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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 289 records · Page 16

Self-balanced modulation and magnetic rebalancing method for parallel multilevel inverters

A self-balanced modulation method and a closed-loop magnetic flux rebalancing control method for parallel multilevel inverters. The combination of the two methods provides for balancing of the magnetic flux of the inter-cell transformers (ICTs) of the parallel multilevel inverters without deteriorating the quality of the output voltage. In various embodiments a parallel multi-level inverter modulator is provide including a multi-channel comparator to generate a multiplexed digitized ideal waveform for a parallel multi-level inverter and a finite state machine (FSM) module coupled to the parallel multi-channel comparator, the FSM module to receive the multiplexed digitized ideal waveform and to generate a pulse width modulated gate-drive signal for each switching device of the parallel multi-level inverter. The system and method provides for optimization of the output voltage spectrum without influence the magnetic balancing.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Towards Generic Parallel Programming in Computer Science Education with Kokkos

Parallel patterns, views, and spaces are promising abstractions to capture the programmer's intent as well as the contextual information that can be used by an underlying runtime to efficiently map software to parallel hardware. These abstractions can be valuable in cases where an algorithm must accommodate requirements of code and performance portability across hardware architectures and vendor programming models. Kokkos is a parallel programming model for host- and accelerator architectures that relies on these abstractions and targets these requirements. It consists of a pure C++ interface, a specification, and a programming library. The programming library exposes patterns and types and maps them to an underlying abstract machine model. The abstract machine model offers a generic view of parallel hardware. While Kokkos is gaining popularity in large-scale HPC applications at some DOE laboratories, we believe that the implemented concepts are of interest to a broader audience including academia as they may contribute to a generic, vendor, and architecture-independent education of parallel programming. In this work, we give an insight into the design considerations of this programming model and list important abstractions. Further, we document best practices obtained from giving virtual classes on Kokkos and give pointers to resources that the reader may consider valuable for a lecture on generic parallel programming for students with preexisting knowledge on this matter.

Ciesko, Jan↗

Simulation and Optimizing Groundwater Investigations, Conceptual Design Analysis, Model Calibration and Remedial Design Using Parallel Numerical Methods: Theory and Application - 16578

Optimization of environmental restoration efforts at complex groundwater sites involves the development of a conceptual and often numerical flow and transport models. Typically, a limited number of simulations are done to assess the impact of parameter uncertainty, to evaluate remedial alternatives and develop a remedy, or to modify an existing remedy. A limited number of simulations are performed because each simulation can take upwards of several hours per simulation and until now the ability to conduct the 100's to 1000's of simulations needed to derive an optimal remedy was beyond the reach of the everyday practitioner. HGL has developed and implemented new parallel simulation and optimization methods in their software and has successfully deployed applications on high performance Cloud-based computing platforms. This advancement removes the impediment of burdensome and unpredictable runtime requirements these types of projects have typically exhibited using heuristic trial-and-error or even automated serial computation approaches. A parallel numerical solver has been added to the subsurface flow and transport simulator MODFLOW-SURFACT{sup TM} and has demonstrated reductions in solution time by as much as a factor of 9.8. This is accomplished by distributing the numerical computations of every time step over multiple processors. The integrated parallel simulation and optimization method uses the breadth and depth search approach; iteratively producing sets of tens or 100's of candidate solutions that are evaluated concurrently instead sequentially (i.e. one model evaluation at a time). Solutions within 80-100% of the globally optimal solution are regularly found expending only 5-10% of the usual computational effort using this new parallel optimization method (reducing computation effort by 10 to 20 times). Distributing optimal search runs across multiple processors additionally reduces calendar time to solutions. Practitioners evaluating multiple conceptual site models, model calibration by auto-calibration methods and remedial design by heuristics can enjoy significant reductions in model solution time by using the parallel numerical matrix solver in the physics-based simulator. Combining investigation and design analysis with breadth and depth parallel optimization methods, projects at the fringe of practical optimization, along with projects that were beyond the reach of formal optimization methods are now wholly feasible and tractable optimization problems. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Techniques for recovering from errors when executing software applications on parallel processors

In various embodiments, a software program uses hardware features of a parallel processor to checkpoint a context associated with an execution of a software application on the parallel processor. The software program uses a preemption feature of the parallel processor to cause the parallel processor to stop executing instructions in accordance with the context. The software program then causes the parallel processor to collect state data associated with the context. After generating a checkpoint based on the state data, the software program causes the parallel processor to resume executing instructions in accordance with the context.

