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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 37 records · Page 2

Cross-scale Efficient Tensor Contractions for Coupled Cluster Computations Through Multiple Programming Model Backends

Coupled-cluster methods provide highly accurate models of molecular structure by explicit numerical calculation of tensors representing the correlation between electrons. These calculations are dominated by a sequence of tensor contractions, motivating the development of numerical libraries for such operations. While based on matrix-matrix multiplication, these libraries are specialized to exploit symmetries in the molecular structure and in electronic interactions, and thus reduce the size of the tensor representation and the complexity of contractions. The resulting algorithms are irregular and their parallelization has been previously achieved via the use of dynamic scheduling or specialized data decompositions. We introduce our efforts to extend the Libtensor framework to work in the distributed memory environment in a scalable and energy efficient manner. We achieve up to 240 speedup compared with the best optimized shared memory implementation. We attain scalability to hundreds of thousands of compute cores on three distributed-memory architectures, (Cray XC30&XC40, BlueGene/Q), and on a heterogeneous GPU-CPU system (Cray XK7). As the bottlenecks shift from being compute-bound DGEMM's to communication-bound collectives as the size of the molecular system scales, we adopt two radically different parallelization approaches for handling load-imbalance. Nevertheless, we preserve a uni ed interface to both programming models to maintain the productivity of computational quantum chemists.

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS↗

Cross-scale efficient tensor contractions for coupled cluster computations through multiple programming model backends

Coupled-cluster methods provide highly accurate models of molecular structure through explicit numerical calculation of tensors representing the correlation between electrons. These calculations are dominated by a sequence of tensor contractions, motivating the development of numerical libraries for such operations. While based on matrix–matrix multiplication, these libraries are specialized to exploit symmetries in the molecular structure and in electronic interactions, and thus reduce the size of the tensor representation and the complexity of contractions. The resulting algorithms are irregular and their parallelization has been previously achieved via the use of dynamic scheduling or specialized data decompositions. We introduce our efforts to extend the Libtensor framework to work in the distributed memory environment in a scalable and energy-efficient manner. We achieve up to 240× speedup compared with the optimized shared memory implementation of Libtensor. We attain scalability to hundreds of thousands of compute cores on three distributed-memory architectures (Cray XC30 and XC40, and IBM Blue Gene/Q), and on a heterogeneous GPU-CPU system (Cray XK7). As the bottlenecks shift from being compute-bound DGEMM's to communication-bound collectives as the size of the molecular system scales, we adopt two radically different parallelization approaches for handling load-imbalance, tasking and bulk synchronous models. Nevertheless, we preserve a unified interface to both programming models to maintain the productivity of computational quantum chemists.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Cluster Computation of Flight Reynolds Number Flows

The performance of a workstation cluster used for the solution of the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations is compared with a conventional vector supercomputer architecture. The application simulation of the steady flowfield about a transonic transport was computed using an implicit diagonal scheme in an overset mesh framework. Static load balancing was used, while coarse grain decomposition was achieved by solution of a grid zone per processor. Price/performance ratios are estimated for several scenarios in which such clusters may be utilized.

Atwood, Christopher A.↗

Magic Numbers and Stabilities of Photoionized Water Clusters: Computational and Experimental Characterization of the Nanosolvated Hydronium Ion

The stability and distributions of small water clusters generated in a supersonic beam expansion are interrogated by tunable vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) radiation generated at a synchrotron. Time-of-flight mass spectrometry reveals enhanced population of various protonated water clusters (H + (H 2 O) $n$ ) based upon ionization energy and photoionization distance from source, suggesting there are "magic" numbers below the traditional $n$ = 21 that predominates in the literature. These intensity distributions suggest that VUV threshold photoionization (11.0-11.5 eV) of neutral water clusters close to the nozzle exit leads to a different nonequilibrium state compared to a skimmed molecular beam. This results in the appearance of a new magic number at 14. Metadynamics conformer searches coupled with modern density functional calculations are used to identify the global minimum energy structures of protonated water clusters between $n$ = 2 and 21, as well as the manifold of low-lying metastable minima. New lowest energy structures are reported for the cases of $n$ = 5, 6, 11, 12, 16, and 18, and special stability is identified by several measures. These theoretical results are in agreement with the experiments performed in this work in that $n$ = 14 is shown to exhibit additional stability, based on the computed second-order stabilization energy relative to most cluster sizes, though not to the extent of the well-known $n$ = 21 cluster. Other cluster sizes that show some additional energetic stability are $n$ = 7, 9, 12, 17, and 19. To gain insight into the balance between ion-water and water-water interactions as a function of the cluster size, an analysis of the effective two-body interactions (which sum exactly to the total interaction energy) was performed. In conclusion, this analysis reveals a crossover as a function of cluster size between a water-hydronium-dominated regime for small clusters and a water-water-dominated regime for larger clusters around $n$ = 17.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Accurate excited-state energetics by a combination of Monte Carlo sampling and equation-of-motion coupled-cluster computations

