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Portus

Workflow porting and performance tuning with PNNL
Lifecycle
Active
Period
2026–Present

Portus ports a scientific workflow to an HPC system and tunes where its tasks and data run. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory leads the project, with Nathan Tallent as principal investigator. It was selected in the first round of DOE Genesis Mission projects (opens in a new tab) announced in July 2026, and GRC's work on it began in August 2026.

GRC's Contribution​

GRC contributes workflow performance research and CLIO. The performance work covers models of how tasks produce and consume data, and a storage model that predicts the cost of placing that data on a given system. Dr. Xiaoyang Lu and Dr. Luke Logan lead it at GRC. CLIO from IOWarp supplies the context and data services that agents use in these workflows.

Builds on DaYu​

Portus continues a partnership between GRC and PNNL that began with a PNNL subcontract under the DOE Orchestration for Distributed & Data-Intensive Scientific Exploration program. That work produced DaYu, a semantic I/O analysis tool for HDF5 workflows developed with Meng Tang, which maps how data moves between workflow stages and exposes redundant aggregation, unused data, and missed parallelism. The partnership's papers include DaYu at CLUSTER 2024 and Data Flow Lifecycles for Optimizing Workflow Coordination at SC 2023. PNNL carries DaYu in its DataFlowDrs tool suite, and the Portus profiling work builds on it.

Status​

Portus is in its first phase. DOE's Genesis Mission selection list (opens in a new tab), posted July 22, 2026, lists it as selected for award negotiations, so this page reports participation and scope and makes no claim about results yet.