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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 307 records · Page 17

HAWC2 and BeamDyn: Comparison Between Beam Structural Models for Aero-Servo-Elastic Frameworks: Preprint

This work presents a comparison of two beam codes for aero-servo-elastic frameworks: a new structural model for the aeroelastic code HAWC2 and a new nonlinear beam model, BeamDyn, for the aeroelastic modularization framework FAST v8. The main goal is to establish the suitability of the two approaches to model the structural behaviour of modern wind turbine blades in operation. Through a series of benchmarking structural cases of increasing complexity, the capability of the two codes to simulate highly nonlinear effects is investigated and analyzed. Results show that even though the geometrically exact beam theory can better model effects such as very large deflections, rotations, and structural couplings, an approach based on a multi-body formulation assembled through linear elements is capable of computing accurate solutions for typical nonlinear beam theory benchmarking cases.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

HAWC2 and BeamDyn: Comparison Between Beam Structural Models for Aero-Servo-Elastic Frameworks

This work presents a comparison of two beam codes for aero-servo-elastic frameworks: a new structural model for the aeroelastic code HAWC2 and a new nonlinear beam model, BeamDyn, for the aeroelastic modularization framework FAST v8. The main goal is to establish the suitability of the two approaches to model the structural behaviour of modern wind turbine blades in operation. Through a series of benchmarking structural cases of increasing complexity, the capability of the two codes to simulate highly nonlinear effects is investigated and analyzed. Results show that even though the geometrically exact beam theory can better model effects such as very large deflections, rotations, and structural couplings, an approach based on a multi-body formulation assembled through linear elements is capable of computing accurate solutions for typical nonlinear beam theory benchmarking cases.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

High performance sparse multifrontal solvers on modern GPUs

Here, we have ported the numerical factorization and triangular solve phases of the sparse direct solver STRUMPACK to GPU. STRUMPACK implements sparse LU factorization using the multifrontal algorithm, which performs most of its operations in dense linear algebra operations on so-called frontal matrices of various sizes. Our GPU implementation off-loads these dense linear algebra operations, as well as the sparse scatter–gather operations between frontal matrices. For the larger frontal matrices, our GPU implementation relies on vendor libraries such as cuBLAS and cuSOLVER for NVIDIA GPUs and rocBLAS and rocSOLVER for AMD GPUs. For the smaller frontal matrices we developed custom CUDA and HIP kernels to reduce kernel launch overhead. Overall, high performance is achieved by identifying submatrix factorizations corresponding to sub-trees of the multifrontal assembly tree which fit entirely in GPU memory. The multi-GPU setting uses SLATE (Software for Linear Algebra Targeting Exascale) as a modern GPU-aware replacement for ScaLAPACK. On 4 nodes of SUMMIT the code runs ~10X faster when using all 24 V100 GPUs compared to when it only uses the 168 POWER9 cores. On 8 SUMMIT nodes, using 48 V100 GPUs, the sparse solver reaches over 50TFlop/s. Compared to SuperLU, on a single V100, for a set of 17 matrices our implementation is faster for all but one matrix, and is on average 5X (median 4X) faster

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

PSpecteR: A User-Friendly and Interactive Application for Visualizing Top-Down and Bottom-Up Proteomics Data in R

Visual examination of mass spectrometry data is necessary to assess data quality and to facilitate data exploration. Graphics provide the means to evaluate spectral properties, test alternative peptide/protein sequence matches, prepare annotated spectra for publication, and fine-tune parameters during wet lab procedures. Visual inspection of MS data is hindered by proprietary proteomics visualization software designed for particular workflows and academic software that lack visualization tools. We built PSpecteR, an open-source and interactive R Shiny web application to address these issues, with support for several steps of proteomics data processing, including: reading various mass spectrometry files, running open-source database search tools, labelling spectra with fragmentation patterns, testing post-translational modifications, plotting where identified fragments map to reference sequences, and visualizing algorithmic output and metadata. All figures, tables, and spectra are exportable within one easy-to-use graphical user interface. Our current software provides a flexible and modern R framework to support fast implementation of additional features. The open source code is readily available (https://github.com/EMSL-Computing/PSpecteR), and a PSpecteR Docker container (https://hub.docker.com/r/emslcomputing) is available for easy local installation.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

The Thermonuclear Runaway and the Classical Nova Outburst

Nova explosions occur on the white dwarf component of a cataclysmic variable binary stellar system that is accreting matter lost by its companion. When sufficient material has been accreted by the white dwarf, a thermonuclear runaway occurs and ejects material in what is observed as a classical nova explosion. Here, we describe both the recent advances in our understanding of the progress of the outburst and outline some of the puzzles that are still outstanding. We report on the effects of improving both the nuclear reaction rate library and including a modern nuclear reaction network in our one-dimensional, fully implicit, hydrodynamic computer code. In addition, there has been progress in observational studies of supernovae Ia with implications about the progenitors, and we discuss that in this review.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Optimization of Advanced Steels for Cyclic Operation through an Integration of Material Testing, Modeling and Novel Component Test Validation

