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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 199 records · Page 11
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

OReole-FM: successes and challenges toward billion-parameter foundation models for high-resolution satellite imagery

While the pretraining of Foundation Models (FMs) for remote sensing (RS) imagery is on the rise, models remain restricted to a few hundred million parameters. Scaling models to billions of parameters has been shown to yield unprecedented benefits including emergent abilities, but requires data scaling and computing resources typically not available outside industry R&D labs. In this work, we pair high-performance computing resources including Frontier supercomputer, America's first exascale system, and high-resolution optical RS data to pretrain billion-scale FMs. Our study assesses performance of different pretrained variants of vision Transformers across image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection benchmarks, which highlight the importance of data scaling for effective model scaling. Moreover, we discuss construction of a novel TIU pretraining dataset, model initialization, with data and pretrained models intended for public release. By discussing technical challenges and details often lacking in the related literature, this work is intended to offer best practices to the geospatial community toward efficient training and benchmarking of larger FMs.

Ambrozio Dias, Philipe↗
DOE OSTI2025

Distributed Cross-Channel Hierarchical Aggregation for Foundation Models

Vision-based scientific foundation models hold significant promise for advancing scientific discovery and innovation. This potential stems from their ability to aggregate images from diverse sources—such as varying physical groundings or data acquisition systems—and to learn spatio-temporal correlations using transformer architectures. However, tokenizing and aggregating images can be compute-intensive, a challenge not fully addressed by current distributed methods. In this work, we introduce the Distributed Cross-Channel Hierarchical Aggregation (D-CHAG) approach designed for datasets with a large number of channels across image modalities. Our method is compatible with any model-parallel strategy and any type of vision transformer architecture, significantly improving computational efficiency. We evaluated D-CHAG on hyperspectral imaging and weather forecasting tasks. When integrated with tensor parallelism and model sharding, our approach achieved up to a 75% reduction in memory usage and more than doubled sustained throughput on up to 1,024 AMD GPUs on the Frontier Supercomputer.

Tsaris, Aristeidis (aris) [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000277↗
DOE OSTI2025

ORBIT-2: Scaling Exascale Vision Foundation Models for Weather and Climate Downscaling

Sparse observations and coarse-resolution climate models limit effective regional decision-making, underscoring the need for robust downscaling. However, existing AI methods struggle with generalization across variables and geographies and are constrained by the quadratic complexity of Vision Transformer (ViT) self-attention. We introduce ORBIT-2, a scalable foundation model for global, hyper-resolution climate downscaling. ORBIT-2 incorporates two key innovations: (1) Residual Slim ViT (Reslim), a lightweight architecture with residual learning and Bayesian regularization for efficient, robust prediction; and (2) TILES, a tile-wise sequence scaling algorithm that reduces self-attention complexity from quadratic to linear, enabling long-sequence processing and massive parallelism. ORBIT-2 scales to 10 billion parameters across 65,536 GPUs, achieving up to 4.1 ExaFLOPS sustained throughput and 74–98% strong scaling efficiency. It supports downscaling to 0.9 km global resolution and processes sequences up to 4.2 billion tokens. On 7 km resolution benchmarks, ORBIT-2 achieves high accuracy with R2 scores in range of 0.98–0.99 against observation data.

Wang, Xiao [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000165451943)↗
DOE OSTI2026

Scalable Federated Learning for Scientific Foundation Models on Leadership-Class Systems

Federated learning (FL) at leadership-class HPC systems remains largely unexplored, despite growing interest in deploying federated workflows on modern HPC systems. This paper provides the first system-level empirical characterization of federated fine-tuning of pretrained foundation models on an exascale supercomputer under a multi-node deployment. Using up to 96 concurrent FL clients deployed across Frontier nodes, we study the impact of client scale, model size, data heterogeneity, partial participation, and differential privacy on runtime, communication overhead, and convergence stability. Our results show that pretrained transformer models remain robust to heterogeneity, client dropout, and privacy noise, while system efficiency degrades rapidly with scale as synchronizat and orchestration dominate runtime. We further demonstrate that system-aware execution strategies, including intra-node aggregation and early aggregation, significantly reduce wall-clock time without degrading model quality. These findings establish a practical performance baseline and inform the design of communication-efficient FL systems on leadership-class HPC platforms.

