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At least 361 records · Page 20

STAR Data Production Workflow on HPC: Lessons Learned & Best Practices

The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) is a multi-national supported experiment located at Brookhaven National Lab. The raw physics data captured from the detector is on the order of tens of PBytes per data acquisition campaign, which makes STAR fit well within the definition of a big data science experiment. The production of the data has typically run on standard nodes or on standard Grid computing environments. All embedding simulations (complex workflow mixing real and simulated events) have been run on standard Linux resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) aka PDSF. However, HPC resources such as Cori have become available for STAR's data production as well as embedding, and STAR has been the very first experiment to show feasibility of running a sustainable data production campaign on this computing resource. The use of Docker containers with Shifter is required to run on HPC @ NERSC - this approach encapsulates the environment in which a standard STAR workflow runs. From the deployment of a tailored Scientific Linux environment (requiring many of its own libraries and special configurations required to run) to the deployment of third-party software and the STAR specific software stack, it has become impractical to rely on a set of containers containing each specific software release. To this extent, solutions based on the CERN VM File System (CVMFS) for the deployment of software and services have been employed in HENP, but one needs to make careful scalability considerations when using a resource like Cori, such as not allowing all software to be deployed in containers or bare node. Additionally, CVMFS clients are not compatible on Cori nodes and one needs to rely on an indirect NFS/DVS mount scheme. In our contribution, we will discuss our strategies from the past and our current solution based on CVMFS. Furthermore, running on HPC is not a simple task as each aspect of the workflow must be enabled to scale, run efficiently, and the workflow needs to fit within the boundaries of the provided queue system (SLURM in this case). Lastly, we will also discuss what we have learned so far about what is the best method for grouping jobs to maximize a single 48 core HPC node within a specific time frame and maximize our workflow efficiency.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

OLCF’s Advanced Computing Ecosystem (ACE): FY24 Efforts for the DOE Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) Program

This report highlights significant strides made by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in advancing computational research and infrastructure. Through the Advanced Computing Ecosystem (ACE) strategic initiative, OLCF has been successfully integrated with Doe’s Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) program, establishing itself as a critical framework for enhancing scientific computing capabilities across various domains. This report outlines the activities, accomplishments, and future directions of ACE, emphasizing its role in developing cutting-edge technologies, supporting science pilots, and fostering collaborations that drive scientific innovation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Developing Capabilities in Physical and Computational Sciences

The Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate (PCSD) performs fundamental research in support of the science missions of Offices of Basic Energy Sciences (BES), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), High Energy Physics (HEP), Nuclear Physics (NP), and Fusion Energy Sciences (FES), and others within the domains of the chemical, materials, computational sciences, mathematics, and physics. This LDRD project aims to provide funding to develop/demonstrate research capabilities for proposals and publications to support these science missions. Staff will propose small research tasks/projects to be performed under this overall project.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Message Passing vs. Shared Address Space on a Cluster of SMPs

The convergence of scalable computer architectures using clusters of PCs (or PC-SMPs) with commodity networking has become an attractive platform for high end scientific computing. Currently, message-passing and shared address space (SAS) are the two leading programming paradigms for these systems. Message-passing has been standardized with MPI, and is the most common and mature programming approach. However message-passing code development can be extremely difficult, especially for irregular structured computations. SAS offers substantial ease of programming, but may suffer from performance limitations due to poor spatial locality, and high protocol overhead. In this paper, we compare the performance of and programming effort, required for six applications under both programming models on a 32 CPU PC-SMP cluster. Our application suite consists of codes that typically do not exhibit high efficiency under shared memory programming. due to their high communication to computation ratios and complex communication patterns. Results indicate that SAS can achieve about half the parallel efficiency of MPI for most of our applications: however, on certain classes of problems SAS performance is competitive with MPI. We also present new algorithms for improving the PC cluster performance of MPI collective operations.

Shan, Hongzhang↗

Learning in Modal Space: Solving Time-Dependent Stochastic PDEs Using Physics-Informed Neural Networks

