Nathan Tallent is a computer scientist and lead for the Continuum Computing Team
in the Future Computing Technologies Group
within the Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division.
He joined PNNL in 2011.
He received a Ph.D. in 2010 from Rice University.
As leader of the Performance Lab for EXtreme Computing and daTa, research spans the challenges of measurement and performance, workload modeling, distributed and scalable architectures, and continuum computing, all motivated by current and emerging workloads in scientific workflows, data analytics, and domain modeling.
He has led development of several research software prototypes for distributed scientific workflows and performance analysis and prediction.
- DataLife, a measurement and analysis toolset for distributed scientific workflows that use I/O and storage for task composition.
- MemGaze, a memory analysis toolset that combines high-resolution trace analysis and low overhead measurement, both with respect to time and space.
- TAZeR:
TAZeR is a remote I/O framework for transparently minimizing the access latencies of remote I/O in workflows.
TAZeR's primary strategy is capturing dynamic and irregular inter-task locality, both temporal and spatial, via adaptive hierarchical staging that ensures most frequently accessed data is `close'.
- BigFlowSim:
BigFlowSim is a workflow I/O simulator-emulator and trace generator that captures several parameters that affect local and remote I/O performance.
BigFlowSim generates a large variety of flows within and between tasks of distributed workflows.
With BigFlowSim, we have systematically studied TAZeR's performance on different data flows.
- Palm:
Palm is a suite of performance modeling tools (Palm, Palm-Task, Representative-Paths, Palm/FastFootprints, MIAMI-NW) to assist performance analysis and predictive model generation.
Palm generates models by combining top-down (human-provided) semantic insight with bottom-up static and dynamic analysis.
Palm has been used to model irregular applications with sparse data structures and unpredictable access patterns.
Recent additions focus on rapid characterization of memory behavior.
- SEAK Suite:
The SEAK Suite is a collection of constraining problems for common embedded computing challenges.
A constraining problem is a mission-centric and goal-oriented problem specification that separate problem-domain constraints from solution implementations so as to encourage creative solutions that meet goals but that may deviate from standard implementations.
- PERFECT Suite:
The PERFECT Suite consists of kernels and applications for evaluating tradeoffs between performance, power, and architecture within the domains of radar and image processing.
He is one of the original developers of HPCToolkit, a widely used suite of performance tools on supercomputers.
He contributed to OpenAD, a tool for automatic differentiation (AD) of numerical computer programs.