The efforts in this project were focused in three primary objectives, provided below: • To develop the needed microstructural processing and performance relationships and associated material models for specific constituents in fabricated weldments (such as the parent material, heat affected zone regions and weld metal), • Apply these metallurgical relationships through modeling of a welded pressure bearing power plant component subjected to cyclic operational conditions under both mechanical and thermal loading, and • Validate the model through novel structural feature and component tests. An attempt was made to optimize the heat treatment schedule to reduce or eliminate the presence of boron nitride (BN) in the matrix of the Grade 92 material. BN has been shown to be a primary nucleation source for creep damage. Proper evaluation of material behavior, and as assessed in this research, included the influence of geometric notches (such as those from poor fabrication or design) and metallurgical notches (such as weldments or poorly processed parent material). Better practice methodologies were implemented in the theoretical design of a high-temperature, critical component for cyclic operation. It was demonstrated that vessel testing can be reliably performed and provides a critical link between standard testing, structural assessment and validation. While the goal of an improved Grade 92 steel was not achieved in this project, there is considerable value in applying the documented testing and assessment methodologies to assess material and/or component behavior. This is especially true for materials and/or designs which are expected to be subjected to flexible operating modes. Design of a cycling state of the art thick wall steam header for long term operation with a state of the art ferritic steel was a task in this project. Implementation of that task showed how many factors including plant operating mode, creep strength, creep ductility, fatigue strength, and resistance to crack growth should be considered and evaluated to properly design high temperature components for long term service (200,000 operating hours or more) in a modern Fossil energy power plant. The current ASME non-nuclear boiler design code does not mandate this level of complex analysis nor does it provide all the metallurgical and mechanical properties data needed to perform this kind of design analysis.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗

TChem-atm (v2.0.0): scalable performance-portable multiphase atmospheric chemistry

We present TChem-atm, a performance-portable approach that enables efficient simulation of chemically detailed and multiphase atmospheric chemistry on modern heterogeneous computing architectures. Unlike previous efforts that rely on architecture-specific code or focus exclusively on gas-phase chemistry, TChem-atm supports fully coupled gas–aerosol systems with execution across CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, and AMD GPUs through the Kokkos programming model. It integrates the flexible multiphase capabilities of the Community Atmospheric Model Chemistry Package (CAMP) with the high-performance kinetic routines of TChem, and includes automatic Jacobian construction with support for a range of stiff ODE solvers. In a proof-of-concept integration with the particle-resolved model PartMC, TChem-atm reproduces the existing PartMC–CAMP implementation within solver tolerances and delivers substantial GPU speedups, especially for large particle populations. Performance benchmarks reveal substantial speedups on GPU platforms, particularly for large particle populations, with consistent results across hardware backends. TChem-atm enables performance-portable execution across CPUs and GPUs, though optimal efficiency may require modest architecture-specific tuning (e.g., team and vector sizes), with up to a twofold improvement on the NVIDIA H100. It directly supports sectional and particle-resolved host models, while modal aerosol schemes require minor adaptation to provide particle-scale quantities such as representative diameters. By enabling chemically detailed, multiphase simulations with performance portability and host-model flexibility, TChem-atm facilitates the incorporation of advanced chemistry into atmospheric models.

Díaz-Ibarra, Oscar Homero [Sandia National Laborat↗

HAMR - Heterogeneous Accelerator Memory Resource (HAMR) v1.0

HAMR is a library defining an accelerator technology agnostic memory model that bridges between accelerator technologies (CUDA, HIP, ROCm, OpenMP, Sycl, OpenCL, Kokos, etc) and traditional CPUs in heterogeneous computing environments. HAMR is light weight and implemented in modern C++. HAMR can be used to manage memory with in a single code or as a data model for coupling codes in a technologically agnostic way. HAMR provides a Python module for coupling C++ and Python codes which implements zero-copy data transfers to and from Python using the Numpy array interface and Numba CUDA array interface protocols.

Loring, Burlen↗

Copy Hiding Application Interface

CHAI is a light-weight framework which abstracts the automated movement of data (e.g. to/from Host/Device) via RAJA like performance portability programming model constructs. It can be viewed as a utility framework and an adjunct to FAJA (A Performance Portability Framework). Performance Portability is a technique that abstracts the complexities of modern Heterogeneous Architectures while allowing the original program to undergo incremental minimally invasive code changes in order to adapt to the newer architectures.

