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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 379 records · Page 21

Parallel-in-Time Simulation Algorithm for Power Electronics: MMC-HVdc System

The complexity in simulating power electronics like modular multilevel converters (MMCs) requires simulation algorithms to speed-up the process. Existing simulation algorithms exploit spatial parallelism to speed-up simulation. With rise in complexity of power electronics and presence of increased number of states within them, there are limits in the speed-up using spatial parallelism. In this paper, a temporal parallelism algorithm based on parallel-in-time methods is developed for simulation of power-electronics-systems. The temporal parallelism algorithm is based on computation of power-electronics-states on coarse and fine time-steps using different models. The models of power-electronics-systems used in coarse and fine time-steps are average-value and detailed models, respectively. The updates to states on coarse time-step are computed serially and are used to initialize the states on fine time-step. The updates on fine time-step are computed in parallel. A translation method is proposed in this paper to update the states on fine time-step from the simulations in the coarse time-step, and vice-versa. The proposed algorithm is applied to simulate MMCs and is validated with respect to a detailed reference MMC model. The proposed algorithm recorded a speed-up of up to 3.47× with 5 cores.

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Modular performance prediction for scientific workflows using Machine Learning

Scientific workflows provide an opportunity for declarative computational experiment design in an intuitive and efficient way. A distributed workflow is typically executed on a variety of resources, and it uses a variety of computational algorithms or tools to achieve the desired outcomes. Such a variety imposes additional complexity in scheduling these workflows on large scale computers. As computation becomes more distributed, insights into expected workload that a workflow presents become critical for effective resource allocation. In this paper, we present a modular framework that leverages Machine Learning for creating precise performance predictions of a workflow. The central idea is to partition a workflow in such a way that makes the task of forecasting each atomic unit manageable and gives us a way to combine the individual predictions efficiently. We recognize a combination of an executable and a specific physical resource as a single module. This gives us a handle to characterize workload and machine power as a single unit of prediction. Overall, our modular technique of creating atomic modules and deployment of longest-path approach to estimate workflow performance, allows the framework to adapt to highly complex nested directed acyclic workflows and scale to new scenarios, since it does not make assumptions of underlying workflow structure. We present performance estimation results of independent workflow modules executed on the XSEDE SDSC Comet cluster using various Machine Learning algorithms. The results provide insights into the behavior and effectiveness of different algorithms in the context of scientific workflow performance prediction.

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COHORT: Coordination of Heterogeneous Thermostatically Controlled Loads for Demand Flexibility

Demand flexibility is increasingly important for power grids. Careful coordination of thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) can modulate energy demand, decrease operating costs, and increase grid resiliency. We propose a novel distributed control framework for the Coordination Of HeterOgeneous Residential Thermostatically controlled loads (COHORT). COHORT is a practical, scalable, and versatile solution that coordinates a population of TCLs to jointly optimize a grid-level objective, while satisfying each TCL’s end-use requirements and operational constraints. To achieve that, we decompose the grid-scale problem into subproblems and coordi- nate their solutions to find the global optimum using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The TCLs’ local problems are distributed to and computed in parallel at each TCL, making COHORT highly scalable and privacy-preserving. While each TCL poses combinatorial and non-convex constraints, we characterize these constraints as a convex set through relaxation, thereby making COHORT computationally viable over long planning horizons. After coordination, each TCL is responsible for its own control and tracks the agreed-upon power trajectory with its preferred strategy. In this work, we translate continuous power back to discrete on/off actuation, using pulse width modulation. COHORT is generalizable to a wide range of grid objectives, which we demonstrate through three distinct use cases: generation following, minimizing ramping, and peak load curtailment. In a notable experiment, we validated our approach through a hardware-in-the-loop simulation, including a real-world air conditioner (AC) controlled via a smart thermostat, and simulated instances of ACs modeled after real-world data traces. During the 15-day experimental period, COHORT reduced daily peak loads by an average of 12.5% and maintained comfortable temperatures.

demand response↗

POSTER: Automatic Differentiation of Parallel Loops with Formal Methods

The accompanying poster to this short paper presents a combination of reverse mode AD and formal methods to enable efficient differentiation of (or backpropagation through) shared-memory parallel code. Compared to the state of the art, our approach can more often avoid the need for atomic updates or private data copies during the parallel derivative computation, even in the presence of unstructured or data-dependent data access patterns. This is achieved by gathering information about the memory access patterns from the input program, which is assumed to be correctly parallelized. This information is then used to build a model of assertions in a theorem prover, which can be used to check the safety of shared memory accesses during the parallel derivative computation

