NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

Melissa Romanus

MelissaRomanus v2
Melissa Romanus
Data Management Engineer
Phone: (510) 486-6821
Fax: (510) 486-6459

Melissa Romanus is a Data Management Engineer for the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is a member of the Operations Technology Group, where her research focuses on the ingestion, collection, analysis, and visualization of real-time streaming operational and systems data in data centers that support high-performance computing systems. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) from Tufts University in 2010 and her Master's in ECE from Rutgers in 2014. 

Melissa’s current research interests are in operational data analytics in high-performance computing (HPC) data centers and system architecture of large-scale data warehouses. She is also particularly interested in the automation of scientific workloads and data-driven science on HPC systems.
 
Melissa is a passionate advocate for mental health, increased neurodiversity in the workplace, and disability awareness. She currently serves as NERSC’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accountability (IDEA) council chair for the labwide community, as well as in the CS Area. She is also the co-chair of the All-Access Employee Resource Group Mental Health Initiative. In addition, Melissa is the first-year delegate elect representing Berkeley Lab on the Council of UC Staff Assemblies (CUCSA), where she looks forward to serving the Lab community through staff engagement and making efforts to ensure all voices are heard and represented. 

Journal Articles

Debbie Bard, Wahid Bhimji, David Paul, Glenn K Lockwood, Nicholas J Wright, Katie Antypas, Prabhat Prabhat, Steve Farrell, Andrey Ovsyannikov, Melissa Romanus, others, "Experiences with the Burst Buffer at NERSC", Supercomputing Conference, November 16, 2016, LBNL LBNL-1007120,

Wahid Bhimji, Debbie Bard, Melissa Romanus, David Paul, Andrey Ovsyannikov, Brian Friesen, Matt Bryson, Joaquin Correa, Glenn K Lockwood, Vakho Tsulaia, others, "Accelerating science with the NERSC burst buffer early user program", Cray User Group, May 11, 2016, LBNL LBNL-1005736,

NVRAM-based Burst Buffers are an important part of the emerging HPC storage landscape. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently installed one of the first Burst Buffer systems as part of its new Cori supercomputer, collaborating with Cray on the development of the DataWarp software. NERSC has a diverse user base comprised of over 6500 users in 700 different projects spanning a wide variety of scientific computing applications. The use-cases of the Burst Buffer at NERSC are therefore also considerable and diverse. We describe here performance measurements and lessons learned from the Burst Buffer Early User Program at NERSC, which selected a number of research projects to gain early access to the Burst Buffer and exercise its capability to enable new scientific advancements. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time a Burst Buffer has been stressed at scale by diverse, real user workloads and therefore these lessons will be of considerable benefit to shaping the developing use of Burst Buffers at HPC centers.

Tong Jin, Fan Zhang, Qian Sun, Melissa Romanus, Hoang Bui, Manish Parashar, "Towards autonomic data management for staging-based coupled scientific workflows", Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 1969, 146:35--51,

Brian K Radak, Melissa Romanus, Tai-Sung Lee, Haoyuan Chen, Ming Huang, Antons Treikalis, Vivekanandan Balasubramanian, Shantenu Jha, Darrin M York, "Characterization of the three-dimensional free energy manifold for the uracil ribonucleoside from asynchronous replica exchange simulations", Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, 1969, 11:373--377,

Melissa Romanus, Robert B Ross, Manish Parashar, "Challenges and considerations for utilizing burst buffers in high-performance computing", arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.05492, 1969,

Pradeep Kumar Mantha, Sivakarthik Natesan, Melissa Romanus, Sai Saripalli, Ashley Zebrowski, "FutureGrid 2012 Project Challenge: Project 45 Building Scalable, Dynamic and Distributed Applications Using SAGA", 1969,

Andre Luckow, Pradeep Mantha, Melissa Romanus, Shantenu Jha, "Pilot-Abstractions for Data-Intensive Cloud Applications", 1969,

Fan Zhang, Tong Jin, Qian Sun, Melissa Romanus, Hoang Bui, Scott Klasky, Manish Parashar, "In-memory staging and data-centric task placement for coupled scientific simulation workflows", Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 1969, 29:e4147,