One of the open problems in scientific computing is the long-time integration of nonlinear stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs), especially with arbitrary initial data. We address this problem by taking advantage of recent advances in scientific machine learning and the spectral dynamically orthogonal (DO) and borthogonal (BO) methods for representing stochastic processes. The recently introduced DO/BO methods reduce the SPDE to solving a system of deterministic PDEs and a system of stochastic ordinary differential equations. Specifically, we propose two new physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for solving time-dependent SPDEs, namely the neural network (NN)-DO/BO methods. The proposed methods incorporate the DO/BO constraints into the loss function (along with the modal decomposition of the SPDE) with an implicit form instead of generating explicit expressions for the temporal derivatives of the DO/BO modes. Hence, the NN-DO/BO methods can overcome some of the drawbacks of the original DO/BO methods. For example, we do not need the assumption that the covariance matrix of the random coefficients is invertible as in the original DO method, and we can remove the assumption of no eigenvalue crossing as in the original BO method. Moreover, the NN-DO/BO methods can be used to solve time-dependent stochastic inverse problems with the same formulation and same computational complexity as for forward problems. Furthermore, we demonstrate the capability of the proposed methods via several numerical examples, namely: (1) A linear stochastic advection equation with deterministic initial condition: we obtain good results with the proposed methods, while the original DO/BO methods cannot be applied directly in this case. (2) Long-time integration of the stochastic Burgers' equation: we show the good performance of NN-DO/BO methods, especially the effectiveness of the NN-BO approach for such problems with many eigenvalue crossings during the whole time evolution, while the original BO method fails. (3) Nonlinear reaction diffusion equation: we consider both the forward problem and the inverse problems, including very noisy initial point values, to investigate the flexibility of the NN-DO/BO methods in handling inverse and mixed type problems. Taken together, these simulation results demonstrate that the NN-DO/BO methods can be employed to effectively quantify uncertainty propagation in a wide range of physical problems, but future work should address the efficiency issue of PINNs for forward problems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Scaling the memory wall using mixed-precision - HPG-MxP on an exascale-class machine

Mixed-precision algorithms have been proposed as a way for scientific computing to benefit from some of the gains seen for AI on recent high performance computing (HPC) platforms. A few applications dominated by dense matrix operations have seen substantial speedups by utilizing low precision formats such as FP16. However, a majority of scientific simulation applications are memory bandwidth limited. Beyond preliminary studies, the practical gain from using mixed-precision algorithms on a given high-performance computing (HPC) system is largely unclear. The High Performance GMRES Mixed Precision (HPG-MxP) benchmark has been proposed to measure the useful performance of a HPC system on sparse matrix-based mixed-precision applications. In this work, we present an implementation of the HPG-MxP benchmark for an exascale system and describe our algorithm enhancements. We show for the first time a speedup of 1.6x using a combination of double- and single-precision keeping the same residual level on modern GPU-based supercomputers.

Kashi, Aditya [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000325893792)↗

Computational Science at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Rev. 1) [Slides]

High Performance Computing (HPC) enables problem solving at the grandest scales, on the most complex challenges that face humanity. The problems often tackled by scientific computing are: Very complex; Cool; Using the fastest, most powerful supercomputers on the planet; Often important, impactful, effecting real lives.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

PETSc/TAO developments for GPU-based early exascale systems

The Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc) library provides scalable solvers for nonlinear time-dependent differential and algebraic equations and for numerical optimization via the Toolkit for Advanced Optimization (TAO). PETSc is used in dozens of scientific fields and is an important building block for many simulation codes. During the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, the PETSc team has made substantial efforts to enable efficient utilization of the massive fine-grain parallelism present within exascale compute nodes and to enable performance portability across exascale architectures. We recap some of the challenges that designers of numerical libraries face in such an endeavor, and then discuss the many developments we have made, which include the addition of new GPU backends, features supporting efficient on-device matrix assembly, better support for asynchronicity and GPU kernel concurrency, and new communication infrastructure. In conclusion, we evaluate the performance of these developments on some pre-exascale systems as well as the early exascale systems Frontier and Aurora, using compute kernel, communication layer, solver, and mini-application benchmark studies, and then close with a few observations drawn from our experiences on the tension between portable performance and other goals of numerical libraries.

Exascale Computing Project (ECP)↗

Molecular Level Understanding of the Free Energy Landscape in Early Stages of Metal-Organic Framework Nucleation

The assembly mechanism of hierarchical materials controlled by the choice of solvent and presence of spectator ions. In this paper, we use enhanced sampling molecular dynamics methods to investigate these effects on the configurational landscape of metal-linker interactions in the early stages of synthesis, using MIL-101(Cr) as a prototypical example. Microsecond-long well-tempered metadynamics (WTmetaD) uncover a complex free energy structural landscape, with distinct crystal (C) and non-crystal (NC) like configurations and their equilibrium population. In presence of ions (Na+, F-), we observe a complex effect on the crystallinity of secondary building units (SBUs), by encouraging/suppressing salt bridges between C configurations and consequently controlling the percentage of defects. Solvent effects are assessed by introducing N, N-dimethylformamide (DMF) instead of water, where SBU adducts are appreciably more stable and compact. These results shed light on how solvent nature and ionic strength impact the free energy of nucleation phenomena that ultimately control materials synthesis and defect formation. The work described in this publication was supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences and performed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The authors acknowledge the use of the UCL Legion High Performance Computing Facility (Legion @ UCL) and associated support services in the completion of this work. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Centre, a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Battelle operates PNNL for DOE under Contract DE-AC05-76RL01830.