The recently introduced idea of identifying the most important higher-than-doubly excited determinants in the ground-state coupled-cluster (CC) calculations through stochastic configuration interaction Quantum Monte Carlo propagations [J.E. Deustua, J. Shen, and P. Piecuch, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 223003 (2017)] is extended to excited electronic states via the equation-of-motion (EOM) CC methodology. The advantages of the new method are illustrated by calculations aimed at recovering the ground- and excited-state energies of the CH + molecule at the equilibrium and stretched geometries resulting from the EOMCC calculations with a full treatment of singles, doubles, and triples.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Predicting Cost/Performance Trade-Offs for Whitney: A Commodity Computing Cluster

Recent advances in low-end processor and network technology have made it possible to build a "supercomputer" out of commodity components. We develop simple models of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks version 2 (NPB 2) to explore the cost/performance trade-offs involved in building a balanced parallel computer supporting a scientific workload. We develop closed form expressions detailing the number and size of messages sent by each benchmark. Coupling these with measured single processor performance, network latency, and network bandwidth, our models predict benchmark performance to within 30%. A comparison based on total system cost reveals that current commodity technology (200 MHz Pentium Pros with 100baseT Ethernet) is well balanced for the NPBs up to a total system cost of around $1,000,000.

Becker, Jeffrey C.↗

Predicting Cost/Performance Trade-offs For Whitney: A Commodity Computing Cluster

Recent advances in low-end processor and network technology have made it possible to build a "supercomputer" out of commodity components. We develop simple models of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks version 2 (NPB 2) to explore the cost/performance trade-offs involved in building a balanced parallel computer supporting a scientific workload. By measuring single processor benchmark performance, network latency, and network bandwidth, and using closed form expressions detailing the number and size of messages sent by each benchmark, our models predict benchmark performance to within 30%. A comparison based on total system cost reveals that current commodity technology (200 MHz Pentium Pros with 100baseT Ethernet) is well balanced for the NPBs up to a total system cost of around $ 1,000,000.

Becker, Jeffrey C.↗

Accessing protected data by a high-performance computing cluster

A data protection system is provided that allows applications to access protected data in a way that restricts applications from outputting to unauthorized targets any unprotected data derived from the protected data and that ensures that the applications do not have access to a key that allows access to the unprotected data. The data protection system provides a policy server that may execute on a service node of a high performance computing system and a data encryption process that may execute on each compute node that is allocated to an application or batch job. The policy server maintains policies of entities specifying access control for protected data. The data encryption process generates a secure execution environment for an application process and interfaces with the policy server to retrieve keys for decrypting protected data in accordance with a policy, and it decrypts and provides the decrypted data to the application process.

Barnes, Peter↗

Developing MiniApps on Modern Platforms Using Multiple Programming Models, In: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing

We have developed a set of reduced, proxy applications ("MiniApps") based on large-scale application codes supported at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). The MiniApps are designed to encapsulate the details of the most important (i.e. the most time-consuming and/or unique) facets of the applications that run in production mode on the OLCF. In each case, we have produced or plan to produce individual versions of the MiniApps using different specific programming models (e.g., OpenACC, CUDA, OpenMP). We describe some of our initial observations regarding these different implementations along with estimates of how closely the MiniApps track the actual performance characteristics (in particular, the overall scalability) of the large-scale applications from which they are derived.