Automatic Differentiation↗

Parallel Multigrid in Time and Space for Extreme-Scale Computational Science

The coming massive parallelism of exascale computing presents a pressing challenge for the many DOE simulations of time-dependent partial differential equations, which typically use traditional sequential time stepping methods. Since this traditional approach is inherently serial, it presents a sequential bottleneck when moving to exascale computing, because future performance gains will come through greater concurrency, not faster clock speeds. Thus, the goal of this work is to research parallelism in time, i.e., methods that compute multiple time values simultaneously, not sequentially. The focus will be on hyperbolic and chaotic problems of programmatic interest to DOE, with the goal of enabling scalable simulations of time-dependent hyperbolic and chaotic problems on future architectures.

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Chapter 1: Looking Forward: The Promise and Challenge of Exascale Computing

The demand for HFM development and HPC resources for improved predictive modelling capability for wind energy will continue to grow as industry and government seek solutions to (1) mitigate risk and uncertainty of technology development at multimegawatt-turbine scales, (2) address new requirements driving renewable energy deployment and high -penetration scenarios, (3) understand the impacts of multiple gigawatt-scale plant deployments on microclimatology and grid architectures for both land-based and offshore installation, and (4) evolve the systems and processes needed for the dispatch of renewable energy generation on a national scale supporting a mix of power-generation technologies. When considering the cost of developing a new offshore multimegawatt commercial wind turbine product line or the financial risk of a large offshore wind plant deployment, predictive HPC and HFM simulations that incorporate integrated design, cost analysis, and O&M predictions will become an essential part of the early design and development process.

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HYPPO: A Surrogate-Based Multi-Level Parallelism Tool for Hyperparameter Optimization

We present a new software, HYPPO, that enables the automatic tuning of hyperparameters of various deep learning (DL) models. Unlike other hyperparameter optimization (HPO) methods, HYPPO uses adaptive surrogate models and directly accounts for uncertainty in model predictions to find accurate and reliable models that make robust predictions. Using asynchronous nested parallelism, we are able to significantly alleviate the computational burden of training complex architectures and quantifying the uncertainty. HYPPO is implemented in Python and can be used with both TensorFlow and PyTorch libraries. We demonstrate various software features on time-series prediction and image classification problems as well as a scientific application in computed tomography image reconstruction. Finally, we show that (1) we can reduce by an order of magnitude the number of evaluations necessary to find the most optimal region in the hyperparameter space and (2) we can reduce by two orders of magnitude the throughput for such HPO process to complete.

adaptation models↗

OpenMP and MPI implementations of an elasto-viscoplastic fast Fourier transform-based micromechanical solver for fast crystal plasticity modeling

Here, we explore several parallel implementations of an elasto-viscoplastic fast Fourier transform (EVPFFT) model using Message Passing Interface (MPI), OpenMP, and a hybrid of MPI and OpenMP to efficiently predict micromechanical response of polycrystals. Performance studies using EVPFFT are performed based on domain decomposition over voxels of a periodic cell, which is a representative volume element (RVE) of polycrystalline copper. We begin by parallelizing the computationally intensive Newton–Raphson (NR) single crystal solver within EVPFFT. Next, we compare the performance of the serial and parallel FFTW (Fastest Fourier Transform in the West) using OpenMP (OpenMP-FFTW) and MPI (MPI-FFTW) with the original Numerical Recipes-based FOURN routine within EVPFFT. In the parallel environment, we find that the FFT calculations are best performed using the MPI version of FFTW. Finally, the remainder of the code, except read/write subroutines, is parallelized. Significant speedups of the original EVPFFT model are achieved using MPI on shared memory multicore workstations. Furthermore, results achieved on a distributed memory Cray supercomputer show promising strong and weak scalability and in some cases even super scalability for the single crystal NR solver in EVPFFT. MPI-FFTW also scales perfectly for microstructure RVEs larger than 64 3 FFT voxels. For example, the MPI-EVPFFT parallel version of the code accelerates the simulations for approximately two orders of magnitude using 64 cores over the old serial code for an RVE size of 128 3 . Finally, the parallel EVPFFT code developed in this work can run massive voxel-based microstructural RVEs taking the advantages of thousands of logical cores provided by more advanced clusters.

