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At least 217 records · Page 12

Closeout of CRADA JSA 2012S004: Chapter 5, Integrated Control System, of the document of the ESS Conceptual Design Report, publicly available at https://europeanspallationsource.se/accelerator-documents

The integrated control system (ICS) is responsible for the whole ESS machine and facility: accelerator, target, neutron scattering instruments and conventional facilities. This unified approach keeps the costs of development, maintenance and support relatively low. ESS has selected a standardised, field-proven controls framework, the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS), which was originally developed jointly by Argonne and Los Alamos National Laboratories. Complementing this selection are best practices and experience from similar facilities regarding platform standardisation, control system development and device integration and commissioning. The components of ICS include the control system core, the control boxes, the BLED database management system, and the human machine interface. The control system core is a set of systems and tools that make it possible for the control system to provide required data, information and services to engineers, operators, physicists and the facility itself. The core components are the timing system that makes possible clock synchronisation across the facility, the machine protection system (MPS) and the personnel protection system (PPS) that prevent damage to the machine and personnel, and a set of control system services. Control boxes are servers that control a collection of equipment (for example a radio frequency cavity). The integrated control system will include many control boxes that can be assigned to one supplier, such as an internal team, a collaborating institute or a commercial vendor. This approach facilitates a clear division of responsibilities and makes integration much easier. A control box is composed of a standardised hardware platform, components, development tools and services. On the top level, it interfaces with the core control system components (timing, MPS, PPS) and with the human-machine interface. At the bottom, it interfaces with the equipment and parts of the facility through a set of analog and digital signals, real-time control loops and other communication buses. The ICS central data management system is named BLED (beam line element databases). BLED is a set of databases, tools and services that is used to store, manage and access data. It holds vital control system configuration and physics-related (lattice) information about the accelerator, target and instruments. It facilitates control system configuration by bringing together direct input-output controller (IOC) con guration and real-time data from proton and neutron beam line models. BLED also simplifies development and speeds up the code-test-debug cycle. The set of tools that access BLED will be tailored to the needs of different categories of users, such as ESS staff physicists, engineers, and operators; external partner laboratories; and visiting experimental instrument users. The human-machine interface is vital to providing a high-quality experience to ICS users. It encompasses a wide array of devices and software tools, from control room screens to engineer terminal windows; from beam physics data tools to post-mortem data analysis tools. It serves users with a wide range of skills from widely varied backgrounds. The Controls Group is developing a set of user profiles to accommodate this diverse range of use-cases and users.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Improving User Notification on Frequently Changing HPC Environments

Today s HPC centers user environments can be very complex. Centers often contain multiple large complicated computational systems each with their own user environment. Changes to a system s environment can be very impactful; however, a center s user environment is, in one-way or another, frequently changing. Because of this, it is vital for centers to notify users of change. For users, untracked changes can be costly, resulting in unnecessary debug time as well as wasting valuable compute allocations and research time. Communicating frequent change to diverse user communities is a common and ongoing task for HPC centers. This paper will cover the OLCF s current processes and methods used to communicate change to users of the center s large Cray systems and supporting resources. The paper will share lessons learned and goals as well as practices, tools, and methods used to continually improve and reach members of the OLCF user community.

communication↗

Noise Inject Agent Tool

NINJA is a utility tool that quickly manifests message race bugs for debugging MPI applications

Sato, Kento↗

Stack Trace Ahalysis Tool

STAT is a light weight debugging tool that gathers and merges stack traces from all of the processes in a parallel application. STAT uses the MRNet tree based overlay network to broadcast commands from the tool front-end to the STAT daemons and for the front-end to gather the traces from the STAT daemons. As the traces propagate through the MRNet network tree, they are merged across all tasks to form a similar function call patterns and to delineate a small set of equivalence classes. A representative task from each of these classes can then be fed into a full feature debugger like TolalView for root cause analysis.

