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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 451 records · Page 25
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1989

Asynchronous multilevel adaptive methods for solving partial differential equations on multiprocessors - Performance results

The fast adaptive composite grid method (FAC) is an algorithm that uses various levels of uniform grids (global and local) to provide adaptive resolution and fast solution of PDEs. Like all such methods, it offers parallelism by using possibly many disconnected patches per level, but is hindered by the need to handle these levels sequentially. The finest levels must therefore wait for processing to be essentially completed on all the coarser ones. A recently developed asynchronous version of FAC, called AFAC, completely eliminates this bottleneck to parallelism. This paper describes timing results for AFAC, coupled with a simple load balancing scheme, applied to the solution of elliptic PDEs on an Intel iPSC hypercube. These tests include performance of certain processes necessary in adaptive methods, including moving grids and changing refinement. A companion paper reports on numerical and analytical results for estimating convergence factors of AFAC applied to very large scale examples.

Mccormick, S.↗
NASA NTRS1989

SHARP - A multi-mission AI system for spacecraft telemetry monitoring and diagnosis

The Spacecraft Health Automated Reasoning Prototype (SHARP) is a system designed to demonstrate automated health and status analysis for multi-mission spacecraft and ground data systems operations. Telecommunications link analysis of the Voyager II spacecraft is the initial focus for the SHARP system demonstration which will occur during Voyager's encounter with the planet Neptune in August, 1989, in parallel with real-time Voyager operations. The SHARP system combines conventional computer science methodologies with artificial intelligence techniques to produce an effective method for detecting and analyzing potential spacecraft and ground systems problems. The system performs real-time analysis of spacecraft and other related telemetry, and is also capable of examining data in historical context. A brief introduction is given to the spacecraft and ground systems monitoring process at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The current method of operation for monitoring the Voyager Telecommunications subsystem is described, and the difficulties associated with the existing technology are highlighted. The approach taken in the SHARP system to overcome the current limitations is also described, as well as both the conventional and artificial intelligence solutions developed in SHARP.

Lawson, Denise L.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Neural controller for adaptive movements with unforeseen payloads

A theory and computer simulation of a neural controller that learns to move and position a link carrying an unforeseen payload accurately are presented. The neural controller learns adaptive dynamic control from its own experience. It does not use information about link mass, link length, or direction of gravity, and it uses only indirect uncalibrated information about payload and actuator limits. Its average positioning accuracy across a large range of payloads after learning is 3 percent of the positioning range. This neural controller can be used as a basis for coordinating any number of sensory inputs with limbs of any number of joints. The feedforward nature of control allows parallel implementation in real time across multiple joints.

Kuperstein, Michael↗
NASA NTRS1989

Applications of a transonic wing design method

A method for designing wings and airfoils at transonic speeds using a predictor/corrector approach was developed. The procedure iterates between an aerodynamic code, which predicts the flow about a given geometry, and the design module, which compares the calculated and target pressure distributions and modifies the geometry using an algorithm that relates differences in pressure to a change in surface curvature. The modular nature of the design method makes it relatively simple to couple it to any analysis method. The iterative approach allows the design process and aerodynamic analysis to converge in parallel, significantly reducing the time required to reach a final design. Viscous and static aeroelastic effects can also be accounted for during the design or as a post-design correction. Results from several pilot design codes indicated that the method accurately reproduced pressure distributions as well as the coordinates of a given airfoil or wing by modifying an initial contour. The codes were applied to supercritical as well as conventional airfoils, forward- and aft-swept transport wings, and moderate-to-highly swept fighter wings. The design method was found to be robust and efficient, even for cases having fairly strong shocks.

