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At least 271 records · Page 15

Parallel interior-point solver for block-structured nonlinear programs on SIMD/GPU architectures

Here, we investigate how to port the standard interior-point method to new exascale architectures for block-structured nonlinear programs with state equations. Computationally, we decompose the interior-point algorithm into two successive operations: the evaluation of the derivatives and the solution of the associated Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) linear system. Our method accelerates both operations using two levels of parallelism. First, we distribute the computations on multiple processes using coarse parallelism. Second, each process uses SIMD/GPU accelerators locally to accelerate the operations using fine-grained parallelism. The KKT system is reduced by eliminating the inequalities and the state variables from the corresponding equations. We demonstrate our method's capability on the supercomputer Polaris, a testbed for the future exascale Aurora system. Each node is equipped with four GPUs, a setup amenable to our two-level approach. Our experiments on the stochastic optimal power flow problem show that the reduction method is 50x faster than the sparse linear solver HSL MA57 running in serial on the CPU, and 6x faster than Pardiso running in parallel on CPU on the same number of processes.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

kL-based Linear and Nonlinear Two-Equation Turbulence Models

The development and implementation of kL-based Reynolds Average Navier-Stokes (RANS) two-equation turbulence models are reported herein. The kL is based on Abdol-Hamid's closure and Menter's modification to Rotta's two-equation model. Rotta shows that a reliable transport equation can be formed from the turbulent length scale L, and the turbulent kinetic energy k. Rotta's kL equation is well suited for term-by-term modeling and displays useful features compared to other scale formulation. One of the important differences is the inclusion of higher order velocity derivatives in the source terms of the scale equation. This can enhance the ability of RANS solvers to simulate unsteady flows in URANS mode. The present report documents the formulation of two model levels of turbulence models as implemented in the computational fluid dynamics FUN3D code. The levels are the two-equation linear k-kL and the two-equation algebraic Reynolds stress model (ARSM). Free shear, separated and corner flow cases are documented and compared with experimental, and other turbulence model data. The results show generally very good comparisons with experimental data. The results from this formulation are similar or better than results using the SST two-equation turbulence model. ARSM shows great promise with similar level of computational resources as basic two-equation turbulence models.

Abdol-Hamid, K. S.↗

Fully-Implicit Orthogonal Reconstructed Discontinuous Galerkin for Fluid Dynamics with Phase Change

A new reconstructed Discontinuous Galerkin (rDG) method, based on orthogonal basis/test functions, is developed for fluid flows on unstructured meshes. Orthogonality of basis functions is essential for enabling robust and efficient fully-implicit Newton-Krylov based time integration. The method is designed for generic partial differential equations, including transient, hyperbolic, parabolic or elliptic operators, which are attributed to many multiphysics problems. We demonstrate the method’s capabilities for solving compressible fluid-solid systems (in the low Mach number limit), with phase change (melting/solidification), as motivated by applications in Additive Manufacturing (AM). We focus on the method’s accuracy (in both space and time), as well as robustness and solvability of the system of linear equations involved in the linearization steps of Newton-based methods. The performance of the developed method is investigated for highly-stiff problems with melting/solidification, emphasizing the advantages from tight coupling of mass, momentum and energy conservation equations, as well as orthogonality of basis functions, which leads to better conditioning of the underlying (approximate) Jacobian matrices, and rapid convergence of the Krylov-based linear solver.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Scalability under a Power Bound using the GREMLINs Framework

With the move towards exascale, system and software developers will have to deal with issues of extreme parallelism. The system properties affected most by the increase in node and core count are the shared resources on node and across the system. The increase in parallelism leads to reduced memory and bandwidth when regarding individual cores. Since power is a limiting factor for supercomputers, and power is not fully utilized in current systems, overprovisioning compute resources is a viable approach to maximized power utilization. To maximize system performance in regard to these changing conditions, it is necessary to understand how resource restrictions impact performance and system behavior. For the purpose of understanding anticipated system properties the GREMLINs Framework was developed. The framework gives the opportunity to add power restrictions, hinder memory properties and introduce faults to study resilience, among others. These features give the opportunity to use current petascale technology to study problems system designers and software developers will have to face when moving towards exascale and beyond. This work describes the initial release of the GREMLINs Framework, developed for this work, and shows how it can be used to study the scaling behavior of proxy applications. These proxy applications represent a selection of HPC workloads important to the scientific community. The proxy applications studied are AMG2013, an algebraic multi-grid linear system solver, CoMD, a classical molecular dynamics proxy application and NEKBONE, an application that uses a high order spectral element method to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. The main interest of these studies lies in analysis regarding their power behavior at scale under a power bound. These findings show how the GREMLINs Framework can help systems and software designers to attain better application performance and can also be used as basis for CPU power balancing tools to use power more efficiently.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Parallel-vector computation for linear structural analysis and non-linear unconstrained optimization problems