Lee, Gregory L.↗

Build and Execute Environment

At exascale, the challenge becomes to develop applications that run at scale and use exascale platforms reliably, efficiently, and flexibly. Workflows become much more complex because they must seamlessly integrate simulation and data analytics. They must include down-sampling, post-processing, feature extraction, and visualization. Power and data transfer limitations require these analysis tasks to be run in-situ or in-transit. We expect successful workflows will comprise multiple linked simulations along with tens of analysis routines. Users will have limited development time at scale and, therefore, must have rich tools to develop, debug, test, and deploy applications. At this scale, successful workflows will compose linked computations from an assortment of reliable, well-defined computation elements, ones that can come and go as required, based on the needs of the workflow over time. We propose a novel framework that utilizes both virtual machines (VMs) and software containers to create a workflow system that establishes a uniform build and execution environment (BEE) beyond the capabilities of current systems. In this environment, applications will run reliably and repeatably across heterogeneous hardware and software. Containers, both commercial (Docker and Rocket) and open-source (LXC and LXD), define a runtime that isolates all software dependencies from the machine operating system. Workflows may contain multiple containers that run different operating systems, different software, and even different versions of the same software. We will run containers in open-source virtual machines (KVM) and emulators (QEMU) so that workflows run on any machine entirely in user-space. On this platform of containers and virtual machines, we will deliver workflow software that provides services, including repeatable execution, provenance, checkpointing, and future proofing. We will capture provenance about how containers were launched and how they interact to annotate workflows for repeatable and partial re-execution. We will coordinate the physical snapshots of virtual machines with parallel programming constructs, such as barriers, to automate checkpoint and restart. We will also integrate with HPC-specific container runtimes to gain access to accelerators and other specialized hardware to preserve native performance. Containers will link development to continuous integration. When application developers check code in, it will automatically be tested on a suite of different software and hardware architectures.

Guan, Qiang↗

Report on the ASCR Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Exascale Systems and Applications

In the last few years, numerous studies commissioned by the Department of Energy (DOE), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and others have examined the challenges that will have to be overcome for computational science to achieve exascale, a two order-of-magnitude increase in capability beyond what is possible today. Exponential growth in the number of devices (Moore’s Law) is expected to continue unabated, but the end of Dennard scaling, and hence the growth in performance of individual processors, has led to exponential growth in concurrency. Power consumption has also grown to the point where the cost of the electrical power for systems threatens to exceed the cost of acquiring them. Ever-shrinking devices, and the growth in their number, are expected to increase the rate of soft, or transient, errors such that applications will no longer be able to assume correct behavior of the underlying machine. Adapting to such systems will require new mathematical algorithms that minimize synchronization and data movement, and a new generation of scientific software. Rather than addressing these issues in isolation, a new process of “Co-Design” is being pursued in which application and computer scientists work toward the common goal of an exascale ecosystem of systems and applications. Modeling and simulation (ModSim) is a critical part of this process. It enables scientists and engineers to analyze future algorithms, applications, and computing systems, long before they are realized, and make the necessary design decisions such that exascale science is broadly achieved. Later, when exascale applications and systems are realized, ModSim technology will enable us to understand their behavior, debugging and optimizing them. Given the increasing importance of modeling and simulation, a workshop was organized by DOE/ASCR to assess the current state of the art and to identify research challenges that must be overcome in this field. Fifty experts, representing academia, industry, and government, participated in the workshop, and others contributed both beforehand and afterwards. This report summarizes their findings.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

ArrayBridge: Interweaving declarative array processing with high-performance computing

Scientists are increasingly turning to datacenter-scale computers to produce and analyze massive arrays. Despite decades of database research that extols the virtues of declarative query processing, scientists still write, debug and parallelize imperative HPC kernels even for the most mundane queries. This impedance mismatch has been partly attributed to the cumbersome data loading process; in response, the database community has proposed in situ mechanisms to access data in scientific file formats. Scientists, however, desire more than a passive access method that reads arrays from files. This paper describes ArrayBridge, a bi-directional array view mechanism for scientific file formats, that aims to make declarative array manipulations interoperable with imperative file-centric analyses. Our prototype implementation of ArrayBridge uses HDF5 as the underlying array storage library and seamlessly integrates into the SciDB open-source array database system. In addition to fast querying over external array objects, ArrayBridge produces arrays in the HDF5 file format just as easily as it can read from it. ArrayBridge also supports time travel queries from imperative kernels through the unmodified HDF5 API, and automatically deduplicates between array versions for space efficiency. Our extensive performance evaluation in NERSC, a large-scale scientific computing facility, shows that ArrayBridge exhibits statistically indistinguishable performance and I/O scalability to the native SciDB storage engine.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Reliability Modeling Method for Proton Accelerator