Campbell, Richard L.↗
NASA NTRS1994

Loop heating by D.C. electric current and electromagnetic wave emissions simulated by 3-D EM particle zone

We have shown that a current-carrying plasma loop can be heated by magnetic pinch driven by the pressure imbalance between inside and outside the loop, using a 3-dimensional electromagnetic (EM) particle code. Both electrons and ions in the loop can be heated in the direction perpendicular to the ambient magnetic field, therefore the perpendicular temperature can be increased about 10 times compared with the parallel temperature. This temperature anisotropy produced by the magnetic pinch heating can induce a plasma instability, by which high-frequency electromagnetic waves can be excited. The plasma current which is enhanced by the magnetic pinch can also excite a kinetic kink instability, which can heat ions perpendicular to the magnetic field. The heating mechanism of ions as well as the electromagnetic emission could be important for an understanding of the coronal loop heating and the electromagnetic wave emissions from active coronal regions.

Sakai, J. I.↗
NASA NTRS1998

Parallel Directionally Split Solver Based on Reformulation of Pipelined Thomas Algorithm

In this research an efficient parallel algorithm for 3-D directionally split problems is developed. The proposed algorithm is based on a reformulated version of the pipelined Thomas algorithm that starts the backward step computations immediately after the completion of the forward step computations for the first portion of lines This algorithm has data available for other computational tasks while processors are idle from the Thomas algorithm. The proposed 3-D directionally split solver is based on the static scheduling of processors where local and non-local, data-dependent and data-independent computations are scheduled while processors are idle. A theoretical model of parallelization efficiency is used to define optimal parameters of the algorithm, to show an asymptotic parallelization penalty and to obtain an optimal cover of a global domain with subdomains. It is shown by computational experiments and by the theoretical model that the proposed algorithm reduces the parallelization penalty about two times over the basic algorithm for the range of the number of processors (subdomains) considered and the number of grid nodes per subdomain.

Povitsky, A.↗
NASA NTRS2001

Gust Acoustic Response of a Swept Rectilinear Cascade Using The Space-Time CE/SE Method

The benchmark problem 3 in Category 3 of the third Computational Aero-Acoustics (CAA) Workshop sponsored by NASA Glenn Research Center is solved using the space-time conservation element and solution element (CE/SE) method. This problem concerns the unsteady response of a rectilinear swept cascade to an incident gust. The acoustic field generated by the interaction of the gust with swept at plates in the cascade is computed by solving the 3D nonlinear Euler equations using the space-time CE/SE method. A parallel version of the 3D CE/SE Euler solver is employed to obtain numerical solutions for several sweep angles. Numerical solutions are presented and compared with the analytical solutions.

Wang, X. Y.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Probabilistic Design of a Wind Tunnel Model to Match the Response of a Full-Scale Aircraft

approach is presented for carrying out the reliability-based design of a plate-like wing that is part of a wind tunnel model. The goal is to design the wind tunnel model to match the stiffness characteristics of the wing box of a flight vehicle while satisfying strength-based risk/reliability requirements that prevents damage to the wind tunnel model and fixtures. The flight vehicle is a modified F/A-18 aircraft. The design problem is solved using reliability-based optimization techniques. The objective function to be minimized is the difference between the displacements of the wind tunnel model and the corresponding displacements of the flight vehicle. The design variables control the thickness distribution of the wind tunnel model. Displacements of the wind tunnel model change with the thickness distribution, while displacements of the flight vehicle are a set of fixed data. The only constraint imposed is that the probability of failure is less than a specified value. Failure is assumed to occur if the stress caused by aerodynamic pressure loading is greater than the specified strength allowable. Two uncertain quantities are considered: the allowable stress and the thickness distribution of the wind tunnel model. Reliability is calculated using Monte Carlo simulation with response surfaces that provide approximate values of stresses. The response surface equations are, in turn, computed from finite element analyses of the wind tunnel model at specified design points. Because the response surface approximations were fit over a small region centered about the current design, the response surfaces were refit periodically as the design variables changed. Coarse-grained parallelism was used to simultaneously perform multiple finite element analyses. Studies carried out in this paper demonstrate that this scheme of using moving response surfaces and coarse-grained computational parallelism reduce the execution time of the Monte Carlo simulation enough to make the design problem tractable. The results of the reliability-based designs performed in this paper show that large decreases in the probability of stress-based failure can be realized with only small sacrifices in the ability of the wind tunnel model to represent the displacements of the full-scale vehicle.