Kotevska, Olivera [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000316772243)↗
DOE OSTI2011

On the Minimal Length Uncertainty Relation and the Foundations of String Theory

We review our work on the minimal length uncertainty relation as suggested by perturbative string theory. We discuss simple phenomenological implications of the minimal length uncertainty relation and then argue that the combination of the principles of quantum theory and general relativity allow for a dynamical energy-momentum space. We discuss the implication of this for the problem of vacuum energy and the foundations of nonperturbative string theory.

Chang, Lay Nam↗
DOE OSTI2025

genomeocean: a pretrained microbial genome foundational model (genomeoceanLLM) v1.0

We present Genomeocean, a foundational genome language model that represents the microbial genome sequences from complex environmental samples. By training on a large, diverse metagenomic dataset, Genomeocean learns species-specific sequence composition and can generate long, realistic open reading frames (ORFs). Our model employs a Byte-pair-encoding (BPE) tokenization strategy, allowing it to efficiently process large genomic datasets and generate long sequences up to 50kb. We demonstrate that fine-tuning Genomeocean can generate novel gene clusters encoding biosynthetic pathways, showcasing its ability to model both fundamental and complex biological processes. Our work establishes Genomeocean as a powerful tool for understanding microbial genome biology and paves the way for its application in a range of fields, from synthetic biology to microbiome research.

Wang, Zhong [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory↗
DOE OSTI2021

Scaling trends for balance-of-system costs at land-based wind power plants: Opportunities for innovations in foundation and erection

Wind power plant sizes, hub heights, and turbine ratings have increased since 2008 to optimize the cost and performance of wind power; however, the limits of these economies of scale remain unclear. Here, we explore how the costs incurred to install turbines at a wind power plant—the balance-of-system (BOS) costs—scale with turbine rating, hub height, and plant size. We also investigate how these changes in BOS costs influence the levelized cost of energy (LCOE). We show that increasing the plant size from 150 to 400 MW could reduce the BOS costs by 21%. We also show that if the foundation costs decreased by 50%, building a wind power plant with 5-MW turbines (having rotor diameters of 166 m and hub heights of 120 m) could decrease the LCOE by 5%. These results could help inform future BOS cost-reduction opportunities and thereby reduce future capital costs for land-based wind power.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2021

A vision of immuno-oncology: the Siena think tank of the Italian Network for Tumor Biotherapy (NIBIT) foundation

The yearly Think Tank Meeting of the Italian Network for Tumor Biotherapy (NIBIT) Foundation, brings together in Siena, Tuscany (Italy), experts in immuno-oncology to review the learnings from current immunotherapy treatments, and to propose new pre-clinical and clinical investigations in selected research areas. While immunotherapies in non-small cell lung cancer and melanoma led to practice changing therapies, the same therapies had only modest benefit for patients with other malignancies, such as mesothelioma and glioblastoma. One way to improve on current immunotherapies is to alter the sequence of each combination agent. Matching the immunotherapy to the host’s immune response may thus improve the activity of the current treatments. A second approach is to combine current immunotherapies with novel agents targeting complementary mechanisms. Identifying the appropriate novel agents may require different approaches than the traditional laboratory-based discovery work. For example, artificial intelligence-based research may help focusing the search for innovative and most promising combination partners. Novel immunotherapies are needed in cancer patients with resistance to or relapse after current immunotherapeutic drugs. Such new treatments may include targeted agents or monoclonal antibodies to overcome the immune-suppressive tumor microenvironment. The mode of combining the novel treatments, including vaccines, needs to be matched to the patient’s immune status for achieving the maximum benefit. In this scenario, specific attention should be also paid nowadays to the immune intersection between COVID-19 and cancer.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Chapter 11: Renewable Microgrids as a Foundation of the Future Sustainable Electrical Energy System

