Search NASA⌕ Search

Engineering topics

Anantharaj, Valentine

Publications and source records attributed to Anantharaj, Valentine.

Influence of Atmospheric Slant Path on Geostationary Hyperspectral Infrared Sounder Radiance Simulations

Accurately simulating a geostationary hyperspectral infrared sounder is critical for quantitative applications. Traditional radiation simulations of such instruments often overlook the influence of slant observation geometry by using vertical profile assumption, leading to inadequate simulation accuracy. By using global atmospheric profiles with 1 km spatial resolution, the slant-path effects on brightness temperature simulations are quantified. Experiments indicate that the slant geometry has less impact on longwave brightness temperature simulations and has a substantial impact on middle-wave brightness temperature simulations. It may introduce 0.5 K (or more) uncertainty to brightness temperatures of water vapor absorption channels when the satellite zenith angle is greater than 45°. Considering the slant profile is recommended for quantitative applications of geostationary hyperspectral sounder data, such as sounding retrieval and data assimilation.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

OLCF’s Advanced Computing Ecosystem (ACE): FY24 Efforts for the DOE Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) Program

This report highlights significant strides made by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in advancing computational research and infrastructure. Through the Advanced Computing Ecosystem (ACE) strategic initiative, OLCF has been successfully integrated with Doe’s Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) program, establishing itself as a critical framework for enhancing scientific computing capabilities across various domains. This report outlines the activities, accomplishments, and future directions of ACE, emphasizing its role in developing cutting-edge technologies, supporting science pilots, and fostering collaborations that drive scientific innovation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Strategic Research and Development Insights for Digital Twins

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is pleased to provide our response to the NITRD RFI on Digital Twins Research and Development. Digital twins are virtual representations of physical systems, leveraging real-time data to simulate and predict behaviors. ORNL is advancing digital twin technology across various disciplines, including neutron scattering, networking, science ecosystems, supercomputing, secure facilities, mobility technologies, materials design and discovery, power systems, fusion reactors, biological sciences, and earth observation. These efforts aim to enhance scientific research, operational efficiency, and decision-making processes. ORNL facilities, such as the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR), Grid-C, Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), provide the infrastructure to develop and demonstrate these digital twin technologies. In this document, we lay out key challenges, research gaps, and future opportunities based on our experience with digital twins that aim to serve as useful contributions towards a National Digital Twins R&D Strategic Plan. In the remaining document, we address nine of the thirteen topic areas specified in the RFI.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

US Department of Energy, Office of Science, High-Performance Computing Facility: 2023 Operational Assessment Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) was established to accelerate scientific discovery by providing world-leading computational performance and advanced data infrastructure. As a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility, the OLCF has managed the successful deployment and operation of a succession of leadership-class resources dedicated to open science. In addition to these resources, the OLCF staff continually strive to develop innovative processes and technologies, improve security, and empower users through effective allocation management and comprehensive user support and training. These efforts support the advancement of science by the OLCF users and benefit high-performance computing (HPC) facilities around the world. In calendar year (CY) 2023, the OLCF supported 1,676 users and 598 projects and exceeded all targets for user satisfaction. The facility received an average satisfaction score of 4.52 out of 5 on the annual user survey, and 94% of respondents reported a high satisfaction rate with the OLCF overall. Of the 3,619 user tickets submitted in CY 2023, OLCF staff resolved 97% within 3 business days. The facility opened Frontier to full scientific operations this year. Two projects conducted on Frontier received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize and the Gordon Bell Special Prize for Climate Modeling, and a third earned a nomination as a Gordon Bell Prize finalist. The facility’s previous flagship machine, Summit, gained new life and was extended through 2024 in part to help provide resources to the Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) projects and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot program. The facility instantiated an Advanced Computing Ecosystem testbed in part to support IRI workflows. OLCF made interactivity easier and more accessible to users than ever through tools like Jupyter notebooks and workflows.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

An open science exploration of global 1-km simulations of the earth's atmosphere

We are making available a multi-petabyte data set for open science via a data hackathon. The participants bring their science to the computing and data facility, alleviating the need to transfer and manage the large volume of data. This accelerates the process of discovery science while increasing scientific throughput.

