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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 469 records · Page 26
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2018

Modular Spiking Neural Circuits for Mapping Long Short-Term Memory on a Neurosynaptic Processor

Due to the distributed and asynchronous nature of neural computation through low-energy spikes, brain-inspired hardware systems offer high energy efficiency and massive parallelism. One such platform is the IBM TrueNorth neurosynaptic system. Recently, TrueNorth compatible representation learning algorithms have emerged, achieving close to the state-of-the-art performance in various data sets. However, its application in temporal sequence processing models, such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), is still only at the proof of concept level. There is an inherent difficulty in capturing temporal dynamics of an RNN using spiking neurons, which is only exasperated by the hardware constraints in connectivity and synaptic weight resolution. This paper presents a design flow that overcomes these difficulties and maps a special case of recurrent networks called long short-term memory (LSTM) onto a spike-based platform. The framework utilizes various approximation techniques, such as activation discretization, weight quantization, and scaling and rounding, spiking neural circuits that implement the complex gating mechanisms, and a store-and-release technique to enable neuron synchronization and faithful storage. While the presented techniques can be applied to map LSTM to any spiking neural network (SNN) simulator/emulator, here we choose the TrueNorth chip as the target platform by adhering to its hardware constraints. Three LSTM applications, parity check, extended Reber grammar, and question classification, are evaluated. The tradeoffs among accuracy, performance, and energy tradeoffs achieved on TrueNorth are demonstrated. Finally, this is compared with the performance on an SNN platform without hardware constraints, which represents the upper bound of the achievable accuracy.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Optical neural engine for solving scientific partial differential equations

Abstract Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is the cornerstone of scientific research and development. Data-driven machine learning (ML) approaches are emerging to accelerate time-consuming and computation-intensive numerical simulations of PDEs. Although optical systems offer high-throughput and energy-efficient ML hardware, their demonstration for solving PDEs is limited. Here, we present an optical neural engine (ONE) architecture combining diffractive optical neural networks for Fourier space processing and optical crossbar structures for real space processing to solve time-dependent and time-independent PDEs in diverse disciplines, including Darcy flow equation, the magnetostatic Poisson’s equation in demagnetization, the Navier-Stokes equation in incompressible fluid, Maxwell’s equations in nanophotonic metasurfaces, and coupled PDEs in a multiphysics system. We numerically and experimentally demonstrate the capability of the ONE architecture, which not only leverages the advantages of high-performance dual-space processing for outperforming traditional PDE solvers and being comparable with state-of-the-art ML models but also can be implemented using optical computing hardware with unique features of low-energy and highly parallel constant-time processing irrespective of model scales and real-time reconfigurability for tackling multiple tasks with the same architecture. The demonstrated architecture offers a versatile and powerful platform for large-scale scientific and engineering computations.

Tang, Yingheng (ORCID:0009000153622546)↗
DOE OSTI2021

MemXCT: Design, Optimization, Scaling, and Reproducibility of X-Ray Tomography Imaging

Here, this work extends our previous research entitled "MemXCT: Memory-centric X-ray CT Reconstruction with Massive Parallelization" that was originally published at SC19 conference (Hidayetoglu et al., 2019) with reproducibility of the computational imaging performance. X-ray computed tomography (XCT) is regularly used at synchrotron light sources to study the internal morphology of materials at high resolution. However, experimental constraints, such as radiation sensitivity, can result in noisy or undersampled measurements. Further, depending on the resolution, sample size and data acquisition rates, the resulting noisy dataset can be in the order of terabytes. Advanced iterative reconstruction techniques can produce high-quality images from noisy measurements, but their computational requirements have made their use an exception rather than the rule. We propose a novel memory-centric approach that avoids redundant computations at the expense of additional memory complexity. We develop a memory-centric iterative reconstruction system, MemXCT, that uses an optimized SpMV implementation with two-level pseudo-Hilbert ordering and multi-stage input buffering. We evaluate MemXCT on various supercomputer architectures involving KNL and GPU. MemXCT can reconstruct a large (11Kx11K) mouse brain tomogram in 10 seconds using 4096 KNL nodes (256K cores). The results presented in our original article at the SC19 were based on large-scale supercomputing resources. The MemXCT application was selected for the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) Reproducibility Challenge and evaluated on a variety of cloud computing resources by universities around the world in the SC20 conference. We summarize the results of the top-ranked SCC Reproducibility Challenge teams and identify the most pertinent measures for ensuring the reproducibility of our experiments in this article.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2020