Hukerikar, Saurabh↗

GSplit: Scaling Graph Neural Network Training on Large Graphs via Split-Parallelism

Graph neural networks (GNNs), an emerging class of machine learning models for graphs, have gained popularity for their superior performance in various graph analytical tasks. Mini-batch training is commonly used to train GNNs on large graphs, and data parallelism is the standard approach to scale mini-batch training across multiple GPUs. Data parallel approaches contain redundant work as subgraphs sampled by different GPUs contain significant overlap. To address this issue, we introduce a hybrid parallel mini-batch training paradigm called Split parallelism. Split parallelism avoids redundant work by splitting the sampling, loading, and training of each mini-batch across multiple GPUs. Split parallelism, however, introduces communication overheads that can be more than the savings from removing redundant work. We further present a lightweight partitioning algorithm that probabilistically minimizes these overheads. We implement spllit parllelism in GSplit and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art mini-batch training systems like DGL, Quiver, and P3.

Lim, Seung-Hwan [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000194616866)↗

The Case for Strong Scaling in Deep Learning: Training Large 3D CNNs with Hybrid Parallelism

Here, we present scalable hybrid-parallel algorithms for training large-scale 3D convolutional neural networks. Deep learning-based emerging scientific workflows often require model training with large, high-dimensional samples, which can make training much more costly and even infeasible due to excessive memory usage. We solve these challenges by extensively applying hybrid parallelism throughout the end-to-end training pipeline, including both computations and I/O. Our hybrid-parallel algorithm extends the standard data parallelism with spatial parallelism, which partitions a single sample in the spatial domain, realizing strong scaling beyond the mini-batch dimension with a larger aggregated memory capacity. We evaluate our proposed training algorithms with two challenging 3D CNNs, CosmoFlow and 3D U-Net. Our comprehensive performance studies show that good weak and strong scaling can be achieved for both networks using up to 2K GPUs. More importantly, we enable training of CosmoFlow with much larger samples than previously possible, realizing an order-of-magnitude improvement in prediction accuracy.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Instability Issue of Paralleled Dies in an SiC Power Module in Solid-State Circuit Breaker Applications

Paralleled dies in a power module could have instability issues during high current switching transients. Here, the instability is caused by the differential-mode oscillation among paralleled MOSFETs. Conventional analyses of paralleled MOSFETs’ stability are normally limited to a single operating point, which ignores the influences of the switching trajectory and nonlinear device parameters on stability. This article reveals that the switching trajectory can significantly influence parallel stability. The analysis is improved by solving eigenvalues of state-space modeling system matrices of all operating points that the switching trajectory goes through considering nonlinear device parameters. Higher voltage and current stresses result in greater real parts of complex eigenvalues, which explains why the paralleled MOSFETs are more unstable with higher voltage and current stresses. To improve stability in solid-state circuit breaker applications, we propose a method to manipulate the switching trajectory to avoid the unstable region where the conventional hard switching trajectory normally goes through. Experimental results show that the turn- off current capability can be increased from ~five times of rated current with the gate oscillation using the conventional turn- off trajectory to ~ten times of rated current without the gate oscillation using the optimal turn- off trajectory.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Layer-Parallel Training of Deep Residual Neural Networks

Residual neural networks (ResNets) are a promising class of deep neural networks that have shown excellent performance for a number of learning tasks, e.g., image classification and recognition. Mathematically, ResNet architectures can be interpreted as forward Euler discretizations of a nonlinear initial value problem whose time-dependent control variables represent the weights of the neural network. Hence, training a ResNet can be cast as an optimal control problem of the associated dynamical system. For similar time-dependent optimal control problems arising in engineering applications, parallel-in-time methods have shown notable improvements in scalability. This paper demonstrates the use of those techniques for efficient and effective training of ResNets. The proposed algorithms replace the classical (sequential) forward and backward propagation through the network layers with a parallel nonlinear multigrid iteration applied to the layer domain. This adds a new dimension of parallelism across layers that is attractive when training very deep networks. From this basic idea, we derive multiple layer-parallel methods. The most efficient version employs a simultaneous optimization approach where updates to the network parameters are based on inexact gradient information in order to speed up the training process. Finally, using numerical examples from supervised classification, we demonstrate that the new approach achieves a training performance similar to that of traditional methods, but enables layer-parallelism and thus provides speedup over layer-serial methods through greater concurrency.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A parallel p ‐adaptive discontinuous Galerkin method for the Euler equations with dynamic load‐balancing on tetrahedral grids

