About
Nine years building production systems in Australia, eight at the country's largest supercomputing centre. Designs and runs Python services that schedule, allocate and monitor GPU workloads across multi-tenant clusters. Built vScheduler, an open-source HPC scheduler for interactive GPU sessions, in production since 2022, with the accompanying paper published at ISC High Performance 2026.
Work Experience
Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre (CSIRO)HPC Software Engineer — Visualisation SpecialistMar 2018 - Present
Designs and operates the centre's interactive GPU platform: scheduling, remote access and the infrastructure underneath it.
- Designed, built and shipped vScheduler, a Python scheduling and orchestration service allocating GPU-backed interactive sessions across two production clusters — a Linux HPC partition and a Windows GPU cluster — unifying heterogeneous hardware under one scheduling model. In production since 2022 across 51 GPU nodes.
- Implemented two allocation models in one system: on-demand scheduling via a custom load balancer that ranks nodes on live utilisation and health, plus reservation-based allocation validated against a booking service. No open-source alternative combines both; the capability previously required commercial products such as AWS NICE DCV and NICE EnginFrame.
- Built the control plane end to end: socket-based telemetry agents streaming session and health events, a MySQL-backed state store as the single source of truth, systemd-managed services, and policy enforcement for quotas, walltime and fair-share.
- Shipped a Slurm-style operator CLI (vmanage, valloc, vkill, vquota, vinfo, vreport) plus an HTML reporting and observability layer.
- Architected for failure isolation and portability: separated control and data planes, per-site deployable modules and an optional booking backend. Open-sourced at github.com/PawseySC/vScheduler.
- Operates the clientless remote-access platform — an Apache Guacamole HTML5 gateway brokering RDP, VNC and SSH behind a reverse proxy and institutional SSO.
- Provisions the estate with Ansible across bare metal, KVM/Proxmox virtual machines and an in-house OpenStack private cloud.
- Operates the centre's render farm and NVIDIA Omniverse environment.
StakeSoftware EngineerMar 2017 - Feb 2018
Built the customer-facing trading platform in a regulated financial-services environment.
- Built account opening, order placement and portfolio monitoring in Angular, integrated with backend REST APIs and market-data feeds.
Skills
Selected work
A production-grade Model Context Protocol server exposing GPU scheduling and cluster operations as tools callable by LLM agents. OAuth 2.1, per-tool rate limiting, structured audit logging, OpenTelemetry tracing and Prometheus metrics, packaged as a Helm chart.
Gang-scheduled GPU training job queueing with Kueue, experiment tracking with MLflow, model serving with KServe and full-stack observability. Deliberately mirrors the vScheduler architecture on cloud-native primitives, with the MCP gateway driving live training queues.
Peer-reviewed work
A Scheduler System for Interactive Visualization on HPC Resources
ISC High Performance 2026, Hamburg
First author. System design, implementation and evaluation.