Mitigating Cascading Outages in Severe Weather Using Simulation-Based Optimization

Severe weather events can trigger cascading power outages and lead to significant losses. In this work, we investigate cascading outage mitigation under severe weather conditions. Given day-ahead weather forecasts and component failure models, we aim to identify a set of power lines that can be hardened to minimize the expected impact of potential cascading outages. Since the expected load shedding cannot be expressed as an explicit function of line hardening decisions and system states, we developed a cascading outage simulator to estimate the expected value of load shedding under various initial weather-related disruption scenarios generated using a weather forecast. To avoid massive enumeration of all possible combinations of line hardening decisions and reduce the simulation efforts, we employed an efficient simulation-based optimization approach that quickly identifies the (near) optimal line hardening decisions in the presence of both large simulation noises due to the highly variable initial disturbances and system states, and significant randomness in the subsequent cascades. Furthermore, the algorithm is also able to utilize parallel computing to dramatically reduce computation time to support decision making in preparation for severe weather conditions. We performed a case study on the Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC) 140-bus system model to demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve power grid resilience to adverse weather events.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Domaine-Specific Runtime to Orchestrate Computation on Heterogeneous Platforms

Task-based runtime systems in the past have sought to exploit inherent asynchronicity in the application execution to reduce overall runtime. In the last decade focus shifted to supporting the heterogeneity that is increasingly prevalent in high-performance computing systems. However, existing task-based runtime systems, being general, come with a challenging set of issues such as the complexity of abstractions and overheads. And they still leave much of the burden of exposing the parallelism on the application developers who also have to fit their applications to the runtime systems’ interfaces. In this paper we take a different approach for applications to target heterogeneous systems through domain-specific run-times. Our design aspires to leverage the domain-specific knowledge of a focused class of scientific simulations to pragmatically orchestrate computations in the simulations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2017

Real-time supervisory control implementation of SmAHTR power plant - 143

This paper discusses an implementation of a supervisory control system for a nuclear power plant model using Small modular Advanced High Temperature Reactors (SmAHTR). The simulation operates in real-time using a network of computer agents, implemented on Raspberry Pi's (RPi's), where each major task is performed by one or more RPi's running calculations in parallel. The system architecture contains local, module, master, and operator actions to automate all aspects of the plant. Local level controllers run individual control loops to ensure the desired reference signals are met. The module level controllers set the local level reference signals within each SMR unit and detect sensor and actuator failures to adjust those reference signals as needed. Master level controllers balance plant power by calculating required heat power from each reactor and electric power from each generator and sending that data to the module controllers. Finally, the operator level contains an operator interface to summarize data and faults gathered through the controller levels, with options to review plant and reactor details as desired. This control implementation allows the plant to run autonomously, load follow a desired electrical power curve, and detect a growing number of fault scenarios. Ultimately, this type of supervisory control system will reduce labor-intensive surveillance and testing and allow fewer operators to more safely monitor an entire plant. (authors)

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Multigrid Reduction in Time for Nonlinear Parabolic Problems: A Case Study

The need for parallelism in the time dimension is being driven by changes in computer architectures, where performance increases are now provided through greater concurrency, not faster clock speeds. This creates a bottleneck for sequential time marching schemes because they lack parallelism in the time dimension. Multigrid reduction in time (MGRIT) is an iterative procedure that allows for temporal parallelism by utilizing multigrid reduction techniques and a multilevel hierarchy of coarse time grids. MGRIT has been shown to be effective for linear problems, with speedups of up to 50 times. The goal of this work is the efficient solution of nonlinear problems with MGRIT, where efficiency is defined as achieving similar performance when compared to an equivalent linear problem. The benchmark nonlinear problem is the p-Laplacian, where p=4 corresponds to a well-known nonlinear diffusion equation and p=2 corresponds to the standard linear diffusion operator, our benchmark linear problem. The key difficulty encountered is that the nonlinear time-step solver becomes progressively more expensive on coarser time levels as the time-step size increases. To overcome such difficulties, multigrid research has historically targeted an accumulated body of experience regarding how to choose an appropriate solver for a specific problem type. To that end, this paper develops a library of MGRIT optimizations and modifications, most important an alternate initial guess for the nonlinear time-step solver and delayed spatial coarsening, that will allow many nonlinear parabolic problems to be solved with parallel scaling behavior comparable to the corresponding linear problem.