Abstract A novel p ‐adaptive discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method has been developed to solve the Euler equations on three‐dimensional tetrahedral grids. Hierarchical orthogonal basis functions are adopted for the DG spatial discretization while a third order TVD Runge‐Kutta method is used for the time integration. A vertex‐based limiter is applied to the numerical solution in order to eliminate oscillations in the high order method. An error indicator constructed from the solution of order and is used to adapt degrees of freedom in each computational element, which remarkably reduces the computational cost while still maintaining an accurate solution. The developed method is implemented with under the Charm++ parallel computing framework. Charm++ is a parallel computing framework that includes various load‐balancing strategies. Implementing the numerical solver under Charm++ system provides us with access to a suite of dynamic load balancing strategies. This can be efficiently used to alleviate the load imbalances created by p ‐adaptation. A number of numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate both the numerical accuracy and parallel performance of the developed p ‐adaptive DG method. It is observed that the unbalanced load distribution caused by the parallel p ‐adaptive DG method can be alleviated by the dynamic load balancing from Charm++ system. Due to this, high performance gain can be achieved. For the testcases studied in the current work, the parallel performance gain ranged from 1.5× to 3.7×. Therefore, the developed p ‐adaptive DG method can significantly reduce the total simulation time in comparison to the standard DG method without p ‐adaptation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A non-intrusive parallel-in-time adjoint solver with the XBraid library

In this paper, an adjoint solver for the multigrid-in-time software library XBraid is presented. XBraid provides a non-intrusive approach for simulating unsteady dynamics on multiple processors while parallelizing not only in space but also in the time domain (XBraid: Parallel multigrid in time, http://llnl.gov/casc/xbraid). It applies an iterative multigrid reduction in time algorithm to existing spatially parallel classical time propagators and computes the unsteady solution parallel in time. Techniques from Automatic Differentiation are used to develop a consistent discrete adjoint solver which provides sensitivity information of output quantities with respect to design parameter changes. The adjoint code runs backwards through the primal XBraid actions and accumulates gradient information parallel in time. It is highly non-intrusive as existing adjoint time propagators can easily be integrated through the adjoint interface. The adjoint code is validated on advection-dominated flow with periodic upstream boundary condition. We report it provides similar strong scaling results as the primal XBraid solver and offers great potential for speeding up the overall computational costs for sensitivity analysis using multiple processors.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

ExaHDF5: Delivering Efficient Parallel I/O on Exascale Computing Systems

Scientific applications at exascale generate and analyze massive amounts of data. A critical requirement of these applications is the capability to access and manage this data efficiently on exascale systems. As such, parallel I/O, the key technology enables moving data between compute nodes and storage, faces monumental challenges from new applications, memory, and storage architectures considered in the designs of exascale systems. As the storage hierarchy is expanding to include node-local persistent memory, burst buffers, etc., as well as disk-based storage, data movement among these layers must be efficient. Parallel I/O libraries of the future should be capable of handling file sizes of many terabytes and beyond. In this paper, we describe new capabilities we have developed in Hierarchical Data Format version 5 (HDF5), the most popular parallel I/O library for scientific applications. HDF5 is one of the most used libraries at the leadership computing facilities for performing parallel I/O on existing HPC systems. The state-of-the-art features we describe include: Virtual Object Layer (VOL), Data Elevator, asynchronous I/O, full-featured single-writer and multiple-reader (Full SWMR), and parallel querying. In this paper, we introduce these features, their implementations, and the performance and feature benefits to applications and other libraries.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A derivation and scalable implementation of the synchronous parallel kinetic Monte Carlo method for simulating long-time dynamics

Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulations are used to study long-time dynamics of a wide variety of systems. Unfortunately, the conventional KMC algorithm is not scalable to larger systems, since its time scale is inversely proportional to the simulated system size. A promising approach to resolving this issue is the synchronous parallel KMC (SPKMC) algorithm, which makes the time scale size-independent. This paper introduces a formal derivation of the SPKMC algorithm based on local transition-state and time-dependent Hartree approximations, as well as its scalable parallel implementation based on a dual linked-list cell method. The resulting algorithm has achieved a weak-scaling parallel efficiency of 0.935 on 1024 Intel Xeon processors for simulating biological electron transfer dynamics in a 4.2 billion-heme system, as well as decent strong-scaling parallel efficiency. The parallel code has been used to simulate a lattice of cytochrome complexes on a bacterial-membrane nanowire, and it is broadly applicable to other problems such as computational synthesis of new materials.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A massively-parallel, unstructured overset method for mesh connectivity

Here we present a method that dynamically and efficiently performs connectivity calculations between many O(10 5 ) moving, unstructured overset meshes in parallel. In order to connect overset meshes, elements exterior to the solution domain must be removed from the simulation. In regions with many overlapping meshes, elements must be selectively removed to reduce redundancy while maintaining a solution over the entire domain. Around masked regions interpolation partner pairing is required between meshes to provide boundary conditions. For general unstructured meshes, these steps involve challenging computational geometry calculations which must be efficient and automatic. For many moving meshes each step must be massively parallelized and scalable to large numbers of computational cores. To establish communication patterns a parallelized master/slave algorithm is used which minimizes global communication and storage. To remove elements a parallel ‘Forest Fire’ flood-fill algorithm is used to set a masking variable. For interpolation partner pairing, and other necessary searches, k-dimensional tree data structures (k-d trees) are extensively used. Often in a calculation, the connectivity between overset meshes remains largely the same between time steps. The temporal coherence of the various objects in the connectivity calculation is directly used to only update necessary information with time, resulting in substantial cost savings. Details of the different algorithms are presented. Resulting connectivity and timings are shown for complex geometries. Parallel scaling is demonstrated for 100,000 spherical particles within a channel up to 492,000 processors.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Shift Selection Strategy for Parallel Shift-invert Spectrum Slicing in Symmetric Self-consistent Eigenvalue Computation

The central importance of large-scale eigenvalue problems in scientific computation necessitates the development of massively parallel algorithms for their solution. Recent advances in dense numerical linear algebra have enabled the routine treatment of eigenvalue problems with dimensions on the order of hundreds of thousands on the world’s largest supercomputers. In cases where dense treatments are not feasible, Krylov subspace methods offer an attractive alternative due to the fact that they do not require storage of the problem matrices. However, demonstration of scalability of either of these classes of eigenvalue algorithms on computing architectures capable of expressing massive parallelism is non-trivial due to communication requirements and serial bottlenecks, respectively. In this work, we introduce the SISLICE method: a parallel shift-invert algorithm for the solution of the symmetric self-consistent field (SCF) eigenvalue problem. The SISLICE method drastically reduces the communication requirement of current parallel shift-invert eigenvalue algorithms through various shift selection and migration techniques based on density of states estimation and k-means clustering, respectively. This work demonstrates the robustness and parallel performance of the SISLICE method on a representative set of SCF eigenvalue problems and outlines research directions that will be explored in future work.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Parallel FETI‐DP algorithm for efficient simulation of large‐scale EM problems

Summary An efficient parallelization of the dual‐primal finite‐element tearing and interconnecting (FETI‐DP) algorithm is presented for large‐scale electromagnetic simulations. As a nonoverlapping domain decomposition method, the FETI‐DP algorithm formulates a global interface problem, whose iterative solution is accelerated with a solution of a global corner problem. To achieve a good load balance for parallel computation, the original computational domain is decomposed into subdomains with similar sizes and shapes. The subdomains are then distributed to processors based on their close proximity to minimize inter‐processor communication. The parallel generalized minimal residual method, enhanced with the iterative classical Gram‐Schmidt orthogonalization scheme to reduce global communication, is adopted to solve the global interface problem with a fast convergence rate. The global corner‐related coarse problem is solved iteratively with a parallel communication‐avoiding biconjugate gradient stabilized method to minimize global communication, and its convergence is accelerated by a diagonal preconditioner constructed from the coarse system matrix. To alleviate neighboring communication overhead, the non‐blocking communication approach is employed in both generalized minimal residual and communication‐avoiding biconjugate gradient stabilized iterative solutions. Three numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy, scalability, and capability of the proposed parallel FETI‐DP algorithm for electromagnetic modeling of general objects and antenna arrays. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Zhang, Kedi↗