Mason, Brian H.↗
NASA NTRS2011

Cartesian Off-Body Grid Adaption for Viscous Time- Accurate Flow Simulation

An improved solution adaption capability has been implemented in the OVERFLOW overset grid CFD code. Building on the Cartesian off-body approach inherent in OVERFLOW and the original adaptive refinement method developed by Meakin, the new scheme provides for automated creation of multiple levels of finer Cartesian grids. Refinement can be based on the undivided second-difference of the flow solution variables, or on a specific flow quantity such as vorticity. Coupled with load-balancing and an inmemory solution interpolation procedure, the adaption process provides very good performance for time-accurate simulations on parallel compute platforms. A method of using refined, thin body-fitted grids combined with adaption in the off-body grids is presented, which maximizes the part of the domain subject to adaption. Two- and three-dimensional examples are used to illustrate the effectiveness and performance of the adaption scheme.

Buning, Pieter G.↗
NASA NTRS2017

Performance Enhancement of a Computational Persistent Homology Package

In recent years, persistent homology has become an attractive method for data analysis. It captures topological features, such as connected components, holes, voids, etc., from a point cloud by finding out when these features appear and disappear in the filtration sequence. In this project, we focus on improving the performance of Eirene, a fancy computational persistent homology package. Eirene is a 5000-line opensource software implemented by using the dynamic programming language Julia. We use the Julia profiling tools to identify the performance bottlenecks and develop different methods to manage the bottlenecks, including the parallelization of some time-consuming functions on the multicore/manycore hardware. The empirical results show that the performance can be greatly improved.

Profiling↗
NASA NTRS2019

Tuning the Performance of a Computational Persistent Homology Package

In recent years, persistent homology has become an attractive method for data analysis. It captures topological features, such as connected components, holes, and voids from point cloud data and summarizes the way in which these features appear and disappear in a filtration sequence. In this project, we focus on improving the performanceof Eirene, a computational package for persistent homology. Eirene is a 5000-line open-source software library implemented in the dynamic programming language Julia. We use the Julia profiling tools to identify performance bottlenecks and develop novel methods to manage them, including the parallelization of some time-consuming functions on multicore/manycore hardware. Empirical results show that performance can be greatly improved.

Persistent Homology↗
DOE OSTI2019

Career Development through Discreet Simulation Modeling - 19009

The cleanup mission of the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of River Protection (ORP) at the Hanford Site is to immobilize 212,000 m3 (56 million gallons) of nuclear waste, currently stored in 177 underground tanks, at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) and associated supplemental treatment facilities. Waste transfers to and from the WTP utilize the intricate Hanford Waste Feed Delivery (WFD) system, a network composed of: double-shell tanks (DSTs), single shell tanks (SSTs), the effluent treatment facility (ETF), a large number of pumps, valves, and leak detectors, and thousands of feet of underground transfer lines. This equipment must be prepared to safely and reliably transfer waste to the WTP. This study used discrete event simulation modeling to explore the behavior of the waste transfer system to identify areas of improvement. Two models and their subsequent results are presented: the Effluent Treatment Facility and the next-to-be-retrieved single-shell tanks (A/AX Farms). This study focused on identifying throughput bottlenecks, operational constraints, choke-point analysis, and redundancy in equipment, process design, and operational strategy. Analysis performed on the ETF OR Model indicated that the existing facility operation strategy will not result in a sufficient throughput to prevent WTP melter idling. Furthermore, in the absence of equipment failures, the facility was still shown to be unable to reach the required throughput to prevent melter idling. It is concluded that ETF system maintenance events are currently the main bottlenecks in the ETF facility. Analysis performed on the SST (A/AX) OR model indicate that the main drivers of the retrieval schedule are the hard retrieval start dates for each SST tank. In addition, it was concluded that operating the ventilation trains in parallel results in 15 times less retrieval interruptions and shortens the retrieval durations. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2015