Renewable microgrids are an integral part of the future sustainable energy system. This chapter focuses on the role of renewable energy-based microgrids in the electricity system transformation. It is seen as a foundation that complements large-scale generation plants and high-voltage transmission lines by providing additional flexibility and resilience. This flexibility and resilience are crucial for balancing the energy system and ensuring its long-term sustainability, given the changing supply and demand patterns due to rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV), battery storage, electric mobility, and heat pumps. It is also an opportunity for residential and commercial consumers to become active participants in the energy market. Innovation, new technologies and business models will act as the key enabler for this transformation. The regulatory restructuring of the energy market will be crucial for successful integration of prosumers and aggregated energy communities. The chapter presents the vision of a sustainable, decentralized, and digitized energy future including market potential, most innovative case study projects and start-up companies, and the shifts needed in the regulatory landscape.

battery storage↗
DOE OSTI2017

xSDK Foundations: Toward an Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit

Here, extreme-scale computational science increasingly demands multiscale and multiphysics formulations. Combining software developed by independent groups is imperative: no single team has resources for all predictive science and decision support capabilities. Scientific libraries provide high-quality, reusable software components for constructing applications with improved robustness and portability. However, without coordination, many libraries cannot be easily composed. Namespace collisions, inconsistent arguments, lack of third-party software versioning, and additional difficulties make composition costly. The Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit (xSDK) defines community policies to improve code quality and compatibility across independently developed packages (hypre, PETSc, SuperLU, Trilinos, and Alquimia) and provides a foundation for addressing broader issues in software interoperability, performance portability, and sustainability. The xSDK provides turnkey installation of member software and seamless combination of aggregate capabilities, and it marks first steps toward extreme-scale scientific software ecosystems from which future applications can be composed rapidly with assured quality and scalability.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Perceived Costs and Benefits of ICON Science and Foundational Documents associated with “Integrated, Coordinated, Open, and Networked (ICON) Science to Advance the Geosciences: Introduction and Synthesis of a Special Collection of Commentary Articles"

This data package is associated with the publication "Integrated, Coordinated, Open, and Networked (ICON) Science to Advance the Geosciences: Introduction and Synthesis of a Special Collection of Commentary Articles" in Earth and Space Science (Goldman et al. 2022; https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EA002099). The manuscript is an introductory article for a special collection of commentary articles across 19 geoscience disciplines that explore the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of ICON science principles. These principles focus on research intentionally designed to be Integrated, Coordinated, Open, and Networked (ICON) with the goal of maximizing mutual benefit (among stakeholders) and cross-system transferability of science outcomes. This data package contains data, figures, and R scripts associated with the cost/benefit analysis presented in the manuscript. The writing teams involved in the special collection placed each letter of ICON on a plot with perceived cost on one axis and perceived benefit on the other to summarize their perceptions of pursuing each principle of ICON science. These data were subsequently quantified and analyzed. Files are saved as .csv, .R, and .pdf. This data package also contains (1) the public foundational and instructional documents that enabled the crowdsourced creation of the special collection; (2) file-level metadata (flmd) that lists each file in the data package with a description; (3) data dictionary (dd) that defines column headers that appear in csv files. Files are saved as .pdf and .csv.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

The progeria research foundation 10 th international scientific workshop; researching possibilities, ExTENding lives – webinar version scientific summary