Several parallel-vector computational improvements to the unconstrained optimization procedure are described which speed up the structural analysis-synthesis process. A fast parallel-vector Choleski-based equation solver, pvsolve, is incorporated into the well-known SAP-4 general-purpose finite-element code. The new code, denoted PV-SAP, is tested for static structural analysis. Initial results on a four processor CRAY 2 show that using pvsolve reduces the equation solution time by a factor of 14-16 over the original SAP-4 code. In addition, parallel-vector procedures for the Golden Block Search technique and the BFGS method are developed and tested for nonlinear unconstrained optimization. A parallel version of an iterative solver and the pvsolve direct solver are incorporated into the BFGS method. Preliminary results on nonlinear unconstrained optimization test problems, using pvsolve in the analysis, show excellent parallel-vector performance indicating that these parallel-vector algorithms can be used in a new generation of finite-element based structural design/analysis-synthesis codes.

Nguyen, D. T.↗

Inverse transport problem solvers based on regularized and compressive sensing techniques

According to the direct exposure measurements from flash radiographic image, regularized-based method and compressive sensing (CS)-based method for inverse transport equation are presented. The linear absorption coefficients and interface locations of objects are reconstructed directly at the same time. With a large number of measurements, least-square method is utilized to complete the reconstruction. Owing to the ill-posedness of the inverse problems, regularized algorithm is employed. Tikhonov method is applied with an appropriate posterior regularization parameter to get a meaningful solution. However, it's always very costly to obtain enough measurements. With limited measurements, CS sparse reconstruction technique Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) is applied to obtain the sparse coefficients by solving an optimization problem. This paper constructs and takes the forward projection matrix rather than Gauss matrix as measurement matrix. In the CS-based algorithm, Fourier expansion and wavelet expansion are adopted to convert an underdetermined system to a well-posed system. Simulations and numerical results of regularized method with appropriate regularization parameter and that of CS-based agree well with the reference value, furthermore, both methods avoid amplifying the noise. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Operator inference for non-intrusive model reduction of systems with non-polynomial nonlinear terms

Here in this work we present a non-intrusive model reduction method to learn low-dimensional models of dynamical systems with non-polynomial nonlinear terms that are spatially local and that are given in analytic form. In contrast to state-of-the-art model reduction methods that are intrusive and thus require full knowledge of the governing equations and the operators of a full model of the discretized dynamical system, the proposed approach requires only the non-polynomial terms in analytic form and learns the rest of the dynamics from snapshots computed with a potentially black-box full-model solver. The proposed method learns operators for the linear and polynomially nonlinear dynamics via a least-squares problem, where the given non-polynomial terms are incorporated on the right-hand side. The least-squares problem is linear and thus can be solved efficiently in practice. The proposed method is demonstrated on three problems governed by partial differential equations, namely the diffusion–reaction Chafee–Infante model, a tubular reactor model for reactive flows, and a batch-chromatography model that describes a chemical separation process. The numerical results provide evidence that the proposed approach learns reduced models that achieve comparable accuracy as models constructed with state-of-the-art intrusive model reduction methods that require full knowledge of the governing equations.

42 ENGINEERING↗

A fast Fourier transform-based solver for elastic micropolar composites

This work presents a spectral micromechanical formulation for obtaining the full-field and homogenized response of elastic micropolar composites. The algorithm relies on a coupled set of convolution integral equations for the micropolar strains, where periodic Green’s operators associated with a linear homogeneous reference medium are convolved with functions of the Cauchy and couple stress fields that encode the material’s heterogeneity, as well as any potential material nonlinearity. Such convolution integral equations take an algebraic form in the reciprocal Fourier space that can be solved iteratively. In this vein, the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm is leveraged to accelerate the numerical solution, resulting in a mesh-free formulation in which the periodic unit cell representing the heterogeneous material can be discretized by a regular grid of pixels in two dimensions (or voxels in three dimensions). For verification, the numerical solutions obtained with the micropolar FFT solver are compared with analytical solutions for a matrix with a dilute circular inclusion subjected to plane strain loading. The developed computational framework is then used to study length-scale effects and effective (micropolar) moduli of composites with various topological configurations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Parallel three-dimensional simulations of quasi-static elastoplastic solids

