instead.
- Use a GPU node for PyTorch, TensorFlow, or AlphaFold. Leave it off the request if you are only running R or pandas.
Nectar
This university is on the Nectar member list captured for local allocations.
Keep going
Check before you rely on this
- The university marketing page and the 2024 survey disagree on exact core and GPU counts. Both are linked. Neither was re-counted for this guide.