Progeria is an ultra-rare (prevalence 1 in 20 million), fatal, pediatric autosomal dominant premature aging disease caused by a mutation in the LMNA gene. This mutation results in accumulation of a high level of an aberrant form of the nuclear membrane protein, Lamin A. This aberrant protein, termed progerin, accumulates in many tissues and is responsible for the diverse array of disease phenotypes. Children die predominantly from premature atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The Progeria Research Foundation’s 10th International Scientific Workshop took place via webinar on November 2 and 3, 2020. Participants from 30 countries joined in this new, virtual meeting format. Patient family presentations led the program, followed by updates on Progeria’s first-ever application for FDA drug approval as well as initial results from the only current Progeria clinical trial. This was followed by presentations of unpublished preclinical data on drugs in development targeting the disease-causing DNA mutation, the aberrant mRNA, progerin protein, and its downstream effector proteins. Tying bench to bedside, clinicians presented new discoveries on the natural history of disease to inform future clinical trial development and new Progeria aortic valve replacement procedures. The program engaged the Progeria research community as a single unit with a common goal – to treat and cure children with Progeria worldwide.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2011

Cognitive Foundations for Visual Analytics

In this report, we provide an overview of scientific/technical literature on information visualization and VA. Topics discussed include an update and overview of the extensive literature search conducted for this study, the nature and purpose of the field, major research thrusts, and scientific foundations. We review methodologies for evaluating and measuring the impact of VA technologies as well as taxonomies that have been proposed for various purposes to support the VA community. A cognitive science perspective underlies each of these discussions.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2012

Foundation Heat Exchanger Final Report: Demonstration, Measured Performance, and Validated Model and Design Tool

Geothermal heat pumps, sometimes called ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs), have been proven capable of significantly reducing energy use and peak demand in buildings. Conventional equipment for controlling the temperature and humidity of a building, or supplying hot water and fresh outdoor air, must exchange energy (or heat) with the building's outdoor environment. Equipment using the ground as a heat source and heat sink consumes less non-renewable energy (electricity and fossil fuels) because the earth is cooler than outdoor air in summer and warmer in winter. The most important barrier to rapid growth of the GSHP industry is high first cost of GSHP systems to consumers. The most common GSHP system utilizes a closed-loop ground heat exchanger. This type of GSHP system can be used almost anywhere. There is reason to believe that reducing the cost of closed-loop systems is the strategy that would achieve the greatest energy savings with GSHP technology. The cost premium of closed-loop GSHP systems over conventional space conditioning and water heating systems is primarily associated with drilling boreholes or excavating trenches, installing vertical or horizontal ground heat exchangers, and backfilling the excavations. This project investigates reducing the cost of horizontal closed-loop ground heat exchangers by installing them in the construction excavations, augmented when necessary with additional trenches. This approach applies only to new construction of residential and light commercial buildings or additions to such buildings. In the business-as-usual scenario, construction excavations are not used for the horizontal ground heat exchanger (HGHX); instead the HGHX is installed entirely in trenches dug specifically for that purpose. The potential cost savings comes from using the construction excavations for the installation of ground heat exchangers, thereby minimizing the need and expense of digging additional trenches. The term foundation heat exchanger (FHX) has been coined to refer exclusively to ground heat exchangers installed in the overcut around the basement walls. The primary technical challenge undertaken by this project was the development and validation of energy performance models and design tools for FHX. In terms of performance modeling and design, ground heat exchangers in other construction excavations (e.g., utility trenches) are no different from conventional HGHX, and models and design tools for HGHX already exist. This project successfully developed and validated energy performance models and design tools so that FHX or hybrid FHX/HGHX systems can be engineered with confidence, enabling this technology to be applied in residential and light commercial buildings. The validated energy performance model also addresses and solves another problem, the longstanding inadequacy in the way ground-building thermal interaction is represented in building energy models, whether or not there is a ground heat exchanger nearby. Two side-by-side, three-level, unoccupied research houses with walkout basements, identical 3,700 ft{sup 2} floor plans, and hybrid FHX/HGHX systems were constructed to provide validation data sets for the energy performance model and design tool. The envelopes of both houses are very energy efficient and airtight, and the HERS ratings of the homes are 44 and 45 respectively. Both houses are mechanically ventilated with energy recovery ventilators, with space conditioning provided by water-to-air heat pumps with 2 ton nominal capacities. Separate water-to-water heat pumps with 1.5 ton nominal capacities were used for water heating. In these unoccupied research houses, human impact on energy use (hot water draw, etc.) is simulated to match the national average. At House 1 the hybrid FHX/HGHX system was installed in 300 linear feet of excavation, and 60% of that was construction excavation (needed to construct the home). At House 2 the hybrid FHX/HGHX system was installed in 360 feet of excavation, 50% of which was construction excavation. There are six pipes in all excavations (three parallel circuits - out and back), and the multiple instances of FHX and/or HGHX are all connected in series. The working fluid is 20% by weight propylene glycol in water. Model and design tool development was undertaken in parallel with constructing the houses, installing instrumentation, and monitoring performance for a year. Several detailed numerical models for FHX were developed as part of the project. Essentially the project team was searching for an energy performance model accurate enough to achieve project objectives while also having sufficient computational efficiency for practical use in EnergyPlus. A 3-dimensional, dual-coordinate-system, finite-volume model satisfied these criteria and was included in the October 2011 EnergyPlus Version 7 public release after being validated against measured data.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2012