parareal↗
DOE OSTI2021

Neuromorphic Graph Algorithms: Cycle Detection, Odd Cycle Detection, and Max Flow

Neuromorphic computing is poised to become a promising computing paradigm in the post Moore’s law era due to its extremely low power usage and inherent parallelism. Spiking neural networks are the traditional use case for neuromorphic systems, and have proven to be highly effective at machine learning tasks such as control problems. More recently, neuromorphic systems have been applied outside of the arena of machine learning, primarily in the field of graph algorithms. Neuromorphic systems have been shown to perform graph algorithms faster and with lower power consumption than their traditional (GPU/CPU) counterparts, and are hence an attractive option for a co-processing unit in future high performance computing systems, where graph algorithms play a critical role. In this paper, we present a neuromorphic implementation of cycle detection, odd cycle detection, and the Ford-Fulkerson max-flow algorithm. We further evaluate the performance of these implementations using the NEST neuromorphic simulator by using spike counts and simulation time as proxies for energy consumption and run time. In addition to gains inherent in neuromorphic systems, we show that within the neuromorphic implementations early stopping criteria can be implemented to further improve performance.

Kay, Bill↗
DOE OSTI2018

ExaTN

A challenging scientific problem that will benefit from exascale computing is predictive simulation of two- and three-dimensional quantum many-body Hamiltonians in condensed matter physics, together with the related strong entanglement problems in quantum chemistry and quantum computing. Efficient numerical simulations will require new insights into wavefunction compression algorithms that scale on extremely heterogeneous HPC architectures. To address this need, we propose to develop a scalable math library of parallel multi-linear algebraic numerical primitives for hierarchical tensor compression. Our library will subsequently be used for building an efficient, performance-portable HPC framework for simulating strongly correlated quantum systems. In particular, our will will be the first to deliver a massively parallel implementation of the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA), a hierarchical tensor decomposition quantum scheme capable of expressing local expectation values of strongly entangled higher-dimensional quantum systems efficiently. To address the extreme complexity and high computational cost of such schemes, we will automate their parallel implementation by delivering an integrated software framework, ExaTN (Exascale Tensor Networks), that will process hierarchical tensor representations on exascale HPC systems via an asymchronous task-based programming model. As a specific application, our framework will provide scientists with a capability of simulating strongly entangled quantum systems, thus positioning ORNL as a strategic leader in modeling of strongly correlated materials.

McCaskey, AlexanderJ↗
DOE OSTI2018

Scalable molecular dynamics with NAMD on the Summit system

According to the article, NAnoscale Molecular Dynamics (NAMD) is a parallel molecular dynamics application that has been used to make breakthroughs in understanding the structure and dynamics of large biomolecular complexes, such as viruses like HIV and various types of influenza. State-of-the-art biomolecular simulations often require integration of billions of timesteps, computing all interatomic forces for each femtosecond timestep. Molecular dynamics simulation of large biomolecular systems and long-timescale biological phenomena requires tremendous computing power. NAMD harnesses the power of thousands of heterogeneous processors to meet this demand. In this paper, we present algorithmic improvements and performance optimizations that enable NAMD to achieve high performance on the IBM Newell platform (with IBM POWER9 processors and NVIDIA Volta V100 GPUs), which underpins the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Summit and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sierra supercomputers. The Top-500 supercomputers November 2018 list shows Summit at the number one spot, with 200 petaflop/s peak performance, and Sierra second with 125 petaflop/s. Optimizations for NAMD on Summit include: data layout changes for GPU acceleration and CPU vectorization, improving GPU offload efficiency, increasing performance with Parallel Active Messaging Interface support in Charm++, improving efficiency of fast Fourier transform calculations, improving load balancing, enabling better CPU vectorization and cache performance, and providing an alternative thermostat through stochastic velocity rescaling. We also present performance scaling results on early Newell systems.