Anantharaj, Valentine↗

VisMetHack2022: Visualizing winds and surface variables from the ECMWF IFS 1-km nature run

This data collection was contributed to the Visualisation Hackathon 2022 (#VisMetHack2022), in conjunction with the Using ECMWF's Forecasts (UEF2022) workshop. The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are pleased to announce access to the data collection from global 1-km nature run (NR) simulations using the Integrated Forecast System (IFS) with explicit convection. We invite you to join us in exploring this precursor to a digital twin of the earth! The NR simulations reveal unprecedented detail of the earth’s atmosphere, and the then outgoing Editor-in-Chief of AGU JAMES commended the project as one of “stunning ambitions,” enabled by computational capacity at scale. The project also won the 2020 HPCwire Readers Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences. A set of two NR seasonal simulations have been completed, one corresponding to the northern hemispheric winter months (NDJF) and the other for the North Atlantic tropical cyclone season (ASO). The project used the Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). The simulations were facilitated with an INCITE award from the US Department of Energy Office of Science. For the first seasonal run of four months (NDJF), the hydrostatic IFS model was initialized at 00Z on 1 November 2018. The NR for the TC season (AS) was initialized at 00Z on 1 August 2019. The NR simulations were constrained only by sea surface temperatures (SST) at the lower boundary. The IFS output was saved every 3 hours. After feedback and interest from the scientific community, the simulations were rerun for four specific extreme events, with output every 15 minutes. The special cases include a tropical cycle and three severe storm events over the continental USA.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

US Department of Energy, Office of Science High Performance Computing Facility Operational Assessment 2021: Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL’s) Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) continues to surpass its operational target goals of supporting users; delivering fast, reliable computational ecosystems; creating innovative solutions for high-performance computing (HPC) needs; contributing to the community to build the next generation HPC workforce, and managing risks, safety, and security associated with operating some of the most powerful computers in the world. The results can be seen in the cutting-edge science conducted by users and the praise from the research community. Calendar year (CY) 2021 saw continued excellence in research supported by the OLCF’s leadership-class computing resources, including Summit (the nation’s most powerful supercomputer), the global scratch file system Alpine, the Scalable Protected Infrastructure (SPI), the Exploratory Visualization Environment for Research in Science and Technology (EVEREST), and the archival mass-storage resource High-Performance Storage System (HPSS). While maintaining access and exceptional user support for Summit, the OLCF continued to make progress on the installation and deployment of Frontier, which will be the nation’s first exascale system when it comes online at the start of CY 2023. Users have already begun running and optimizing scientific codes on Crusher, the OLCF test and development system equipped with Frontier’s architecture. Throughout the year, the OLCF maintained a strong culture of operational excellence, including risk management, workplace safety, and cybersecurity. The OLCF’s rigorous risk management strategy anticipated and mitigated risks, and at this time there are no high-priority operational risks. Similarly, ORNL and the OLCF were committed to operating under the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) safety regulations that ensure a safe workplace. Technical staff tracked and monitored existing threats and vulnerabilities within the OLCF while continually developing tools and practices to enhance operations without increasing the facility’s risk. CY 2021 was filled with outstanding results and accomplishments, including a very high rating from users on overall satisfaction for the eighth consecutive year; a tremendous number of node hours delivered to 1,671 researchers on Summit; and the successful delivery of the allocation split of roughly 60%, 20%, and 20% of core-hours offered for the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE), Advanced Scientific Computing Research Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC), and Director’s Discretionary (DD) programs, respectively (Section 2). COVID-19 research remained a focus in 2021, and the ALCC and DD programs allocated over 1 million Summit hours to the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. These accomplishments, coupled with the high utilization rates (i.e., overall and capability usage), represent the fulfillment of the promise of leadership class machines: efficient facilitation of leadership-class computational applications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Processing Full-Scale Square Kilometre Array Data on the Summit Supercomputer

This work presents a workflow for simulating and processing the full-scale low-frequency telescope data of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Phase 1. The SKA project will enter the construction phase soon, and once completed, it will be the world’s largest radio telescope and one of the world’s largest data generators. The authors used Summit to mimic an endto-end SKA workflow, simulating a dataset of a typical 6 hour observation and then processing that dataset with an imaging pipeline. This workflow was deployed and run on 4,560 compute nodes, and used 27,360 GPUs to generate 2.6 PB of data. This was the first time that radio astronomical data were processed at this scale. Results show that the workflow has the capability to process one of the key SKA science cases, an Epoch of Reionization observation. This analysis also helps reveal critical design factors for the next-generation radio telescopes and the required dedicated processing facilities.