Conference Papers

Andrey Ovsyannikov, Melissa Romanus, Brian Van Straalen, Gunther H Weber, David Trebotich, "Scientific workflows at datawarp-speed: Accelerated data-intensive science using nersc's burst buffer", 2016 1st Joint International Workshop on Parallel Data Storage and data Intensive Scalable Computing Systems (PDSW-DISCS), Salt Lake City, UT, USA, IEEE, November 14, 2016, 1--6, LBNL LBNL-1006680, doi: 10.1109/PDSW-DISCS.2016.005

Michael Ott, Woong Shin, Norman Bourassa, Torsten Wilde, Stefan Ceballos, Melissa Romanus, Natalie Bates, "Global experiences with HPC operational data measurement, collection and analysis", 2020 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER), 1969, 499--508,

Jong Youl Choi, Jeremy Logan, Matthew Wolf, George Ostrouchov, Tahsin Kurc, Qing Liu, Norbert Podhorszki, Scott Klasky, Melissa Romanus, Qian Sun, others, "TGE: Machine learning based task graph embedding for large-scale topology mapping", 2017 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER), 1969, 587--591,

Qian Sun, Tong Jin, Melissa Romanus, Hoang Bui, Fan Zhang, Hongfeng Yu, Hemanth Kolla, Scott Klasky, Jacqueline Chen, Manish Parashar, "Adaptive data placement for staging-based coupled scientific workflows", Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, 1969, 1--12,

Jack A Smith, Melissa Romanus, Pradeep Kumar Mantha, Yaakoub El Khamra, Thomas C Bishop, Shantenu Jha, "Scalable online comparative genomics of mononucleosomes: a BigJob", Proceedings of the Conference on Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment: Gateway to Discovery, 1969, 1--8,

Qian Sun, Melissa Romanus, Tong Jin, Hongfeng Yu, Peer-Timo Bremer, Steve Petruzza, Scott Klasky, Manish Parashar, "In-staging data placement for asynchronous coupling of task-based scientific workflows", 2016 Second International Workshop on Extreme Scale Programming Models and Middlewar (ESPM2), 1969, 2--9,

Elizabeth Bautista, Melissa Romanus, Thomas Davis, Cary Whitney, Theodore Kubaska, "Collecting, monitoring, and analyzing facility and systems data at the national energy research scientific computing center", Proceedings of the 48th International Conference on Parallel Processing: Workshops, 1969, 1--9,

Tong Jin, Fan Zhang, Qian Sun, Hoang Bui, Melissa Romanus, Norbert Podhorszki, Scott Klasky, Hemanth Kolla, Jacqueline Chen, Robert Hager, others, "Exploring data staging across deep memory hierarchies for coupled data intensive simulation workflows", 2015 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 1969, 1033--1042,

Brian K Radak, Melissa Romanus, Emilio Gallicchio, Tai-Sung Lee, Ole Weidner, Nan-Jie Deng, Peng He, Wei Dai, Darrin M York, Ronald M Levy, others, "A framework for flexible and scalable replica-exchange on production distributed CI", Proceedings of the Conference on Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment: Gateway to Discovery, 1969, 1--8,

Melissa Romanus, Fan Zhang, Tong Jin, Qian Sun, Hoang Bui, Manish Parashar, Jong Choi, Saloman Janhunen, Robert Hager, Scott Klasky, others, "Persistent data staging services for data intensive in-situ scientific workflows", Proceedings of the ACM International Workshop on Data-Intensive Distributed Computing, 1969, 37--44,

Melissa Romanus, Pradeep Kumar Mantha, Matt McKenzie, Thomas C Bishop, Emilio Gallichio, Andre Merzky, Yaakoub El Khamra, Shantenu Jha, "The anatomy of successful ECSS projects: Lessons of supporting high-throughput high-performance ensembles on XSEDE", Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment: Bridging from the eXtreme to the campus and beyond, 1969, 1--9,

Book Chapters

Elizabeth Bautista, Nitin Sukhija, Melissa Romanus, Thomas Davis, Cary Whitney, "OMNI at the Edge", Cybersecurity and High-Performance Computing Environments, ( 1969) Pages: 63--84

Tong Jin, Qian Sun, Melissa Romanus, Manish Parashar, "Adaptive Data Placement in Multi-Tiered Data Staging Runtime", New Frontiers in High Performance Computing and Big Data, ( 1969) Pages: 175--196