I work for SchedMD, maintainer of the HPC Slurm workload manager, and am a Junior in Computer Science at Brigham Young University (BYU) with a Machine Learning Emphasis.

I love enhancing my life with technology and translating dreams into a reality through code! My hobbies, conversations, and subscriptions tend towards: Machine Learning, Smart Assistants, Large Language Models/Natural Language Processing, and Finance! I'm an avid learner of people, places, and ideas that advance these goals.

Experience:

SchedMD

QA Intern

Oct 2022 - Present

Update and develop unit tests for Slurm: an open source, fault-tolerant, and highly scalable cluster management and job scheduling system used in many HPC contexts.

Work with: Python, Linux, Git, and Expect.

Sandia National Laboratories

Database and Technical Maintenance

Sep 2021 - Aug 2023

Maintained and updated WordPress websites and SQL databases, allowing 3000+ scientists world-wide to collaborate, share, and publish research. Also oversaw 5+ website server migrations and ported vital Python 2 engine codes to Python 3. Additionally refactored and modularized essential Data Search Utilities for 500+ users, improving page load and response times by 30%.

Worked with: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Apache Servers, BASH, Python, MATLAB, and MySQL.

Brigham Young University: CS Department

Research Assistant

Sep 2021 - Abr 2022

Increased CNN accuracy of marine species classification ResNet architectures in PyTorch by 25%. Experimented with data augmentation, dropout, and other Machine Learning techniques to improve results. All work was performed while part of Dr. Ryan Farrell's Computer Vision Lab.

Worked with: Python, PyTorch, and BASH.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Software Engineer

Apr 2020 - Jun 2020

Developed functionality for Curvallis, a Python program, that accelerates data analysis by more than 60% for Equations of State. Prepared Pull Requests from team, saving 4+ hours of manager’s time weekly.

Worked with: Python, GitHub, and Git.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Full-Time Missionary

Aug 2019 - Jul 2021

Led 28 individuals in service efforts, helping region achieve 20% growth in key performance indicators. Became fluent in Spanish, learned to work with a wide variety of people from different cultures and backgrounds, and adapted teaching techniques to needs of those taught. Also heightened personal learning skills and the ability to express myself clearly.

Sandia National Laboratories

Website Designer

Jul 2017 - Aug 2019

Updated and maintained websites used by 1000+ international monthly users. Briefly maintained a European site. Created three custom data search tools to quickly sort hundreds of experimental results based on multiple parameters. Earned monetary bonus for exceptional work.

Worked with: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, WordPress, Apache Servers, BASH, and MATLAB.

Recent Work + Projects:

Transformer Replication

I've been working with the Transformer architecture for a couple of my projects recently and wanted to get a more intimate idea of its workings. It has been quite valuable to program Scaled Dot-Product Attention, Multi-Headed Attention, Softmax, and other components from scratch with basic PyTorch layers. It isn't optimized for speed, though I hope the layout of the code will be helpful to others trying to get familiar with Transformers!

See the project on GitHub for more information.

JSON Comparer

The JSON Comparer is a utility I developed within the space of three days! I was doing some repetative, unofficial work for a startup and the idea of this tool was born!

I found that online diff tools would only let you see the differences between two texts, not filter or tweak parts of the files that weren't relevant. After a few days of coding around school and work, I developed the JSON Comparer with the features I desired! Besides a standard graphical diff, the JSON Comparer allows the user to delete all instances of a specific key in one of the texts or even delete an entire object! This allows the user to quickly pare down the text to what is relevant, removing what doesn't matter and assuring that all remaining content from both texts match.

See the project on GitHub for more information.

This Website

I coded this site from scratch! After working with large content managers for years in the workplace, I knew that to permit me to implement all the custom features I desired while retaining fast loading times, I'd have to do it myself. Hopefully this is one of the fastest websites you've ever visited!

Moving this website to production entirely myself allowed me to exercise many different skills. Before hosting the website files in the cloud, as I do now for speed reasons, I served files off of a computer I assembled myself with Ubuntu Server. Even with my current setup, however, I still maintain the haproxy load-balancer, monitor Apache and its configuration, and renew my own SSL certificates as needed. Factoring in the additional effort to create the entire site from scratch, this website is one of my biggest projects!

Building A Server

I built my own server for personal projects and to give me a place to train and run my own Machine Learning models!

While building my own server I taught myself many details about RAM, PWM fans, PCIe lanes, different generations of CPUs, and power supplies. I had never needed to know about these parts intimately and enjoyed translating my requirements into a matrix of compatible hardware components.

What Others Say:

"Nathan was the sharpest, hardest-working undergraduate I ever managed... Nathan’s software engineering was excellent, he was responsive to the customers, and he was knowledgeable about revision control and issue tracking... I would recommend him for pretty much anything."

— Jim Leek, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

"Nathan Prisbrey is without a doubt one of the most talented computer network and database specialists that I have ever had the pleasure to work with. There is no job that is too big or too small for Nate;... Nate was a lifesaver for our project that kept us up and running with minimal downtime.... He took the time to understand the requirements and make sure that he was responsive to the needs of multiple parties. As always, the work was top-notch."

— Isaac Ekoto, Sandia National Laboratories

"Nathan is a hard-working and very capable individual. He has very, very strong technical abilities and [is] good at working independently and in solving problems that require creativity and even learning new techniques. Nathan is also inquisitive, he works well with others on a team, and I think he would be great in a leadership role as well."

— Ryan Farrell, Brigham Young University