Foundation Heat Exchanger Final Report: Demonstration, Measured Performance, and Validated Model and Design Tool

Geothermal heat pumps, sometimes called ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs), have been proven capable of significantly reducing energy use and peak demand in buildings. Conventional equipment for controlling the temperature and humidity of a building, or supplying hot water and fresh outdoor air, must exchange energy (or heat) with the building's outdoor environment. Equipment using the ground as a heat source and heat sink consumes less non-renewable energy (electricity and fossil fuels) because the earth is cooler than outdoor air in summer and warmer in winter. The most important barrier to rapid growth of the GSHP industry is high first cost of GSHP systems to consumers. The most common GSHP system utilizes a closed-loop ground heat exchanger. This type of GSHP system can be used almost anywhere. There is reason to believe that reducing the cost of closed-loop systems is the strategy that would achieve the greatest energy savings with GSHP technology. The cost premium of closed-loop GSHP systems over conventional space conditioning and water heating systems is primarily associated with drilling boreholes or excavating trenches, installing vertical or horizontal ground heat exchangers, and backfilling the excavations. This project investigates reducing the cost of horizontal closed-loop ground heat exchangers by installing them in the construction excavations, augmented when necessary with additional trenches. This approach applies only to new construction of residential and light commercial buildings or additions to such buildings. In the business-as-usual scenario, construction excavations are not used for the horizontal ground heat exchanger (HGHX); instead the HGHX is installed entirely in trenches dug specifically for that purpose. The potential cost savings comes from using the construction excavations for the installation of ground heat exchangers, thereby minimizing the need and expense of digging additional trenches. The term foundation heat exchanger (FHX) has been coined to refer exclusively to ground heat exchangers installed in the overcut around the basement walls. The primary technical challenge undertaken by this project was the development and validation of energy performance models and design tools for FHX. In terms of performance modeling and design, ground heat exchangers in other construction excavations (e.g., utility trenches) are no different from conventional HGHX, and models and design tools for HGHX already exist. This project successfully developed and validated energy performance models and design tools so that FHX or hybrid FHX/HGHX systems can be engineered with confidence, enabling this technology to be applied in residential and light commercial buildings. The validated energy performance model also addresses and solves another problem, the longstanding inadequacy in the way ground-building thermal interaction is represented in building energy models, whether or not there is a ground heat exchanger nearby. Two side-by-side, three-level, unoccupied research houses with walkout basements, identical 3,700 ft{sup 2} floor plans, and hybrid FHX/HGHX systems were constructed to provide validation data sets for the energy performance model and design tool. The envelopes of both houses are very energy efficient and airtight, and the HERS ratings of the homes are 44 and 45 respectively. Both houses are mechanically ventilated with energy recovery ventilators, with space conditioning provided by water-to-air heat pumps with 2 ton nominal capacities. Separate water-to-water heat pumps with 1.5 ton nominal capacities were used for water heating. In these unoccupied research houses, human impact on energy use (hot water draw, etc.) is simulated to match the national average. At House 1 the hybrid FHX/HGHX system was installed in 300 linear feet of excavation, and 60% of that was construction excavation (needed to construct the home). At House 2 the hybrid FHX/HGHX system was installed in 360 feet of excavation, 50% of which was construction excavation. There are six pipes in all excavations (three parallel circuits - out and back), and the multiple instances of FHX and/or HGHX are all connected in series. The working fluid is 20% by weight propylene glycol in water. Model and design tool development was undertaken in parallel with constructing the houses, installing instrumentation, and monitoring performance for a year. Several detailed numerical models for FHX were developed as part of the project. Essentially the project team was searching for an energy performance model accurate enough to achieve project objectives while also having sufficient computational efficiency for practical use in EnergyPlus. A 3-dimensional, dual-coordinate-system, finite-volume model satisfied these criteria and was included in the October 2011 EnergyPlus Version 7 public release after being validated against measured data.