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DECA: scalable XHMM exome copy-number variant calling with ADAM and Apache Spark

Abstract Background XHMM is a widely used tool for copy-number variant (CNV) discovery from whole exome sequencing data but can require hours to days to run for large cohorts. A more scalable implementation would reduce the need for specialized computational resources and enable increased exploration of the configuration parameter space to obtain the best possible results. Results DECA is a horizontally scalable implementation of the XHMM algorithm using the ADAM framework and Apache Spark that incorporates novel algorithmic optimizations to eliminate unneeded computation. DECA parallelizes XHMM on both multi-core shared memory computers and large shared-nothing Spark clusters. We performed CNV discovery from the read-depth matrix in 2535 exomes in 9.3 min on a 16-core workstation (35.3× speedup vs. XHMM), 12.7 min using 10 executor cores on a Spark cluster (18.8× speedup vs. XHMM), and 9.8 min using 32 executor cores on Amazon AWS’ Elastic MapReduce. We performed CNV discovery from the original BAM files in 292 min using 640 executor cores on a Spark cluster. Conclusions We describe DECA’s performance, our algorithmic and implementation enhancements to XHMM to obtain that performance, and our lessons learned porting a complex genome analysis application to ADAM and Spark. ADAM and Apache Spark are a performant and productive platform for implementing large-scale genome analyses, but efficiently utilizing large clusters can require algorithmic optimizations and careful attention to Spark’s configuration parameters.

Linderman, Michael D. (ORCID:0000000296437148)↗

A space-time parallel algorithm with adaptive mesh refinement for computational fluid dynamics

This work describes a space-time parallel algorithm with space-time adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). AMR with subcycling is added to multigrid reduction-in-time (MGRIT) in order to provide solution efficient adaptive grids with a reduction in work performed on coarser grids. This algorithm is achieved by integrating two software libraries: XBraid (Parallel time integration with multigrid. https://computation.llnl.gov/projects/parallel-timeintegration-multigrid) and Chombo (Chombo software package for AMR applications—design document, 2014). The former is a parallel time integration library using multigrid and the latter is a massively parallel structured AMR library. Employing this adaptive space-time parallel algorithm is Chord (Comput Fluids 123:202–217, 2015), a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application code for solving compressible fluid dynamics problems. For the same solution accuracy, speedups are demonstrated from the use of space-time parallelization over the time-sequential integration on Couette flow and Stokes’ second problem. On a transient Couette flow case, at least a 1.5× speedup is achieved, and with a time periodic problem, a speedup of up to 13.7× over the time-sequential case is obtained. In both cases, the speedup is achieved by adding processors and exploring additional parallelization in time. The numerical experiments show the algorithm is promising for CFD applications that can take advantage of the time parallelism. Future work will focus on improving the parallel performance and providing more tests with complex fluid dynamics to demonstrate the full potential of the algorithm.

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A nonlinear data-driven reduced order model for computational homogenization with physics/pattern-guided sampling

Developing an accurate nonlinear reduced order model from simulation data has been an outstanding research topic for many years. For many physical systems, data collection is very expensive and the optimal data distribution is not known in advance. Thus, maximizing the information gain remains a grand challenge. In a recent paper, Bhattacharjee and Matouš (2016) proposed a manifold-based nonlinear reduced order model for multiscale problems in mechanics of materials. Expanding this work here, we develop a novel sampling strategy based on the physics/pattern-guided data distribution. Our adaptive sampling strategy relies on enrichment of sub-manifolds based on the principal stretches and rotational sensitivity analysis. This novel sampling strategy substantially decreases the number of snapshots needed for accurate reduced order model construction (i.e., ~5 x reduction of snapshots over Bhattacharjee and Matouš (2016)). Moreover, we build the nonlinear manifold using the displacement rather than deformation gradient data. We provide rigorous verification and error assessment. We demonstrate both localization and homogenization of the multiscale solution on a large particulate composite unit cell.

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Avoiding excess computation in asynchronous evolutionary algorithms

Abstract Asynchronous evolutionary algorithms are becoming increasingly popular as a means of making full use of many processors while solving computationally expensive search and optimization problems. These algorithms excel at keeping large clusters fully utilized, but may sometimes inefficiently sample an excess of fast‐evaluating solutions at the expense of higher‐quality, slow‐evaluating ones. We have previously introduced a steady‐state parent selection strategy, SWEET (“Selection whilE EvaluaTing”), that sometimes selects individuals that are still being evaluated and allows them to reproduce early. We perform a takeover‐time analysis that confirms that this strategy gives slow‐evaluating individuals that have higher fitnesses an increased ability to multiply in the population. We also find that SWEET appears effective at improving optimization performance on problems in which solution quality is positively correlated with evaluation time. We evaluate our approach on six simulated real‐valued optimization problems and three real‐world applications: an autonomous vehicle controller problem that involves tuning a spiking neural network and two adversarial EA problems. We further evaluate SWEET versus a basic asynchronous process in a simulated setting. We present evidence that SWEET outperforms basic asynchronous processes in a use‐case in which performance is positively correlated with evaluation time, and performs comparably (and often better) than basic asynchronous processes in several use‐cases where performance is negatively correlated with evaluation time. That said, in the cases where performance and evaluation time are negatively correlated the variance of outcomes for SWEET is notably high.

