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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 181 records · Page 10

Real‐time XFEL data analysis at SLAC and NERSC: A trial run of nascent exascale experimental data analysis

X‐ray scattering experiments using free electron lasers (XFELs) are a powerful tool to determine the molecular structure and function of unknown samples (such as COVID‐19 viral proteins). XFEL experiments are a challenge to computing in two ways: (i) due to the high cost of running XFELs, a fast turnaround time from data acquisition to data analysis is essential to make informed decisions on experimental protocols; (ii) data‐collection rates are growing exponentially, requiring new scalable algorithms. Here we report our experiences analyzing data from two experiments at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) during September 2020. Raw data were analyzed on NERSC's Cori XC40 system, using the Superfacility paradigm: our workflow automatically moves raw data between LCLS and NERSC, where it is analyzed using the software package CCTBX. We achieved real time data analysis with a turnaround time from data acquisition to full molecular reconstruction in as little as 10 min—sufficient time for the experiment's operators to make informed decisions. By hosting the data analysis on Cori, and by automating LCLS‐NERSC interoperability, we achieved a data analysis rate which matches the data acquisition rate. Completing data analysis within 10 min is a first for XFEL experiments and an important milestone if we are to keep up with data‐collection trends.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Bioenergy Underground: Challenges and opportunities for phenotyping roots and the microbiome for sustainable bioenergy crop production

Abstract Bioenergy production often focuses on the aboveground feedstock production for conversion to fuel and other materials. However, the belowground component is crucial for soil carbon sequestration, greenhouse gas fluxes, and ecosystem function. Roots maximize feedstock production on marginal lands by acquiring soil resources and mediating soil ecosystem processes through interactions with the microbial community. This belowground world is challenging to observe and quantify; however, there are unprecedented opportunities using current methodologies to bring roots, microbes, and soil into focus. These opportunities allow not only breeding for increased feedstock production but breeding for increased soil health and carbon sequestration as well. A recent workshop hosted by the USDOE Bioenergy Research Centers highlighted these challenges and opportunities while creating a roadmap for increased collaboration and data interoperability through standardization of methodologies and data using F.A.I.R. principles. This article provides a background on the need for belowground research in bioenergy cropping systems, a primer on root system properties of major U.S. bioenergy crops, and an overview of the roles of root chemistry, exudation, and microbial interactions on sustainability. Crucially, we outline how to adopt standardized measures and databases to meet the most pressing methodological needs to accelerate root, soil, and microbial research to meet the pressing societal challenges of the century.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

Optimizing Data Movement for GPU-Based In-Situ Workflow Using GPUDirect RDMA

The extreme-scale computing landscape is increasingly dominated by GPU-accelerated systems. At the same time, in-situ workflows that employ memory-to-memory inter-application data exchanges have emerged as an effective approach for leveraging these extreme-scale systems. In the case of GPUs, GPUDirect RDMA enables third-party devices, such as network interface cards, to access GPU memory directly and has been adopted for intra-application communications across GPUs. In this paper, we present an interoperable framework for GPU-based in-situ workflows that optimizes data movement using GPUDirect RDMA. Specifically, we analyze the characteristics of the possible data movement pathways between GPUs from an in-situ workflow perspective, and design a strategy that maximizes throughput. Furthermore, we implement this approach as an extension of the DataSpaces data staging service, and experimentally evaluate its performance and scalability on a current leadership GPU cluster. The performance results show that the proposed design reduces data-movement time by up to 53% and 40% for the sender and receiver, respectively, and maintains excellent scalability for up to 256 GPUs.

Zhang, Bo↗

Lessons Learned and Scalability Achieved When Porting Uintah to DOE Exascale Systems

A key challenge faced when preparing codes for Department of Energy (DOE) exascale systems was designing scalable applications for systems featuring hardware and software not yet available at leadership-class scale. With such systems now available, it is important to evaluate scalability of the resulting software solutions on these target systems. One such code designed with the exascale DOE Aurora and DOE Frontier systems in mind is the Uintah Computational Framework, an open-source asynchronous many-task (AMT) runtime system. To prepare for exascale, Uintah adopted a portable MPI+X hybrid parallelism approach using the Kokkos performance portability library (i.e., MPI+Kokkos). This paper complements recent work with additional details and an evaluation of the resulting approach on Aurora and Frontier. Results are shown for a challenging benchmark demonstrating interoperability of 3 portable codes essential to Uintah-related combustion research. These results demonstrate single-source portability across Aurora and Frontier with scaling characteristics shown to 3,072 Aurora nodes and 9,216 Frontier nodes. In addition to showing results run to new scales on new systems, this paper also discusses lessons learned through efforts preparing Uintah for exascale systems.