Reliability Analysis is an essential part of designing any complex system in order to predict performance and understand availability. However modeling complex systems has been a challenging task due to the large number of components and inter -dependencies. The options have been custom written simulation packages, requiring large investment of programming and debugging time; or standard commercial software running for many days. In our research we developed a hierarchical method to represent t he reliability model of Project X, * a proposed linear accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The system is first divided into subsystems small enough to readily simulate. Each subsystem is then separately simulated and parameterized so th ey can be represented as simple blocks in the top level system diagram. This allows standard, commercial software to model systems with many tens of thousands of components without requiring many days of computer time. Simulation were run and compared wit h data gathered from existing accelerators.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Visualization for Classification in Deep Neural Networks

Recently, the techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved a great performance in classification tasks in a wide range of applications, such as image recognition and natural language processing. However, DNN developers face a lot of trial and error during the development process and spend their efforts in debugging their network model through analyzing and understanding the classification results. As such, tools are needed that help the developers not only understand the results, but also suggest the ways to improve their model. In this paper, we propose a visual analytics tool for visualizing the classification results during the iterative development pipeline of a DNN model. Our tool enables exploring the classification results from any type of neural network models, identifying misclassified samples, examining the predicted score distributions of samples, and showing how the outcomes progressively change during the training process.

Chae, Junghoon↗

INL HPC Overview and CASL Computing Collaboration

October 2019 – INL is increasing the upper limit on Falcon’s high priority “dedicated” CASL queue to 10,000 cores January 2019 – INL will give CASL early-access to the Lemhi system for MAMBA calibration work. The system will likely still be in commission/test mode (subject to reconfiguration/reboots). This early-access to Lemhi should support the required MAMBA calibration runs FY19 -- INL will provide proactive user support for CASL users/jobs and code debugging. INL will specifically focus on helping industry users getting access to Falcon and running their jobs. FY19 CASL costs = $500k vs. $1.2M for a purchased dedicated machine.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

Women in Science: Fermilab Scientific Computing Specialist Krista Majewski

With February 11 marking the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, female physicists, engineers and computer scientists from CERN and Fermilab share their experiences of building careers in science. Krista Majewski came to Fermilab nine years ago as a software developer and now works in an operations role. She is a computing services specialist and part of the grid and cloud operations group, which manages computing clusters for the CMS experiment and other intensity frontier experiments at the lab. "My typical day would be maintaining the services that our group is responsible for and the machines that they run on. So if there are problems with a computing cluster where a user can't run their jobs, or they're trying to run on resources on the grid and they're unable to, then our group would be responsible for helping debug some of those issues," Krista says. Her path to programming at Fermilab has been winding. After receiving a degree in biomedical engineering, she went to work doing web development and programming for a large consulting firm, then moved to the financial industry. But programming called her back, and she earned a master's degree in computer science to start her new career. For Krista, programming is similar to something she enjoyed as child: solving puzzles. "I think it's a skill that you use in a lot of different ways," she says. Credits: Video production - Fermilab Creative Services Music Copyright: Universal Production Music Astral Light Chevalier Idea originally conceived by Tanya Levshina, Fermilab and Maria Dimou, CERN.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Report on the ASCR Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Exascale Systems and Applications

In the last few years, numerous studies commissioned by the Department of Energy (DOE), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and others have examined the challenges that will have to be overcome for computational science to achieve exascale, a two order-of-magnitude increase in capability beyond what is possible today. Exponential growth in the number of devices (Moore's Law) is expected to continue unabated, but the end of Dennard scaling, and hence the growth in performance of individual processors, has led to exponential growth in concurrency. Power consumption has also grown to the point where the cost of the electrical power for systems threatens to exceed the cost of acquiring them. Ever-shrinking devices, and the growth in their number, are expected to increase the rate of soft, or transient, errors such that applications will no longer be able to assume correct behavior of the underlying machine. Adapting to such systems will require new mathematical algorithms that minimize synchronization and data movement, and a new generation of scientific software. Rather than addressing these issues in isolation, a new process of "Co-Design" is being pursued in which application and computer scientists work toward the common goal of an exascale ecosystem of systems and applications. Modeling and simulation (ModSim) is a critical part of this process. It enables scientists and engineers to analyze future algorithms, applications, and computing systems, long before they are realized, and make the necessary design decisions such that exascale science is broadly achieved. Later, when exascale applications and systems are realized, ModSim technology will enable us to understand their behavior, debugging and optimizing them. Given the increasing importance of modeling and simulation, a workshop was organized by DOE/ASCR to assess the current state of the art and to identify research challenges that must be overcome in this field. Fifty experts, representing academia, industry, and government, participated in the workshop, and others contributed both beforehand and afterwards. This report summarizes their findings.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Numerical reproducibility for implicit Monte Carlo simulations