Kollias, Loukas↗

Case Study of Using Kokkos and SYCLs Performance-Portable Frameworks for Milc-Dslash Benchmark on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs

Six of the top ten supercomputers in the TOP500 list from June 2021 rely on NVIDIA GPUs to achieve their peak compute bandwidth. With the announcement of Aurora, Frontier, and El Capitan, Intel and AMD have also entered the domain of providing GPUs for scientific computing. A consequence of the increased diversity in the GPU landscape is the emergence of portable programming models such as Kokkos, SYCL, OpenCL, and OpenMP, which allow application developers to maintain a single-source code across a diverse range of hardware architectures. While the portable frameworks try to optimize the compute resource usage on a given architecture, it is the programmers responsibility to expose parallelism in an application that can take advantage of thousands of processing elements available on GPUs. In this paper, we introduce a GPU-friendly parallel implementation of Milc-Dslash that exposes multiple hierarchies of parallelism in the algorithm. Milc-Dslash was designed to serve as a benchmark with highly optimized matrix-vector multiplications to measure the resource utilization on the GPU systems. The parallel hierarchies in the Milc-Dslash algorithm are mapped onto a target hardware using Kokkos and SYCL programming models. We present the performance achieved by Kokkos and SYCL implementations of Milc-Dslash on NVIDIA A100 GPU, AMD MI100 GPU, and Intel Gen9 GPU. Additionally, we compare the Kokkos and SYCL performances with those obtained from the versions written in CUDA and HIP programming models on NVIDIA A100 GPU and AMD MI100 GPU, respectively.

Dufek, Amanda S↗

Interactive access and management for four-dimensional environmental data sets using McIDAS

This grant has fundamentally changed the way that meteorologists look at the output of their atmospheric models, through the development and wide distribution of the Vis5D system. The Vis5D system is also gaining acceptance among oceanographers and atmospheric chemists. Vis5D gives these scientists an interactive three-dimensional movie of their very large data sets that they can use to understand physical mechanisms and to trace problems to their sources. This grant has also helped to define the future direction of scientific visualization through the development of the VisAD system and its lattice data model. The VisAD system can be used to interactively steer and visualize scientific computations. A key element of this capability is the flexibility of the system's data model to adapt to a wide variety of scientific data, including the integration of several forms of scientific metadata.

Hibbard, William L.↗

Two-Tower Quantum Matrix Chain Multiplication: Trading Qubits for Depth

Matrix chain multiplication -- computing $\mathcal{W} = M^{(0)}\cdots M^{(K-1)}$ where $M^{(k)} \in \mathbb{R}^{P_k \times P_{k+1}}$-- arises in scientific computing, machine learning, and graph analysis. Despite the importance of this problem, for chains of distinct matrices, the classical number of operations grows linearly with the chain length $K$ and polynomially in the matrix dimensions. We present \emph{Two-Tower Matrix Multiplication}, a quantum subroutine that encodes the product $\mathcal{W}$ of the $K$ matrices into a quantum state in circuit depth $\mathcal{O}(\max_{k} \mathrm{polylog} (P_k P_{k+1}))$, which is independent of~$K$ within the QRAM-based state-preparation model, whereas the qubit count is $\mathcal{O}\bigl(\sum_{k} \log P_k \bigr)$; the total gate count remains linear in $K$, so the gain is in the circuit depth. The construction interleaves state-preparation operators across two layers; within each layer, all operators act on disjoint registers and execute in parallel. This subroutine can be specialized for the chain-vector case, which computes the product of $K-1$ matrices applied to a vector. We prove the correctness of the subroutine for all $K$ and provide two implementations using the Qiskit and QCLAB frameworks. The subroutine is applicable to any downstream quantum algorithm that operates on a matrix encoded in the statevector, including norm estimation, graph-matrix powers, linear system solving, and quantum machine learning kernels.

Antonioli, Giacomo [Pisa U.] (ORCID:00090000668703↗

Computational Requirements in Clean Energy and Manufacturing: Summary report of the virtual workshop held on June 28-29, 2021

On June 28–29, 2021, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program in the Office of Science convened a workshop with the Energy Efficiency and Renew able Energy (EERE) program offices to assess the future need for advanced computing resources in the areas of clean energy and advanced manufacturing. In part, this discussion served as an update to earlier workshops and townhalls. ASCR is guided by DOE mission needs as it develops research programs, computers, and networks at the leading edge of technologies. As the exascale computing era dawns, technology changes are creating new opportunities for those who must use high-performance computing (HPC) and data systems effectively. The ASCR computing facilities are augmenting their strategy to adapt to changing science needs and emerging technologies and to leverage the utility of exascale computing across the federal government.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A toolbox and record for scientific models