Computer Science↗
DOE OSTI2025

Automatic Generation of Algorithms for High-Speed Reliable Lossy Data Compression (Final Report)

Fast reliable data compression is urgently needed for many leading-edge scientific instruments and for exascale high-performance computing applications because they produce vast amounts of data at extremely high rates. The goal of this project has been to develop a framework named LC that is able to automatically generate high-speed lossless and reliable lossy compression and decompression algorithms that can be customized for different kinds of data. The resulting LC framework is freely available on GitHub. To achieve high-speed operation, LC outputs optimized and parallelized CPU and GPU implementations of the generated algorithms. To ensure the quality of lossily compressed data, LC guarantees the user-provided error bound. To be able to customize the compression algorithm to various use cases, LC can synthesize millions of different algorithms and automatically search for the one that works best for the given data. We have already employed LC to create state-of-the-art lossless and lossy compressors for scientific data as well as leading lossless compressors for images. We hope that LC and the customized, fast, reliable, and CPU/GPU-compatible compression algorithms that it can generate will greatly benefit the many scientific applications that need not only high trustworthiness but also high performance.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2023

Scalable self attraction and loading calculations for unstructured ocean tide models

Self attraction and earth-loading effects are important for accurately modeling global tides. A common approach of handling this forcing is to expand mass anomalies into spherical harmonics, which are scaled by load Love numbers to account for elastic earth deformation. We investigate two different approaches to perform these calculations for ocean models that employ unstructured meshes and distributed memory parallelization. The first approach leverages a highly efficient spherical harmonics library, but requires all-to-one and one-to-all communications and interpolation operations between the unstructured and a structured mesh. This approach is compared to a parallel algorithm that computes the spherical harmonic transformations directly on the unstructured mesh with an all-reduce communication. Here, our results show that although the unstructured mesh calculations are more expensive, the scalability of the unstructured mesh approach allows for more efficient spherical harmonics transforms for high-resolution meshes and large processor counts. This methodology enables the efficient inclusion of tidal dynamics large-scale Earth system model simulations.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2017

Deep Packet/Flow Analysis using GPUs

Deep packet inspection (DPI) faces severe performance challenges in high-speed networks (40/100 GE) as it requires a large amount of raw computing power and high I/O throughputs. Recently, researchers have tentatively used GPUs to address the above issues and boost the performance of DPI. Typically, DPI applications involve highly complex operations in both per-packet and per-flow data level, often in real-time. The parallel architecture of GPUs fits exceptionally well for per-packet network traffic processing. However, for stateful network protocols such as TCP, their data stream need to be reconstructed in a per-flow level to deliver a consistent content analysis. Since the flow-centric operations are naturally antiparallel and often require large memory space for buffering out-of-sequence packets, they can be problematic for GPUs, whose memory is normally limited to several gigabytes. In this work, we present a highly efficient GPU-based deep packet/flow analysis framework. The proposed design includes a purely GPU-implemented flow tracking and TCP stream reassembly. Instead of buffering and waiting for TCP packets to become in sequence, our framework process the packets in batch and uses a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) with prefix-/suffix- tree method to detect patterns across out-of-sequence packets that happen to be located in different batches. In conclusion, evaluation shows that our code can reassemble and forward tens of millions of packets per second and conduct a stateful signature-based deep packet inspection at 55 Gbit/s using an NVIDIA K40 GPU.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2019

Parallelized Kalman-Filter-Based Reconstruction of Particle Tracks on Many-Core Architectures with the CMS Detector

In the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), one of the most challenging computational problems is expected to be finding and fitting charged-particle tracks during event reconstruction. The methods currently in use at the LHC are based on the Kalman filter. Such methods have shown to be robust and to provide good physics performance, both in the trigger and offline. In order to improve computational performance, we explored Kalman-filter-based methods for track finding and fitting, adapted for many-core SIMD and SIMT architectures. Our adapted Kalman-filter-based software has obtained significant parallel speedups using such processors, e.g., Intel Xeon Phi, Intel Xeon SP (Scalable Processors) and (to a limited degree) NVIDIA GPUs. Recently, an effort has started towards the integration of our software into the CMS software framework, in view of its exploitation for the Run III of the LHC. Prior reports have shown that our software allows in fact for some significant improvements over the existing framework in terms of computational performance with comparable physics performance, even when applied to realistic detector configurations and event complexity. Here, we demonstrate that in such conditions physics performance can be further improved with respect to our prior reports, while retaining the improvements in computational performance, by making use of the knowledge of the detector and its geometry.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2020