We describe and compare different approaches for achieving numerical reproducibility in photon Monte Carlo simulations. Reproducibility is desirable for code verification, testing, and debugging. Parallelism creates a unique problem for achieving reproducibility in Monte Carlo simulations because it changes the order in which values are summed. This is a numerical problem because double precision arithmetic is not associative. In [1], a way of eliminating this roundoff error using integer tallies was described. This approach successfully achieves reproducibility at the cost of lost accuracy by rounding double precision numbers to fewer significant digits. This integer approach, and other extended reproducibility techniques, are described and compared in this work. Increased precision alone is not enough to ensure reproducibility of photon Monte Carlo simulations. A non-arbitrary precision approaches required a varying degree of rounding to achieve reproducibility. For the problems investigated in this work double precision global accuracy was achievable by using 100 bits of precision or greater on all unordered sums which where subsequently rounded to double precision at the end of every time-step. (authors)

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Sensor Network Demonstration for In Situ Decommissioning - 13332

Florida International University's (FIU's) Applied Research Center is currently supporting the Department of Energy's (DOE) Environmental Management Office of D and D and Facility Engineering program. FIU is supporting DOE's initiative to improve safety, reduce technical risks, and limit uncertainty within D and D operations by identifying technologies suitable to meet specific facility D and D requirements, assessing the readiness of those technologies for field deployment, and conducting feasibility studies and large scale demonstrations of promising technologies. During FY11, FIU collaborated with Savannah River National Laboratory in the development of an experimental test site for the demonstration of multiple sensor systems for potential use in the in situ decommissioning process. In situ decommissioning is a process in which the above ground portion of a facility is dismantled and removed, and the underground portion is filled with a cementious material such as grout. In such a scenario, the question remains on how to effectively monitor the structural health of the grout (cracking, flexing, and sinking), as well as track possible migration of contaminants within and out of the grouted monolith. The right types of sensors can aid personnel in better understanding the conditions within the entombed structure. Without sensors embedded in and around the monolith, it will be very difficult to estimate structural integrity and contaminant transport. Yet, to fully utilize the appropriate sensors and the provided data, their performance and reliability must be evaluated outside a laboratory setting. To this end, a large scale experimental setup and demonstration was conducted at FIU. In order to evaluate a large suite of sensor systems, FIU personnel designed and purchased a pre-cast concrete open-top cube, which served as a mock-up of an in situ DOE decommissioned facility. The inside of the cube measures 10 ft x 10 ft x 8 ft. In order to ensure that the individual sensors would be immobilized during the grout pouring activities, a set of nine sensor racks were designed. The 270 sensors provided by Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Mississippi State University (MSU), University of Houston (UH), and University of South Carolina (USC) were secured to these racks based on predetermined locations. Once sensor racks were installed inside the test cube, connected and debugged, approximately 32 cubic yards of special grout material was used to entomb the sensors. MSU provided and demonstrated four types of fiber loop ring-down (FLR) sensors for detection of water, temperature, cracks, and movement of fluids. INL provided and demonstrated time differenced 3D electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), advanced tensiometers for moisture content, and thermocouples for temperature measurements. University of Houston provided smart aggregate (SA) sensors, which detect crack severity and water presence. An additional UH sensor system demonstrated was a Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) fiber optic system measuring strain, presence of water, and temperature. USC provided a system which measured acoustic emissions during cracking, as well as temperature and pH sensors. All systems were connected to a Sensor Remote Access System (SRAS) data networking and collection system designed, developed and provided by FIU. The purpose of SRAS was to collect and allow download of the raw sensor data from all the sensor system, as well as allow upload of the processed data and any analysis reports and graphs. All this information was made available to the research teams via the Deactivation and Decommissioning Knowledge Management and Information Tool (D and D KM-IT). As a current research effort, FIU is performing an energy analysis, and transferring several sensor systems to a Photovoltaic (PV) System to continuously monitor energy consumption parameters and overall power demands. Also, One final component of this research is focusing on developing an integrated data network to capture, log and analyze sensor system data in near real time from a single interface. FIU personnel and DOE Fellows monitored the progress and condition of the sensors for a period of six months. During this time, the sensors recorded data pertaining to strain, compression, temperature, crack detection, moisture presence, fluid mobility, shock resistance, monolith movement, and electrical resistivity. In addition, FIU regularly observed the curing process of the grout and documented the cube condition via the nine racks of sensors. The sensors held up throughout the curing process, withstood the natural elements for six months, and monitored the integrity of the grout. The large scale experiment and demonstration conducted at FIU was the first of its kind to demonstrate the feasibility of state of the art sensors for in situ decommissioning applications. These efforts successfully measured the durability, performance, and precision of the sensors in question as well as monitored and recorded the curing process of the selected grout material under natural environmental conditions. The current energy analysis work is resulting in data on the constraints placed by some of the sensor systems on a power network that requires high reliability and low losses. In addition, a sensor system demonstration has determined that it is feasible to develop an integrated data network where data can be accessed in near real-time from all systems, thereby allowing for larger-scale integrated system testing to be performed. Information collected during the execution of this research project will aid decision makers in the identification of sensors to be used in nuclear facilities selected for in situ decommissioning. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Validation of a Monte Carlo model for the MLC-Elekta Precise with MCNP6 - Paper 76