A Framework to Analyze the Performance of Load Balancing Schemes for Ensembles of Stochastic Simulations

Ensembles of simulations are employed to estimate the statistics of possible future states of a system, and are widely used in important applications such as climate change and biological modeling. Ensembles of runs can naturally be executed in parallel. However, when the CPU times of individual simulations vary considerably, a simple strategy of assigning an equal number of tasks per processor can lead to serious work imbalances and low parallel efficiency. This paper presents a new probabilistic framework to analyze the performance of dynamic load balancing algorithms for ensembles of simulations where many tasks are mapped onto each processor, and where the individual compute times vary considerably among tasks. Four load balancing strategies are discussed: most-dividing, all-redistribution, random-polling, and neighbor-redistribution. Simulation results with a stochastic budding yeast cell cycle model are consistent with the theoretical analysis. It is especially significant that there is a provable global decrease in load imbalance for the local rebalancing algorithms due to scalability concerns for the global rebalancing algorithms. The overall simulation time is reduced by up to 25 %, and the total processor idle time by 85 %.

ALGORITHMS↗
DOE OSTI2023

PETSc/TAO Users Manual (Rev. 3.19)

This manual describes the use of the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc) and the Toolkit for Advanced Optimization (TAO) for the numerical solution of partial differential equations and related problems on high-performance computers. PETSc/TAO is a suite of data structures and routines that provide the building blocks for the implementation of large-scale application codes on parallel (and serial) computers. PETSc uses the MPI standard for all distributed memory communication. PETSc/TAO includes a large suite of parallel linear solvers, nonlinear solvers, time integrators, and opti mization that may be used in application codes written in Fortran, C, C++, and Python (via petsc4py; see Getting Started). PETSc provides many of the mechanisms needed within parallel application codes, such as parallel matrix and vector assembly routines. The library is organized hierarchically, enabling users to employ the level of abstraction that is most appropriate for a particular problem. By using techniques of object-oriented programming, PETSc provides enormous flexibility for users. PETSc is a sophisticated set of software tools; as such, for some users it initially has a much steeper learning curve than packages such as MATLAB or a simple subroutine library. In particular, for individuals without some computer science background, experience programming in C, C++, python, or Fortran and experience using a debugger such as gdb or lldb, it may require a significant amount of time to take full advantage of the features that enable efficient software use. However, the power of the PETSc design and the algorithms it incorporates may make the efficient implementation of many application codes simpler than “rolling them” yourself. For many tasks a package such as MATLAB is often the best tool; PETSc is not intended for the classes of problems for which effective MATLAB code can be written. There are several packages, built on PETSc, that may satisfy your needs without requiring directly using PETSc. We recommend reviewing these packages functionality before starting to code directly with PETSc. PETSc can be used to provide a “MPI parallel linear solver” in an otherwise sequential, or OpenMP parallel code. This approach cannot provide extremely large improvements in the application time by utilizing large numbers of MPI processes but can still improve the performance. Certainly all parts of a previously sequential code need not be parallelized but the matrix generation portion must be parallelized to expect true scalability to large numbers of MPI processes. See PCMPI for details on how to utilize the PETSc MPI linear solver server. Since PETSc is under continued development, small changes in usage and calling sequences of routines will occur. PETSc has been supported for twenty-five years; see mailing list information on our website for information on contacting support.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
NASA NTRS1987

Synthetic aperture radar signal processing on the MPP

Satellite-borne Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR) sense areas of several thousand square kilometers in seconds and transmit phase history signal data several tens of megabits per second. The Shuttle Imaging Radar-B (SIR-B) has a variable swath of 20 to 50 km and acquired data over 100 kms along track in about 13 seconds. With the simplification of separability of the reference function, the processing still requires considerable resources; high speed I/O, large memory and fast computation. Processing systems with regular hardware take hours to process one Seasat image and about one hour for a SIR-B image. Bringing this processing time closer to acquisition times requires an end-to-end system solution. For the purpose of demonstration, software was implemented on the present Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) configuration for processing Seasat and SIR-B data. The software takes advantage of the high processing speed offered by the MPP, the large Staging Buffer, and the high speed I/O between the MPP array unit and the Staging Buffer. It was found that with unoptimized Parallel Pascal code, the processing time on the MPP for a 4096 x 4096 sample subset of signal data ranges between 18 and 30.2 seconds depending on options.