Holmen, John [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000259342641)↗

A2SD: Accelerating Scientific Innovation Through Autonomous Discovery Systems

The 2025 Advancing Autonomous Scientific Discovery (A2SD) workshop convened researchers from academia, national laboratories, and industry to explore the transformative role of autonomy in scientific discovery. The workshop highlighted a convergence of artificial intelligence, robotics, and computational workflows into autonomous systems capable of accelerating the scientific process. Presentations and discussions spanned autonomous experimentation, intelligent workflow orchestration, digital twins, and agent-based systems for managing complex research ecosystems. Key challenges discussed included interoperability across heterogeneous infrastructures, near real-time data management under FAIR principles, reproducibility, and the integration of human oversight. The workshop also emphasized the need for modular software interfaces, federated learning models, and education initiatives to support a next-generation scientific workforce.

Taufer, Michela [University of Tennessee, Knoxvill↗

Multidisciplinary design optimization in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction: a detailed review and call for collaboration

The design of buildings has become a complex and multidisciplinary problem involving multiple conflicting objectives as architects and designers address competing technical, economic, environmental, and societal concerns. This has been driving research in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) toward rigorous multidisciplinary decision-making frameworks that generate and evaluate numerous design alternatives using multi-objective optimization in concert with simulation and analysis models of varying fidelity and computational expense. While such frameworks are well known and widely employed in the aerospace and systems engineering domains, efforts by design professionals and researchers in the AEC field are scattered at best. In this paper, we provide a detailed review of recent developments in optimization frameworks in the AEC field and subsequently highlight how such developments are largely compartmentalized into separate domains such as structural, energy, daylighting, and other performance factors. Herein, we further discuss the technical challenges involved in concurrent coupled multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) in the AEC field such as interoperability issues between Building Information Modeling (BIM) environments, analysis/simulation tools, and optimization frameworks. We conclude by outlining research needed for more unified modeling and simulation-based optimization frameworks to aid in complex and multidisciplinary building design processes. We also highlight the need for the identification and development of multi-fidelity simulation tools for use across multiple design phases. As such, this paper contributes a novel roadmap to leverage aerospace and systems engineering research in MDO into the field of AEC, along with a call for researchers in the MDO community to seek collaborations in AEC field.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

The Ontology of Biological Attributes (OBA)—computational traits for the life sciences

Abstract Existing phenotype ontologies were originally developed to represent phenotypes that manifest as a character state in relation to a wild-type or other reference. However, these do not include the phenotypic trait or attribute categories required for the annotation of genome-wide association studies (GWAS), Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) mappings or any population-focussed measurable trait data. The integration of trait and biological attribute information with an ever increasing body of chemical, environmental and biological data greatly facilitates computational analyses and it is also highly relevant to biomedical and clinical applications. The Ontology of Biological Attributes (OBA) is a formalised, species-independent collection of interoperable phenotypic trait categories that is intended to fulfil a data integration role. OBA is a standardised representational framework for observable attributes that are characteristics of biological entities, organisms, or parts of organisms. OBA has a modular design which provides several benefits for users and data integrators, including an automated and meaningful classification of trait terms computed on the basis of logical inferences drawn from domain-specific ontologies for cells, anatomical and other relevant entities. The logical axioms in OBA also provide a previously missing bridge that can computationally link Mendelian phenotypes with GWAS and quantitative traits. The term components in OBA provide semantic links and enable knowledge and data integration across specialised research community boundaries, thereby breaking silos.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Riverine dissolved organic matter transformations increase with watershed area, water residence time, and Damköhler numbers in nested watersheds