Cancer treatment using radiotherapy techniques needs an accurate prediction of the dose delivered to the patient at each position. Treatment planning systems (TPS) allow the optimization of the dose delivered to the tumor volume while minimizing the dose absorbed by the surrounding healthy tissue. Commercial treatment planning systems use empirical deterministic algorithms that do not correctly estimate the dose in the surroundings of heterogeneities. This lack of accuracy is taken into account as bigger security margins in the treatment, reducing the potential effect of the treatment. However, Monte Carlo (MC) simulation techniques have proved to predict the dose distribution more accurately and also representing experimental data better. Nevertheless, the clinical application of these techniques has been limited by the long calculation times they require. As high performance computers decrease in cost MC simulations become more feasible to be used in TPS. The present work improves a simplified model of the MLC-Elekta Precise linear accelerator (linac or unit from now on) previously developed and correctly validated by the group. A multileaf collimator (MLC) has been modelled according to the manufacturer specifications and added to the previous model to allow higher conformity in the studies. The full geometry has been entered to the MCNP6 Monte Carlo code to simulate the transport of particles through the linac. The geometry also includes a cubic water phantom for dosimetry studies and validation with experimental data. The experimental data employed for the dose distribution comparison has been measured at the linac from the linac Hospital Universitari Clinic de Valencia (Spain). Additionally, particles are stored in a phase space surface before their entrance in the water to be analyzed and for performance optimization. Given the results presented, we conclude that this first approach to validate a model of the Elekta Precise linac from the Hospital Cl nic Universitari de Valancia represents well the depth-dose distribution, but fails at representing the dose profiles. It has been shown that they predict too much penumbra, probably caused by the filtration between the leaves. In order to solve this problems, further work is needed to improve the simulated model. This work will mainly focus on the multileaf collimator. Also, the codes developed by the group to analyze phase space files produced by MCNP6 have proven highly useful. As work progress and the codes are debugged, they will be published so that the community can take advantage of them.

61 RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY↗

SFDS: The criticality assembly for the experimental research of the nuclear spent fuel dissolver in CIAE - 14401

SFDS is the criticality assembly for the experimental research of the spent fuel dissolver in China Institute of Atomic Energy. The spent fuel dissolver, as the bottleneck of spent fuel reprocessing, has so many characteristics such as the dynamic changes, heterogeneous distribution, complex compositions that it is hard to analysis by theoretical method. Without enough experiments, clear bias and uncertainty of the analysis tools the handling limits for criticality safety in dissolver can't be determined. The SFDS, physical designed by MONK 9A code, uses two kinds of nuclear fuels, 3% enrichment solid UO{sub 2} rods and 5.5% enrichment UO{sub 2}(NO{sub 3}){sub 2} solution, will meet the demand of the critical experiments about the dissolvers. Seven series of critical experiments will be present on it, those are on pitches of rods, uranium concentrations of solutions, nitric acid concentrations of solutions, fission products, void fractions, temperatures and dissolve phases. More kinds of experiments could be introduced with the flexible structures of SFDS in the future. The current work on it are testing and debugging with full systems by water and it will be first critical later in 2015. It will become the first benchmark assembly for critical experiments research in the nuclear fuel cycle system in China. (authors)

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