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Comparative Study of Finite Element Methods Using the Time-Accuracy-Size(TAS) Spectrum Analysis

We present a performance analysis appropriate for comparing algorithms using different numerical discretizations. By taking into account the total time-to-solution, numerical accuracy with respect to an error norm, and the computation rate, a cost-benefit analysis can be performed to determine which algorithm and discretization are particularly suited for an application. This work extends the performance spectrum model in for interpretation of hardware and algorithmic tradeoffs in numerical PDE simulation. As a proof-of-concept, popular finite element software packages are used to illustrate this analysis for Poisson’s equation.

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Motion Planning Algorithms for Safety and Quantum Computing Efficiency

Motion planning remains a fundamental problem in robotics. Sampling-based algorithms use randomization to allow efficient solutions to this complex problem. As mobile robots and autonomous vehicles become more prevalent in everyday life, motion planning must be applied to increasingly challenging scenarios. Safety has become a paramount concern in motion planning for ensuring robotic applications enrich human lives. To date, many motion planning techniques to increase safety in the face of uncertain and dynamic environments have been developed. This dissertation first addresses distributional safety of Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees (RRT) through our algorithm W-Safe RRT. To acknowledge distributional uncertainty and poor modeling, W-Safe RRT uses the Wasserstein metric to provide a probabilistic bound on the distributional distance between a robot and obstacles. Human-interpretable environmental agent classification allows online safety margin adaptation. We propose and analyze an integrating region method for online classification that increases actor labeling accuracy based on behavioral feature values when compared to state of the art methods. The method performs class assignments based on local maximum likelihood in a created behavioral feature-space, allowing a notion of classification uncertainty. Model-based methods with safety guarantees can quickly become computationally in tractable, especially with multiple agents, higher dimensions, and plentiful unknowns. Sampling based algorithms have been parallelized for computation with multi-core computers and GPUs. We consider the use of quantum algorithms and computers for sampling-based motion planning for the first time. Quantum computing performs operations on superpositions of states and can solve certain problems much more efficiently than classical computers, but introduces previously unseen challenges. With Quantum-RRT, we recast the motion planning problem into a database-search structure and use Quantum Amplitude Amplification to find reachable states in the database with a quadratic performance increase over classical methods. We address two error sources with this method: quantum measurement and quantum oracle errors. We then extend this method to Parallel Quantum-RRT, which uses a manager-worker architecture with multiple parallel quantum workers to increase database search efficiency. We compare algorithm architectures and characterize probabilities of multiple workers finding solutions. Lastly, we test in simulation the quantum algorithms against classical versions in a wide variety of scenarios, concluding that a similar parallelization improvement is to be found in the quantum case as was found in the parallelization of classical RRT.

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Node failure resiliency for Uintah without checkpointing

The frequency of failures in upcoming exascale supercomputers may well be greater than at present due to many-core architectures if component failure rates remain unchanged. This potential increase in failure frequency coupled with I/O challenges at exascale may prove problematic for current resiliency approaches such as checkpoint restarting, although the use of fast intermediate memory may help. Algorithm-Based Fault Tolerance (ABFT) using Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) is one resiliency approach used to address these challenges. For adaptive mesh codes, a coarse mesh version of the solu- tion may be used to restore the fine mesh solution. This paper addresses the implementation of the ABFT approach within the Uintah software framework: both at a software level within Uintah and in the data reconstruction method used for the recovery of lost data. This method has two problems: inaccuracies introduced during the reconstruction propagate forward in time, and the physical consistency of variables such as positivity or boundedness may be violated during interpolation. These challenges can be addressed by the combination of two techniques: 1. a fault-tolerant MPI implementation to recover from runtime node failures, and 2. high-order interpolation schemes to preserve the physical solution and reconstruct lost data. Here, the approach considered here uses a "Limited Essentially Non-Oscillatory" (LENO) scheme along with AMR to rebuild the lost data without checkpointing using Uintah. Experiments were carried out using a fault-tolerant MPI - ULFM to recover from runtime failure, and LENO to recover data on patches belonging to failed ranks, while the simulation was continued to the end. Results show that this ABFT approach is up to 10x faster than the traditional checkpointing method. The new interpolation approach is more accurate than linear interpolation and not subject to the overshoots found in other interpolation methods.

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