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2014

Integrated Nuclear-Renewable Energy Systems: Foundational Workshop Report

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recognizes the need to transform the energy infrastructure of the U.S. and elsewhere to systems that can drastically reduce environmental impacts in an efficient and economically viable manner while utilizing both hydrocarbon resources and clean energy generation sources. Thus, DOE is supporting research and development that could lead to more efficient utilization of clean energy generation sources, including renewable and nuclear options. A concept being advanced by the DOE Offices of Nuclear Energy (NE) and Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) is tighter coupling of nuclear and renewable energy sources in a manner that produces new energy currency for the combined electricity grid, industrial manufacturing, and the transportation energy sectors. This integration concept has been referred to as a “hybrid system” that is capable of providing the right type of energy, at the right time, in the right place. At the direction of DOE-NE and DOE-EERE leadership, project leads at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have identified and engaged stakeholders in discussing integrated energy systems that would optimize renewable and nuclear energy integration on a region-by-region basis. Subsequent work will entail conduct of technical, economic, environmental and socio-political evaluations of the leading integrated system options based on a set of criteria established with stakeholder input. The Foundational Workshop for Integrated Nuclear – Renewable Energy Systems was organized around the following objectives: 1. Identify and refine priority region-specific opportunities for integrated nuclear-renewable energy systems in the U.S.; 2. Select Figures of Merit (FOM) to rank and prioritize candidate systems; 3. Discuss enabling technology development needs; 4. Identify analysis requirements, capabilities and gaps to estimate FOM for integrated system options; 5. Identify experimental needs to develop and demonstrate nuclear-renewable energy systems.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2013

Tanadgusix Foundation Hydrogen / Plug In Electric Vehicle Project

TDX Foundation undertook this project in an effort to evaluate alternative transportation options and their application in the community of Saint Paul, Alaska an isolated island community in the Bering Sea. Both hydrogen and electric vehicle technology was evaluated for technical and economic feasibility. Hydrogen technology was found to be cost prohibitive. TDX demonstrated the implementation of various types of electric vehicles on St. Paul Island, including side-by-side all terrain vehicles, a Chevrolet Volt (sedan), and a Ford Transit Connect (small van). Results show that electric vehicles are a promising solution for transportation needs on St. Paul Island. Limited battery range and high charging time requirements result in decreased usability, even on a small, isolated island. These limitations were minimized by the installation of enhanced charging stations for the car and van. In collaboration with the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), TDX was able to identify suitable technologies and demonstrate their applicability in the rural Alaskan environment. TDX and UAF partnered to engage and educate the entire community of Saint Paul – fom school children to elders – through presentation of research, findings, demonstrations, first hand operation of alternative fuel vehicles.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