Ramapriyan, H. K.↗
NASA NTRS1999

MPI, HPF or OpenMP: A Study with the NAS Benchmarks

Porting applications to new high performance parallel and distributed platforms is a challenging task. Writing parallel code by hand is time consuming and costly, but this task can be simplified by high level languages and would even better be automated by parallelizing tools and compilers. The definition of HPF (High Performance Fortran, based on data parallel model) and OpenMP (based on shared memory parallel model) standards has offered great opportunity in this respect. Both provide simple and clear interfaces to language like FORTRAN and simplify many tedious tasks encountered in writing message passing programs. In our study, we implemented the parallel versions of the NAS Benchmarks with HPF and OpenMP directives. Comparison of their performance with the MPI implementation and pros and cons of different approaches will be discussed along with experience of using computer-aided tools to help parallelize these benchmarks. Based on the study, potentials of applying some of the techniques to realistic aerospace applications will be presented.

Jin, H.↗
NASA NTRS1999

MPI, HPF or OpenMP: A Study with the NAS Benchmarks

Porting applications to new high performance parallel and distributed platforms is a challenging task. Writing parallel code by hand is time consuming and costly, but the task can be simplified by high level languages and would even better be automated by parallelizing tools and compilers. The definition of HPF (High Performance Fortran, based on data parallel model) and OpenMP (based on shared memory parallel model) standards has offered great opportunity in this respect. Both provide simple and clear interfaces to language like FORTRAN and simplify many tedious tasks encountered in writing message passing programs. In our study we implemented the parallel versions of the NAS Benchmarks with HPF and OpenMP directives. Comparison of their performance with the MPI implementation and pros and cons of different approaches will be discussed along with experience of using computer-aided tools to help parallelize these benchmarks. Based on the study,potentials of applying some of the techniques to realistic aerospace applications will be presented

Jin, Hao-Qiang↗
NASA NTRS1993

A transient FETI methodology for large-scale parallel implicit computations in structural mechanics, part 2

Explicit codes are often used to simulate the nonlinear dynamics of large-scale structural systems, even for low frequency response, because the storage and CPU requirements entailed by the repeated factorizations traditionally found in implicit codes rapidly overwhelm the available computing resources. With the advent of parallel processing, this trend is accelerating because explicit schemes are also easier to parallellize than implicit ones. However, the time step restriction imposed by the Courant stability condition on all explicit schemes cannot yet and perhaps will never be offset by the speed of parallel hardware. Therefore, it is essential to develop efficient and robust alternatives to direct methods that are also amenable to massively parallel processing because implicit codes using unconditionally stable time-integration algorithms are computationally more efficient than explicit codes when simulating low-frequency dynamics. Here we present a domain decomposition method for implicit schemes that requires significantly less storage than factorization algorithms, that is several times faster than other popular direct and iterative methods, that can be easily implemented on both shared and local memory parallel processors, and that is both computationally and communication-wise efficient. The proposed transient domain decomposition method is an extension of the method of Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting (FETI) developed by Farhat and Roux for the solution of static problems. Serial and parallel performance results on the CRAY Y-MP/8 and the iPSC-860/128 systems are reported and analyzed for realistic structural dynamics problems. These results establish the superiority of the FETI method over both the serial/parallel conjugate gradient algorithm with diagonal scaling and the serial/parallel direct method, and contrast the computational power of the iPSC-860/128 parallel processor with that of the CRAY Y-MP/8 system.

Farhat, Charbel↗