Hypo-elastoplasticity is a flexible framework for modeling the mechanics of many hard materials under small elastic deformation and large plastic deformation. Under typical loading rates, most laboratory tests of these materials happen in the quasi-static limit, but there are few existing numerical methods tailor-made for this physical regime. Here, we extend to three dimensions a recent projection method for simulating quasi-static hypo-elastoplastic materials. The method is based on a mathematical correspondence to the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, where the projection method of Chorin (1968) is an established numerical technique. We develop and utilize a three-dimensional parallel geometric multigrid solver employed to solve a linear system for the quasi-static projection. Our method is tested through simulation of three-dimensional shear band nucleation and growth, a precursor to failure in many materials. As an example system, we employ a physical model of a bulk metallic glass based on the shear transformation zone theory, but the method can be applied to any elastoplasticity model. We consider several examples of three-dimensional shear banding, and examine shear band formation in physically realistic materials with heterogeneous initial conditions under both simple shear deformation and boundary conditions inspired by friction welding.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

X-ray free electron laser linear accelerator without a laser heater

Linear accelerator based X-ray free electron laser (FEL) light sources provide an important tool for scientific discoveries. Most of these light source facilities employ a laser heater to increase the electron beam’s uncorrelated energy spread to suppress microbunching instability through the linear accelerators. In this paper, we first studied the microbunching instability in an X-ray FEL linear accelerator with lower initial peak current (~ 10 A) and moderate final peak currents (1-2 kA). In this regime, the microbunching instability can be substantially mitigated with modest initial uncorrelated energy spread. Here, we then suggested a less expensive method to mitigate the microbunching instability using a section of low beta FODO lattice instead of the laser heater. With the use of the high brightness electron beam from a photoinjector, the intrabeam scattering effect inside the beam through the FODO lattice can generate sufficient uncorrelated energy spread to mitigate the microbunching instability. At last, we demonstrated the feasibility of this method with self-consistent solution of the Fokker–Planck equation through the X-ray FEL linear accelerator.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Balancing Power Absorption Against Structural Loads With Viscous Drag and Power-Takeoff Efficiency Considerations

The focus of this paper is to balance power absorption against structural loading for a novel fixed-bottom oscillating surge wave energy converter in both regular and irregular wave environments. The power-to-load ratio will be evaluated using pseudospectral control (PSC) to determine the optimum power-takeoff (PTO) torque based on a multiterm objective function. This paper extends the pseudospectral optimal control problem to not just maximize the time-averaged absorbed power but also include measures for the surge-foundation force and PTO torque in the optimization. The objective function may now potentially include three competing terms that the optimizer must balance. Separate weighting factors are attached to the surge-foundation force and PTO control torque that can be used to tune the optimizer performance to emphasize either power absorption or load shedding. To correct the pitch equation of motion, derived from linear hydrodynamic theory, a quadratic-viscous-drag torque has been included in the system dynamics; however, to continue the use of quadratic programming solvers, an iteratively obtained linearized drag coefficient was utilized that provided good accuracy in the predicted pitch motion. Furthermore, the analysis considers the use of a nonideal PTO unit to more accurately evaluate controller performance. The PTO efficiency is not directly included in the objective function but rather the weighting factors are utilized to limit the PTO torque amplitudes, thereby reducing the losses resulting from the bidirectional energy flow through a nonideal PTO. Furthermore, results from PSC show that shedding a portion of the available wave energy can lead to greater reductions in structural loads, peak-to-average power ratio, and reactive power requirement.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗

Crashworthiness of light aircraft fuselage structures: A numerical and experimental investigation

The dynamic behavior of aircraft fuselage structures subject to various impact conditions was investigated. An analytical model was developed based on a self-consistent finite element (CFE) formulation utilizing shell, curved beam, and stringer type elements. Equations of motion were formulated and linearized (i.e., for small displacements), although material nonlinearity was retained to treat local plastic deformation. The equations were solved using the implicit Newmark-Beta method with a frontal solver routine. Stiffened aluminum fuselage models were also tested in free flight using the UTIAS pendulum crash test facility. Data were obtained on dynamic strains, g-loads, and transient deformations (using high speed photography in the latter case) during the impact process. Correlations between tests and predicted results are presented, together with computer graphics, based on the CFE model. These results include level and oblique angle impacts as well as the free-flight crash test. Comparisons with a hybrid, lumped mass finite element computer model demonstrate that the CFE formulation provides the test overall agreement with impact test data for comparable computing costs.

Nanyaro, A. P.↗

Linearized Functional Minimization for Inverse Modeling

Heterogeneous aquifers typically consist of multiple lithofacies, whose spatial arrangement significantly affects flow and transport. The estimation of these lithofacies is complicated by the scarcity of data and by the lack of a clear correlation between identifiable geologic indicators and attributes. We introduce a new inverse-modeling approach to estimate both the spatial extent of hydrofacies and their properties from sparse measurements of hydraulic conductivity and hydraulic head. Our approach is to minimize a functional defined on the vectors of values of hydraulic conductivity and hydraulic head fields defined on regular grids at a user-determined resolution. This functional is constructed to (i) enforce the relationship between conductivity and heads provided by the groundwater flow equation, (ii) penalize deviations of the reconstructed fields from measurements where they are available, and (iii) penalize reconstructed fields that are not piece-wise smooth. We develop an iterative solver for this functional that exploits a local linearization of the mapping from conductivity to head. This approach provides a computationally efficient algorithm that rapidly converges to a solution. A series of numerical experiments demonstrates the robustness of our approach.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Simulations of bypass transition for spatially evolving disturbances