Computational science presents a host of challenges for the field of knowledge-based software design. Scientific computation models are difficult to construct. Models constructed by one scientist are easily misapplied by other scientists to problems for which they are not well-suited. Finally, models constructed by one scientist are difficult for others to modify or extend to handle new types of problems. Construction of scientific models actually involves much more than the mechanics of building a single computational model. In the course of developing a model, a scientist will often test a candidate model against experimental data or against a priori expectations. Test results often lead to revisions of the model and a consequent need for additional testing. During a single model development session, a scientist typically examines a whole series of alternative models, each using different simplifying assumptions or modeling techniques. A useful scientific software design tool must support these aspects of the model development process as well. In particular, it should propose and carry out tests of candidate models. It should analyze test results and identify models and parts of models that must be changed. It should determine what types of changes can potentially cure a given negative test result. It should organize candidate models, test data, and test results into a coherent record of the development process. Finally, it should exploit the development record for two purposes: (1) automatically determining the applicability of a scientific model to a given problem; (2) supporting revision of a scientific model to handle a new type of problem. Existing knowledge-based software design tools must be extended in order to provide these facilities.

Ellman, Thomas↗

Development of a multi-layer canopy model for E3SM Land Model with support for heterogeneous computing

The vertical structure of vegetation canopies creates micro-climates. However, the land components of most Earth System Models, including the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), typically neglect vertical canopy structure by using a single layer big-leaf representation to simulate water, CO 2 , and energy exchanges between the land and the atmosphere. In this study, we developed a Multi-Layer Canopy Model for the E3SM Land Model to resolve the micro-climate created by vegetation canopies. The model developed in this study re-implements the CLM-ml_v1 to support heterogeneous computing architectures consisting of CPUs and GPUs and includes three additional optimization-based stomatal conductance models. The use of Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation provides a speedup of 25–50 times on a GPU relative to a CPU. The numerical implementation of the model was verified against CLM-ml_v1 for a month-long simulation using data from the Ameriflux US-University of Michigan Biological Station site. Model structural uncertainty was explored by performing control simulations for five stomatal conductance models that exclude and include the control of plant hydrodynamics (PHD) on photosynthesis. The bias in simulated sensible and latent heat fluxes was lower when PHD was accounted for in the model. Additionally, six idealized simulations were performed to study the impact of three environmental variables (i.e. air temperature, atmospheric CO 2 , and soil moisture) on canopy processes (i.e. net CO 2 assimilation, leaf temperature, and leaf water potential). Increasing air temperature reduced net CO 2 assimilation and increased air temperature. Net CO 2 assimilation increased at higher atmospheric CO 2 , while decreasing soil moisture resulted in lower leaf water potential.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Deploying and Operating CephFS for Scientific Applications at Fermilab

Fermilab has been running a Ceph cluster in production for several years to support high-throughput scientific computing. Our primary use case is CephFS, which serves interactive data analysis workloads, with growing interest in using RGW for scalable object storage of scientific datasets. In this talk, we'll share lessons learned from successfully deploying and maintaining our Ceph cluster with cephadm, including challenges faced, performance tuning, and operational practices. We'll also present custom tools we've developed to streamline monitoring and management and discuss how Ceph fits into our broader storage architecture for large-scale scientific research.

Peisker, Alison [Fermilab]↗

Influence of computational fluid dynamics on experimental aerospace facilities: A fifteen year projection

An assessment was made of the impact of developments in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) on the traditional role of aerospace ground test facilities over the next fifteen years. With improvements in CFD and more powerful scientific computers projected over this period it is expected to have the capability to compute the flow over a complete aircraft at a unit cost three orders of magnitude lower than presently possible. Over the same period improvements in ground test facilities will progress by application of computational techniques including CFD to data acquisition, facility operational efficiency, and simulation of the light envelope; however, no dramatic change in unit cost is expected as greater efficiency will be countered by higher energy and labor costs.

Source record↗

History of the numerical aerodynamic simulation program

The Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation (NAS) program has reached a milestone with the completion of the initial operating configuration of the NAS Processing System Network. This achievement is the first major milestone in the continuing effort to provide a state-of-the-art supercomputer facility for the national aerospace community and to serve as a pathfinder for the development and use of future supercomputer systems. The underlying factors that motivated the initiation of the program are first identified and then discussed. These include the emergence and evolution of computational aerodynamics as a powerful new capability in aerodynamics research and development, the computer power required for advances in the discipline, the complementary nature of computation and wind tunnel testing, and the need for the government to play a pathfinding role in the development and use of large-scale scientific computing systems. Finally, the history of the NAS program is traced from its inception in 1975 to the present time.

Peterson, Victor L.↗