Abstract Quantifying the relative influence of factors and processes controlling riverine ecosystem function is essential to predicting future conditions under global change. Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is a fundamental component of riverine ecosystems that fuels microbial food webs, influences nutrient and light availability, and represents a significant carbon flux globally. The heterogeneous nature of DOM molecular composition and its propensity for interaction (i.e., functional diversity) can characterize riverine ecosystem function across spatiotemporal scales. To investigate fundamental drivers of DOM diversity, we collected seasonal water samples from 42 nested locations within five watersheds spanning multiple watershed sizes (~ 5 to 30,000 km 2 ) across the United States. Patterns in DOM molecular richness, aromaticity, relative abundance of N-containing formulas, and putative biochemical transformations derived from high-resolution mass spectrometry were assessed across gradients of explanatory variables associated with watershed characteristics (e.g., watershed area, water residence time, land cover). We found that putative biochemical transformations were more strongly related to explanatory variables across watersheds than common bulk DOM parameters and that watershed area, surface water residence time and derived Damköhler numbers representing DOM reactivity timescales were strong predictors of DOM diversity. The data also indicate that catchment-specific land cover factors can significantly influence DOM diversity in diverging directions. Overall, the results highlight the importance of considering water residence time and land cover when interpreting longitudinal patterns in DOM chemistry and the continued challenge of identifying generalizable drivers that are transferable across watershed and regional scales for application in Earth system models. This work also introduces a Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable (FAIR) dataset (> 300 samples) to the community for future syntheses.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Optimizing design and dispatch of a renewable energy system with combined heat and power

We embellish a mixed-integer program that prescribes a set of renewable energy, conventional generation, and storage technologies to procure, along with a corresponding dispatch strategy. Specifically, we add combined heat and power to this set. The model minimizes fixed and operational costs less incentives for the use of various technologies, subject to a series of component interoperability and system-wide constraints. The resulting mixed-integer linear program contains hundreds of thousands of variables and constraints. We demonstrate how to efficiently formulate and solve the corresponding instances such that we produce near-optimal solutions in minutes. A previous rendition of the model required hours of solution time for the same instances.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

A digital twin platform for building performance monitoring and optimization: Performance simulation and case studies

Advancements in sensor technology, data analytics, affordable compute, and communication infrastructure have paved the way for Digital Twin technology in optimizing building operations and controls. This study presents the development of an open and interoperable web-based Digital Twin platform for integrating diverse data streams and facilitating effective user interactions. The platform utilizes modern technologies for the web framework and time-series data management, ensuring scalability and responsiveness. The backend supports seamless integration of diverse data sources and emulators, incorporating data from building sensors and meters, external weather Application Programming Interfaces, and advanced EnergyPlus simulation models of the building and its energy systems including the Distributed Energy Resources that are formulated in Functional Mockup Units. A simulation case study was conducted with FlexLab, a test facility on Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory campus. The case study includes normal operations, Distributed Energy Resource integration, and power outage scenarios, to illustrate the Digital Twin’s ability to provide critical insights into energy performance and thermal resilience. The results demonstrated the platform’s potential as a decision-support tool for optimizing building energy performance and enhancing resilience against extreme weather events. Future work will focus on deploying the Digital Twin platform to a real building for field validation, extending its capabilities to cover more scenarios such as bidirectional Electric Vehicle interactions, and enhancing user engagement.

EnergyPlus↗

Energy flexibility of residential buildings: A systematic review of characterization and quantification methods and applications

With building electric demand becoming increasingly dynamic, and a growing percentage of intermittent renewable power generation from solar photovoltaics and wind turbines, the power grid is facing increasing challenge to manage the real time balance between the supply and demand. With advancements in smart sensing and metering, smart appliances, electric vehicles, and energy storage technologies, demand side management of residential buildings can help the grid to improve stability by optimizing flexible loads. This paper reviews recent studies on residential building demand side management, with a focus on characterization and quantification of energy flexibility covering various types of flexible loads, metrics, methods, and applications. The reviewed studies showed four levels of applications: building level (45%), district or community level (29%), system level (19%), and building sector level (7%). Shifting loads is the dominant flexibility type in 60% of applications, followed by shedding (19%), generation (16%), and modulating (6%). Depending on the technology and application scope, flexible operations have a wide range of performance, with peak power reductions of 1%~65%, energy savings up to 60%, operational cost reduction of 1%~48%, and greenhouse gas emission reductions of up to29%. More than half (51%) of the studies employed control strategies to achieve flexibility; among those 72% used optimal controls, while 28% used rule-based controls. About 58% of the studies used mathematical formulation to quantify energy flexibility. Most studies were based on simulation, while less than 15% of the studies had measurements from experiments or field tests. The review reveals research opportunities to address significant gaps in the existing literature: (1) establishing a common definition and performance metrics for energy flexibility of buildings that are technology and application agnostic, (2) developing an ontology to standardize representation of flexibility resources for interoperability, (3) integrating occupant impacts into the quantification and optimization of energy flexibility, and (4) developing requirements and credits of energy flexibility in building energy codes and standards. Findings from the review can inform future research and development of energy flexible buildings which are essential to a reliable and resilient power grid.