Wang, Ruonan↗

The DOE E3SM coupled model version 1: Overview and evaluation at standard resolution

This work documents the first version of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) new Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SMv1). We focus on the standard resolution of the fully--coupled physical model designed to address DOE mission-relevant water cycle questions. Its components include atmosphere and land (110km grid spacing), ocean and sea ice (60km in the mid-latitudes and 30km at the equator and poles), and river transport (55km) models. This base configuration will also serve as a foundation for additional configurations exploring higher horizontal resolution as well as augmented capabilities in the form of biogeochemistry and cryosphere configurations. The performance of E3SMv1 is evaluated by means of a standard set of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 Diagnosis, Evaluation, and Characterization of Klima (CMIP6 DECK) simulations consisting of a long pre-industrial control, historical simulations (ensembles of fully coupled and prescribed SSTs) as well as idealized CO 2 forcing simulations. The model performs well overall with biases typical of other CMIP-class models, although the simulated Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is weaker than many CMIP-class models. While the E3SMv1 historical ensemble captures the bulk of the observed warming between pre-industrial (1850) and present-day, the trajectory of the warming diverges from observations in the second half of the 20th century with a period of delayed warming followed by an excessive warming trend. Using a two-layer energy balance model, we attribute this divergence to the model's strong aerosol-related effective radiative forcing (ERF ari+aci = -1.65 W m -2 ) and high equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS = 5.3 K).

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

MODIS Atmospheric Data Handler

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Atmosphere Data Handler software converts the HDF data to ASCII format, and outputs: (1) atmospheric profiles of temperature and dew point and (2) total precipitable water. Quality-control data are also considered in the export procedure.

Anantharaj, Valentine↗

Handling Input and Output for COAMPS

Two suites of software have been developed to handle the input and output of the Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Prediction System (COAMPS), which is a regional atmospheric model developed by the Navy for simulating and predicting weather. Typically, the initial and boundary conditions for COAMPS are provided by a flat-file representation of the Navy s global model. Additional algorithms are needed for running the COAMPS software using global models. One of the present suites satisfies this need for running COAMPS using the Global Forecast System (GFS) model of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The first step in running COAMPS downloading of GFS data from an Internet file-transfer-protocol (FTP) server computer of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) is performed by one of the programs (SSC-00273) in this suite. The GFS data, which are in gridded binary (GRIB) format, are then changed to a COAMPS-compatible format by another program in the suite (SSC-00278). Once a forecast is complete, still another program in the suite (SSC-00274) sends the output data to a different server computer. The second suite of software (SSC- 00275) addresses the need to ingest up-to-date land-use-and-land-cover (LULC) data into COAMPS for use in specifying typical climatological values of such surface parameters as albedo, aerodynamic roughness, and ground wetness. This suite includes (1) a program to process LULC data derived from observations by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments aboard NASA s Terra and Aqua satellites, (2) programs to derive new climatological parameters for the 17-land-use-category MODIS data; and (3) a modified version of a FORTRAN subroutine to be used by COAMPS. The MODIS data files are processed to reformat them into a compressed American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) format used by COAMPS for efficient processing.

Fitzpatrick, Patrick↗

Demonstration of a Real Time Capability to Produce Tidal Heights and Currents for Naval Operational Use: A Cast Study for the West Coast of Africa (Liberia)

This report documents an existing capability to produce operationally relevant products on sea level and currents from a tides/storm surge model for any coastal region around the world within 48 hours from the time of the request. The model is ready for transition to the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) for potential contingency use anywhere around the world. A recent application to naval operations offshore Liberia illustrates this. Mississippi State University, in collaboration with the University of Colorado and NAVOCEANO, successfully deployed the Colorado University Rapidly Relocatable Nestable Tides and Storm Surge (CURReNTSS) model that predicts sea surface height, tidal currents and storm surge, and provided operational products on tidal sea level and currents in the littoral region off south-western coast of Africa. This report summarizes the results of this collaborative effort in an actual contingency use of the relocatable model, summarizes the lessons learned, and provides recommendations for further evaluation and transition of this modeling capability to operational use.

CASE STUDIES↗