Computer Science↗

Exploring Memory Hierarchy to Improve Scientific Data Read Performance, In: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing

Improving read performance is one of the major challenges with speeding up scientific data analytic applications. Utilizing the memory hierarchy is one major line of researches to address the read performance bottleneck. Related methods usually combine solide-state-drives(SSDs) with dynamic random-access memory(DRAM) and/or parallel file system(PFS) to mitigate the speed and space gap between DRAM and PFS. However, these methods are unable to handle key performance issues plaguing SSDs, namely read contention that may cause up to 50% performance reduction. In this paper, we propose a framework that exploits the memory hierarchy resource to address the read contention issues involved with SSDs. The framework employs a general purpose online read algorithm that able to detect and utilize memory hierarchy resource to relieve the problem. To maintain a near optimal operating environment for SSDs, the framework is able to orchastrate data chunks across different memory layers to facilitate the read algorithm. Compared to existing tools, our framework achieves up to 50% read performance improvement when tested on datasets from real-world scientific simulations.

Computer Science↗

Fast Fault Injection and Sensitivity Analysis for Collective Communications, In: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing

The collective communication operations, which are widely used in parallel applications for global communication and synchronization are critical for application's performance and scalability. However, how faulty collective communications impact the application and how errors propagate between the application processes is largely unexplored. One of the critical reasons for this situation is the lack of fast evaluation method to investigate the impacts of faulty collective operations. The traditional random fault injection methods relying on a large amount of fault injection tests to ensure statistical significance require a significant amount of resources and time. These methods result in prohibitive evaluation cost when applied to the collectives. In this paper, we introduce a novel tool named Fast Fault Injection and Sensitivity Analysis Tool (FastFIT) to conduct fast fault injection and characterize the application sensitivity to faulty collectives. The tool achieves fast exploration by reducing the exploration space and predicting the application sensitivity using Machine Learning (ML) techniques. A basis for these techniques are implicit correlations between MPI semantics, application context, critical application features, and application responses to faulty collective communications. The experimental results show that our approach reduces the fault injection points and tests by 97% for representative benchmarks (NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB)) and a realistic application (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS)) on a production supercomputer. Further, we statistically generalize the application sensitivity to faulty collective communications for these workloads, and present correlation between application features and the sensitivity.

Computer Science↗

TRIO: Burst Buffer Based I/O Orchestration, In: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing

The growing computing power on leadership HPC systems is often accompanied by ever-escalating failure rates. Checkpointing is a common defensive mechanism used by scientific applications for failure recovery. However, directly writing the large and bursty checkpointing dataset to parallel file systems can incur significant I/O contention on storage servers. Such contention in turn degrades bandwidth utilization of storage servers and prolongs the average job I/O time of concurrent applications. Recently burst buffers have been proposed as an intermediate layer to absorb the bursty I/O traffic from compute nodes to storage backend. But an I/O orchestration mechanism is still desirable to efficiently move checkpointing data from burst buffers to storage backend. In this paper, we propose a burst buffer based I/O orchestration framework, named TRIO, to intercept and reshape the bursty writes for better sequential write traffic to storage servers. Meanwhile, TRIO coordinates the flushing orders among concurrent burst buffers to alleviate the contention on storage server. Our experimental results demonstrated that TRIO could efficiently utilize storage bandwidth and reduce the average job I/O time by 37% on average for data-intensive applications in typical checkpointing scenarios.

Computer Science↗

An Approach to Selecting Thread + Process Mixes for Hybrid MPI + OpenMP Applications, In: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing

Hybrid MPI + OpenMP is a popular means of programming modern machines that feature substantial parallelism both off-node and on-node. Determining the right mix of the two programming models to use, however, is not as straightforward as simply using exclusively OpenMP on-node and limiting MPI to only inter-node communication. We present a step-by-step methodology to help make the decision of which mix of the two programming models to use. It starts with an estimate of the performance of a generic hybrid application on a given machine and incorporates additional available information about the specific application and the machine to provide guidance for selecting effective mixes of MPI processes and OpenMP threads to use when running that application on the machine in question. We validate our approach on four different applications on an IBM Blue Gene/Q, a Cray XK7, and a Cray XC30.

Computer Science↗