Jones, Holger↗

Detailed modeling of fission with F R E Y A

For many years, the state of the art for treating fission in radiation transport codes has involved sampling from average distributions. However, such “average” fission models have limited interaction-by-interaction capabilities. Energy is not explicitly conserved and no correlations are available because all particles are emitted isotropically and independently. However, in a true fission event, the energies, momenta and multiplicities of emitted particles are correlated. Such correlations are interesting for many modern applications, including detector development and detection of small amounts of special material. Recently, several Monte Carlo codes have become available that calculate complete fission events. Event-by-event techniques are particularly useful because it is possible to obtain the fission products as well as the prompt neutrons and photons emitted during an individual fission process, all with complete kinematic information. It is therefore possible to extract any desired correlation observables. Such codes, when included in broader Monte Carlo transport codes, such as MCNP, can be made broadly available to the community. One such code, FREYA (Fission Reaction Event Yield Algorithm), is particularly fast and can readily generate large samples of complete fission events. We briefly describe here the physics in FREYA and compare our results with relevant available data on prompt neutron and photon emission. We discuss correlated measurements in particular for validation.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Automatic Code Generation for High-Performance Graph Algorithms

Graph problems are common across fields of scientific computing and social sciences. However, despite their importance, implementing graph algorithms effectively on modern computing systems is a challenging task that requires significant programming effort and generally results in customized implementations. Current computing and memory hierarchies are not architected for irregular computations resulting in challenges for graph algorithms to achieve high performance on those architectures. In this paper, we present GraphX, a novel compiler framework and DSL designed to simplify the development of efficient graph algorithms and achieve high performance on modern computing systems. GraphX consists of a DSL for efficient implementation of graph algorithms, various optimizations, such as support for sparse linear algebra and workspace transformations, optimized graph primitives, including semiring and masking, and a high-performance code generation engine. Using GraphX, users can implement graph algorithms using a semantically-rich language with graph-oriented operators. GraphX uses these semantics to automatically generate efficient code for target architectures, increasing performance and portability across architectures. The composable nature of GraphX makes it possible to extend the set of optimizations and architectures without modifying the source code. We demonstrate GraphX outperforms state-of-the-art graph libraries, such as LAGraph, up to $3.7 speedup in semiring operations, $2.19 speedup in an important sparse computational kernel, and $9.05 speedup in graph processing algorithms.

compiler, graph algorithms, semiring, masking, wor↗

Initial development and verification of a primary load design method based on elastic-perfectly plastic analysis

This report describes a new primary load design method to supplement the current design-by-elastic-analysis rules in Section III, Division 5, Subsection HB, Subpart B of the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code, covering the design and construction of Class A high temperature nuclear structural components. The main objectives for the new design method are to provide a procedure that can be applied to components with complicated geometries and to simplify the primary load design process by providing rules more compatible with modern finite element analysis. The report includes a complete set of design rules, presented as a draft ASME Code Case, as well as a commentary on the rules and a set of verification problems. The verification design problems demonstrate the new primary load design rules produce safe, efficient components when compared to the current Division 5 approach, while greatly simplifying the design analysis process.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Recent Code Developments/Improvements to SAM Multi-dimensional Flow Model

The System Analysis Module (SAM) is under development at Argonne National Laboratory as a modern system-level modeling and simulation tool for advanced non-light water reactor safety analyses. In addition to its conventional one-dimensional flow network module, the multi-dimensional flow model of SAM offers significant benefits to its end-users, including the U.S. NRC, who uses it to develop reference models for advanced reactor concepts. This report provides a summary of the recent progress achieved under DOE-NE’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program in the continuous code development and improvements of the SAM code, specifically its multi-dimensional flow model. The improvements include enhancements to the physical model, code usability, addressing user feedback, and compliance with the SQA program standards that aim to enhance and maintain the quality of the software.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

WARP

WARP, which can stand for ``Weaving All the Random Particles,'' is a three-dimensional (3D) continuous energy Monte Carlo neutron transport code developed at UC Berkeley to efficiently execute on NVIDIA graphics processing unit (GPU) platforms. WARP accelerates Monte Carlo simulations while preserving the benefits of using the Monte Carlo method, namely, that very few physical and geometrical simplifications are applied. WARP is able to calculate multiplication factors, neutron flux distributions (in both space and energy), and fission source distributions for time-independent neutron transport problems. It can run in both criticality or fixed source modes, but fixed source mode is currently not robust, optimized, or maintained in the newest version. WARP can transport neutrons in unrestricted arrangements of parallelepipeds, hexagonal prisms, cylinders, and spheres. The goal of developing WARP is to investigate algorithms that can grow into a full-featured, continuous energy, Monte Carlo neutron transport code that is accelerated by running on GPUs. The crux of the effort is to make Monte Carlo calculations faster while producing accurate results. Modern supercomputers are commonly being built with GPU coprocessor cards in their nodes to increase their computational efficiency and performance. GPUs execute efficiently on data-parallel problems, but most CPU codes, including those for Monte Carlo neutral particle transport, are predominantly task-parallel. WARP uses a data-parallel neutron transport algorithm to take advantage of the computing power GPUs offer.