Li, H↗

Results of an interlaboratory study on the working curve in vat photopolymerization II: Towards a standardized method

The working curve measurement in photopolymer additive manufacturing is a ubiquitous measure of the cure depth of a printing resin as a function of radiant exposure of light. The fit parameters from this measurement (the depth of light penetration D p and the critical exposure E c ) are used to evaluate and report a resin’s printability, optimize processing parameters, and inform print and resin quality control. Despite its widespread use, the working curve lacks a standard measurement method. Here, following up on our paper “Results of an Interlaboratory Study on the Working Curve in Vat Photopolymerization” from last year, an interlaboratory study on the working curve was performed using calibrated, reproducible, bandpass filtered light sources. With these light sources, the variability between labs in measured working curves was dramatically reduced from the initial interlaboratory study. Aggregate data from this experiment produced reliable D p and E c measurements at 385 nm of 39.2 ± 3.7 µm and 12.3 ± 3.0 mJ cm −2 , respectively. At 405 nm the values of D p and E c are 69.3 ± 3.8 µm and 17.9 ± 2.3 mJ cm −2 , respectively. The results are agnostic to the thickness measurement tool utilized by participants, ensuring broad applicability across laboratories. We also tested the generalizability of the proposed method of using a filtered light source by filtering a commercial 405 nm light source and obtaining a working curve in agreement with the aggregate data from the interlaboratory study. This interlaboratory study provides a basis for a documentary standard for the working curve, so that the entire photopolymer additive manufacturing industry can share reproducible and interoperable working curve data.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Optimizing design and dispatch of a renewable energy system

Renewable energy technologies are becoming increasingly important due to their cost-competitiveness, and because of enhanced climate concerns. We demonstrate the capabilities of an integer-programming optimization model that minimizes capital (investment) and operational costs, and utility charges, while adhering to system sizing constraints, demand requirements, and interoperability characteristics of the systems chosen. Furthermore, the model recommends an optimally sized mix of renewable energy, conventional generation, and energy storage technologies, while simultaneously optimizing the corresponding dispatch strategy. Our case studies explore several venues, i.e., a small campus and a local hospital, with complex utility rate tariffs, multi-technology integration opportunities, and incentives for renewable power production. Using an optimization model, versus applying rules of thumb, can produce millions of dollars in savings over a 25-year time horizon and result in thousands of kilowatts of installed renewable energy.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

An ontology to represent synthetic building occupant characteristics and behavior

Since the introduction of the occupant behavior Drivers-Needs-Actions-Systems (DNAS) framework in 2013, researchers have used the framework or further developed it based on their case studies, which include efforts to collect new data on occupant behaviors. The effort is often costly for the relatively few new data points added. Problems emerge when the already collected data do not meet the modelers' interoperability requirements. Previous studies addressed this issue by developing more sophisticated ontologies that enable integration with other datasets and synthetic data methodologies that would meet unique research applications. This paper presents an extension of the DNAS framework for the representation of synthetic occupant data to support various applications and use cases across the building life cycle. An agent-based modeling application is one of our motivations that requires more elaborate characteristics of an occupant-agent or a group-of-agent. The extension, built upon a review of the literature, introduces new elements to the framework that fall into five categories, including socio-economic, geographical location, activities, subjective values, and individual and collective adaptive actions. On-going research includes identifying occupant datasets and developing data fusion methods to generate synthetic occupants, as well as to demonstrate its applications in agent-based modeling coupled with building performance simulation.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

A comprehensive and fair comparison of two neural operators (with practical extensions) based on $\mathrm{FAIR}$ data