On the adequacy of lightweight thread approaches for high-level parallel programming models

High-level parallel programming models (PMs) are becoming crucial in order to extract the computational power of current on-node multi-threaded parallelism. The most popular PMs, such as OpenMP or OmpSs, are directive-based: the complexity of the hardware is hidden by the underlying runtime system, improving coding productivity. The implementations of OpenMP usually rely on POSIX threads (pthreads), offering excellent performance for coarse-grained parallelism and a perfect match with the current hardware. OmpSs is a task oriented PM based on an ad hoc runtime solution called Nanos++; it is the precursor of the tasking parallelism in the OpenMP tasking specification. A recent trend in runtimes and applications points to leveraging massive on-node parallelism in conjunction with fine-grained and dynamic scheduling paradigms. In this paper we analyze the behavior of the OpenMP and OmpSs PMs on top of the recently emerged Generic Lightweight Threads (GLT) API. GLT exposses a common API for lightweight thread (LWT) libraries that offers the possibility of running the same application over different native LWT solutions. We describe the design details of those high-level PMs implemented on top of GLT and analyze different scenarios in order to assess where the use of LWTs may benefit application performance. Our work reveals those scenarios where LWTs overperform pthread-based solutions and compares the performance between an ad hoc solution and a generic implementation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

MOOSE ProbML: Parallelized probabilistic machine learning and uncertainty quantification for computational energy applications

Here, this paper presents the development and demonstration of massively parallel probabilistic machine learning (ML) and uncertainty quantification (UQ) capabilities within the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE), an open-source computational platform for parallel finite element and finite volume analyses. In addressing the computational expense and uncertainties inherent in complex multiphysics simulations, this paper integrates Gaussian process (GP) variants, active learning, Bayesian inverse UQ, adaptive forward UQ, Bayesian optimization, evolutionary optimization, and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) within MOOSE. It also elaborates on the interaction among key MOOSE systems — Sampler, MultiApp, Reporter, and Surrogate — in enabling these capabilities. The modularity offered by these systems enables development of a multitude of probabilistic ML and UQ algorithms in MOOSE. Example code demonstrations include parallel active learning and parallel Bayesian inference via active learning. The impact of these developments is illustrated through five applications relevant to computational energy applications: UQ of nuclear fuel fission product release, using parallel active learning Bayesian inference; very rare events analysis in nuclear microreactors using active learning; advanced manufacturing process modeling using multi-output GPs (MOGPs) and dimensionality reduction; fluid flow using deep GPs (DGPs); and tritium transport model parameter optimization for fusion energy, using batch Bayesian optimization. These capabilities are part of the MOOSE framework.

97 - MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Performance and Accuracy Implications of Parallel Split Physics-Dynamics Coupling in the Energy Exascale Earth System Atmosphere Model

Simultaneous calculation of atmospheric processes is faster than calculating processes one at a time. This type of parallelism is beneficial or perhaps even necessary to provide good performance on modern supercomputers, which achieve faster performance through increased processor count rather than improved clock speed. The scalability of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) Atmosphere Model (EAM) is limited by the fluid dynamics which scales up to the number of mesh cells in the global mesh. In contrast, the suite of physics parameterizations in EAM is scalable up to the total number of physics columns, which is an order of magnitude greater than the number of mesh cells. A proposed solution to unlocking the greater potential performance from the physics suite is to solve the physics and dynamics in parallel. This work represents a first attempt at parallel splitting of the grid-scale fluid dynamics model and the subgrid-scale physics parameterizations in a global atmosphere model. We will demonstrate that switching to parallel physics-dynamics coupling extends the scalability of the EAM to up to 3 times the previous peak scalability limit and is up to 20% faster than the sequentially split coupling at the highest core counts and the same time step. Decadal simulations of both coupling approaches show very little impact to the model climate. This improved performance does not come without drawbacks, however. Parallel splitting requires a shorter time step and other modifications which largely offset performance gains. A mass fixer is required for conservation. Techniques for mitigating these issues are also discussed.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