NMDQi Nuclear Materials Discovery and Qualification Initiative Conference Overview

The Nuclear Materials Discovery and Qualification Initiative (NMDQi) is designed to accelerate nuclear materials qualification to fulfill the promises of early and advanced reactor technologies as a safe, clean, and low-cost baseload energy. Materials development and qualification in the nuclear industry is by definition challenging due to stringent safety requirements, limited availability of specialized facilities for materials irradiation and testing, and the challenging high-temperature, high-radiation environment. NMDQi will establish tools and capabilities that will greatly accelerate the nuclear fuels and materials development process. These tools will provide both computationally informed insights and high-throughput infrastructure with the goal of completing qualification in a single pass. In this approach, materials must be fabricated with a range of properties of interest so that materials performance can be examined in parallel, rather than with multiple discrete specimens. Advanced manufacturing (AM) techniques, which can produce complex component geometries, microstructures, and compositions, are ideal. The improved process monitoring and control that AM can provide are ideal for ensuring and reducing material variability, which will be particularly important as standards committees pursue regulations for AM components. However, gaining these benefits requires overcoming the substantial barrier of qualifying AM processes and the resulting materials and components for supporting research campaigns and eventually nuclear service.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2020

GPU acceleration of all-electron electronic structure theory using localized numeric atom-centered basis functions

We present an implementation of all-electron density-functional theory for massively parallel GPU-based platforms, using localized atom-centered basis functions and real-space integration grids. Special attention is paid to domain decomposition of the problem on non-uniform grids, which enables compute- and memory-parallel execution across thousands of nodes for real-space operations, e.g. the update of the electron density, the integration of the real-space Hamiltonian matrix, and calculation of Pulay forces. To assess the performance of our GPU implementation, we performed benchmarks on three different architectures using a 103-material test set. We find that operations which rely on dense serial linear algebra show dramatic speedups from GPU acceleration: in particular, SCF iterations including force and stress calculations exhibit speedups ranging from 4.5 to 6.6. For the architectures and problem types investigated here, this translates to an expected overall speedup between 3–4 for the entire calculation (including non-GPU accelerated parts), for problems featuring several tens to hundreds of atoms. Additional calculations for a 375-atom Bi2Se3 bilayer show that the present GPU strategy scales for large-scale distributed-parallel simulations.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2018

Performance Optimization of a Beam Dynamics PIC Code On Hybrid Computer Architectures

The self-consistent multi-particle tracking based on particle-in-cell method (PIC) has been widely used in particle accelerator beam dynamics study. However, the PIC simulation is time-consuming and needs to use modern parallel computers for high resolution applications. In this paper, we implemented and optimized a parallel beam dynamics PIC code on two types of hybrid parallel computer architectures: one is the GPU and GPU cluster, while the other is the "Knight Landing" CPU cluster.

Liu, Zhicong↗
DOE OSTI2017

Aces4: A Platform for Computational Chemistry Calculations with Extremely Large Block-Sparse Arrays

Aces4 is a parallel programming platform comprising a DSL for Computational Chemistry and its runtime system. It offers a convenient way to express parallelism together with extensive support for extremely large, possibly sparse, distributed arrays. It aids scientists in the creation of performant, scalable, massively parallel programs that can effectively take advantage of leadership class computing systems to address important scientific questions. Aces4 has enabled the development and implementation of new methods in electronic structure theory which are breaking new ground in their ability to perform highly accurate calculations on ever larger molecular systems. In this paper the design of Aces4, which is based on the the Super Instruction Architecture approach, is described. Experimental scaling results for Molecular Cluster Perturbation Theory, a new method enabled by Aces4, and CCSD, a widely used computational chemistry method are given.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