Neural operators can learn nonlinear mappings between function spaces and offer a new simulation paradigm for real-time prediction of complex dynamics for realistic diverse applications as well as for system identification in science and engineering. Herein, we investigate the performance of two neural operators, which have shown promising results so far, and we develop new practical extensions that will make them more accurate and robust and importantly more suitable for industrial-complexity applications. The first neural operator, DeepONet, was published in 2019 (Lu et al., 2019), and its original architecture was based on the universal approximation theorem of Chen & Chen (1995). The second one, named Fourier Neural Operator or FNO, was published in 2020, and it is based on parameterizing the integral kernel in the Fourier space. DeepONet is represented by a summation of products of neural networks (NNs), corresponding to the branch NN for the input function and the trunk NN for the output function; both NNs are general architectures, e.g., the branch NN can be replaced with a CNN or a ResNet. According to Kovachki et al. (2021), FNO in its continuous form can be viewed conceptually as a DeepONet with a specific architecture of the branch NN and a trunk NN represented by a trigonometric basis. In order to compare FNO with DeepONet computationally for realistic setups, we develop several extensions of FNO that can deal with complex geometric domains as well as mappings where the input and output function spaces are of different dimensions. We also develop an extended DeepONet with special features that provide inductive bias and accelerate training, and we present a faster implementation of DeepONet with cost comparable to the computational cost of FNO, which is based on the Fast Fourier Transform. Here we consider 16 different benchmarks to demonstrate the relative performance of the two neural operators, including instability wave analysis in hypersonic boundary layers, prediction of the vorticity field of a flapping airfoil, porous media simulations in complex-geometry domains, etc. We follow the guiding principles of FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) for scientific data management and stewardship. The performance of DeepONet and FNO is comparable for relatively simple settings, but for complex geometries the performance of FNO deteriorates greatly. We also compare theoretically the two neural operators and obtain similar error estimates for DeepONet and FNO under the same regularity assumptions.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Standards, dissemination, and best practices in systems biology

In this study, the reproducibility of scientific research is crucial to the success of the scientific method. Here, we review the current best practices when publishing mechanistic models in systems biology. We recommend, where possible, to use software engineering strategies such as testing, verification, validation, documentation, versioning, iterative development, and continuous integration. In addition, adhering to the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable modeling principles allows other scientists to collaborate and build off of each other’s work. Existing standards such as Systems Biology Markup Language, CellML, or Simulation Experiment Description Markup Language can greatly improve the likelihood that a published model is reproducible, especially if such models are deposited in well-established model repositories. Where models are published in executable programming languages, the source code and their data should be published as open-source in public code repositories together with any documentation and testing code. For complex models, we recommend container-based solutions where any software dependencies and the run-time context can be easily replicated.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

A reporting format for field measurements of soil respiration

Field observations of the soil-to-atmosphere CO2 flux–soil respiration, RS–are a prime example of ‘long tail’ data that historically have had neither centralized databases nor an agreed-upon reporting format. This has hindered scientific transparency, analytical reproducibility, and novel syntheses with respect to this globally-important component of the carbon cycle. Here we propose a new data and metadata reporting format for RS data, based on engagement with a wide range of researchers in the field as well as expert advisory panels. Our goal was a reporting format that would be relevant and useful for synthesis activities, and optimizing data discoverability and usability while not placing an undue burden on data contributors. We describe previous RS data collection efforts, lessons learned from related databases and data-oriented networks (e.g. FLUXNET) in earth and ecological sciences, and the process of community consultation. The proposed reporting format focuses on chamber-level data and metadata, specifying measurement conditions and, for a given measurement period defined by beginning and ending timestamps, a mean RS flux (or CO2 concentration) and associated ancillary measurements. Fundamentally, this format aims to enable findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data, while providing ‘future-proofing’ capabilities to support reanalyses using as yet unknown algorithms or approaches. Finally, this proposed RS reporting format is available online, and is intended to be a dynamic document, subject to further community feedback and/or change in the future.

Bond-Lamberty, Benjamin↗

Developing energy flexibility in clusters of buildings: A critical analysis of barriers from planning to operation

This paper examines building energy flexibility at an aggregated level and addresses the main barriers and research gaps for the development of this resource across three design and development phases: market and policy, early planning and design, and operation. We review methodologies and tools and discuss barriers, challenges, and opportunities, incorporating policy, economic, technical, professional, and social perspectives. Although various legal and regulatory frameworks exist to foster the development of energy flexibility for small buildings, financing mechanisms are limited with a significant number of perceived risks undermining private investment. For the early planning and design phase, planners and designers lack appropriate tools and face interoperability challenges, which often results in insufficient consideration of demand response programs. The review of the operational phase highlighted the socio-technical challenges related to both the complexity of deployment and communication, as well as privacy and acceptability issues. Finally, the paper proposes a number of targeted research directions to address challenges and promote greater energy flexibility deployments, including capturing building demand side dynamics, improving baseline estimations and developing seamless connectivity between buildings and districts.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