Bergmann, RyanM. [University of California - Berke↗

WARP

WARP, which can stand for ``Weaving All the Random Particles,'' is a three-dimensional (3D) continuous energy Monte Carlo neutron transport code developed at UC Berkeley to efficiently execute on NVIDIA graphics processing unit (GPU) platforms. WARP accelerates Monte Carlo simulations while preserving the benefits of using the Monte Carlo method, namely, that very few physical and geometrical simplifications are applied. WARP is able to calculate multiplication factors, neutron flux distributions (in both space and energy), and fission source distributions for time-independent neutron transport problems. It can run in both criticality or fixed source modes, but fixed source mode is currently not robust, optimized, or maintained in the newest version. WARP can transport neutrons in unrestricted arrangements of parallelepipeds, hexagonal prisms, cylinders, and spheres. The goal of developing WARP is to investigate algorithms that can grow into a full-featured, continuous energy, Monte Carlo neutron transport code that is accelerated by running on GPUs. The crux of the effort is to make Monte Carlo calculations faster while producing accurate results. Modern supercomputers are commonly being built with GPU coprocessor cards in their nodes to increase their computational efficiency and performance. GPUs execute efficiently on data-parallel problems, but most CPU codes, including those for Monte Carlo neutral particle transport, are predominantly task-parallel. WARP uses a data-parallel neutron transport algorithm to take advantage of the computing power GPUs offer.

Bergmann, Ryan M.↗

SAM Enhancements for Air-Ingress Event Modeling in HTGRs

The SAM code is under development and supported by DOE-NE’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program as a modern system-level modeling and simulation tool for advanced non-light water reactor safety analyses. These advanced reactor concepts incorporate novel and improved approaches to achieve safety and economic feasibility. This report summarizes recent efforts and progress in addressing the code capability gaps in SAM for the modeling of the air-ingress phenomenon in High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactors (HTGRs). The capability enhancements implemented to the code include: a multi-component flow model to capture the air-helium mixture during air ingress, a 0-D graphite oxidation model to capture the reaction of graphite with oxygen in the air, and an isentropic critical flow model to more accurately predict the de-pressurization of the reactor system due to a small break in the primary loop. Verification cases and demonstrations are provided to showcase these capabilities in SAM. Existing gaps in the code’s capability are also identified.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

TRACE Input Modernization

This work presents a Tom’s Obvious Minimal Language (TOML)-based representation of input for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s TRAC/RELAP Advanced Computational Engine (TRACE) thermal hydraulics code. Implemented using the Workbench Analysis Sequence Processor (WASP), the approach maps traditional TRACE input structures to a hierarchical format composed of named parameters, typed values, and native data collections. The resulting representation preserves TRACE’s existing modeling capabilities while providing a modern, structured interface for model development and management. WASP further extends TOML through a file import directive that supports modular model composition and reusable input organization. In addition, WASP provides extended array data entry convenience with various data repeat and interpolation capabilities. Examples of the new TOML syntax are provided for major TRACE input categories, including hydraulic components, heat structures, control systems, and trip logic. The TOML representation establishes a foundation for improved validation, tooling, automation, and model maintainability while remaining compatible with existing TRACE workflows. To facilitate migration to the TOML-based input format, the TRACE executable now supports conversion of native TRACE input into an intermediate JSON representation. A Python utility subsequently transforms the JSON data into an equivalent TOML model. Lastly, the TRACE executable now supports execution using TOML-formatted input.

Lefebvre, Robert A. [Oak Ridge National Laboratory↗

Extreme Scale Plasma Turbulence Simulations on Top Supercomputers Worldwide

The goal of the extreme scale plasma turbulence studies described in this paper is to expedite the delivery of reliable predictions on confinement physics in large magnetic fusion systems by using world-class supercomputers to carry out simulations with unprecedented resolution and temporal duration. This has involved architecture-dependent optimizations of performance scaling and addressing code portability and energy issues, with the metrics for multi-platform comparisons being 'time-to-solution' and 'energy-to-solution'. Realistic results addressing how confinement losses caused by plasma turbulence scale from present-day devices to the much larger $25 billion international ITER fusion facility have been enabled by innovative advances in the GTC-P code including (i) implementation of one-sided communication from MPI 3.0 standard; (ii) creative optimization techniques on Xeon Phi processors; and (iii) development of a novel performance model for the key kernels of the PIC code. Our results show that modeling data movement is sufficient to predict performance on modern supercomputer platforms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