The spatial evolution of disturbances in plane Poiseuille flow and zero pressure gradient boundary layer flow is considered. For disturbances governed by the linearized equations, potential for significant transient growth of the amplitude is demonstrated. The maximum amplification occurs for disturbances with zero or near zero frequencies. Spatial numerical simulations of the transition scenario involving a pair of oblique waves has been conducted for both flows. A fully spectral solver using a simple but efficient fringe region technique allowed the flows to be computed with high resolution into the fully turbulent domain. A modal decomposition of the simulation results indicates that non-linear excitation of the transient growth is responsible for the rapid emergence of low-frequency structures. Physically, this corresponds to streaky flow structures, as seen from the results of a numerical amplitude expansion. Thus, this spatial transition scenario has been found to be similar to the corresponding temporal one. In the boundary layer simulations the streaks are seen to break down from what appears to be a secondary instability.

Lundbladh, A.↗

Coordinate parameterisation and spectral method optimisation for Beltrami field solver in stellarator geometry

The numerical solution of the stepped pressure equilibrium (Hudson et al 2012 Phys. Plasmas 19 112502) requires a fast and robust solver to obtain the Beltrami field in three-dimensional geometry such as stellarators. The spectral method implemented in the stepped pressure equilibrium code (SPEC) is efficient when the domain is a hollow torus, but ill-conditioning of the discretised linear equations occurs in the (solid) toroid due to the artificially singular coordinate parameterisation near the axis. Here, we propose an improved choice for the reference axis to prevent coordinates surfaces from overlapping. Then, we examine the parity and asymptotics of the magnetic vector potential near the axis and suggest the use of recombined and rescaled Zernike radial basis functions. The maximum relative error in the magnetic field of the Wendelstein 7-X geometry is shown to reach 10 –9 at high resolution in a series of convergence tests and benchmarks against the boundary integral equation solver for Taylor states. The new method is also reported to significantly improve the accuracy of multi-volume SPEC calculations. A comparison between free-boundary SPEC and the analytical Dommaschk potential is presented with higher-than-usual Fourier resolution. It is illustrated that we are able to resolve low amplitude current sheets when an interface is placed where there is no flux surface in the analytic solution. This was previously concealed because of insufficient numerical resolution.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

A Linear-Elasticity Solver for Higher-Order Space-Time Mesh Deformation

A linear-elasticity approach is presented for the generation of meshes appropriate for a higher-order space-time discontinuous finite-element method. The equations of linear-elasticity are discretized using a higher-order, spatially-continuous, finite-element method. Given an initial finite-element mesh, and a specified boundary displacement, we solve for the mesh displacements to obtain a higher-order curvilinear mesh. Alternatively, for moving-domain problems we use the linear-elasticity approach to solve for a temporally discontinuous mesh velocity on each time-slab and recover a continuous mesh deformation by integrating the velocity. The applicability of this methodology is presented for several benchmark test cases.

higher-order↗

Development of a steady potential solver for use with linearized, unsteady aerodynamic analyses

A full potential steady flow solver (SFLOW) developed explicitly for use with an inviscid unsteady aerodynamic analysis (LINFLO) is described. The steady solver uses the nonconservative form of the nonlinear potential flow equations together with an implicit, least squares, finite difference approximation to solve for the steady flow field. The difference equations were developed on a composite mesh which consists of a C grid embedded in a rectilinear (H grid) cascade mesh. The composite mesh is capable of resolving blade to blade and far field phenomena on the H grid, while accurately resolving local phenomena on the C grid. The resulting system of algebraic equations is arranged in matrix form using a sparse matrix package and solved by Newton's method. Steady and unsteady results are presented for two cascade configurations: a high speed compressor and a turbine with high exit Mach number.

Hoyniak, Daniel↗

Numerical solution of 3D Navier-Stokes equations with upwind implicit schemes

An upwind MUSCL type implicit scheme for the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations is presented. Comparison between different approximate Riemann solvers (Roe and Osher) are performed and the influence of the reconstructions schemes on the accuracy of the solution as well as on the convergence of the method is studied. A new limiter is introduced in order to remove the problems usually associated with non-linear upwind schemes. The implementation of a diagonal upwind implicit operator for the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations is also discussed. Finally the turbulence modeling is assessed. Good prediction of separated flows are demonstrated if a non-equilibrium turbulence model is used.

Marx, Yves P.↗