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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 523 records · Page 29

Defense strategies and expected capacity of high performance computing infrastructures

We consider high performance computing infrastructures consisting of multiple sites connected over a wide-area network. These sites house heterogeneous computing systems, network elements and local-area connections, and the wide-area network plays a critical, asymmetric role of providing the vital connectivity between them. We model this infrastructure as a recursive system of systems, wherein the basic systems at the finest levels are composed of discrete cyber and physical components. These components may be disabled by cyber and physical disruptions, and their reinforcements protect against them albeit at a cost. We utilize results from a game formulation based on (i) characterizing the disruptions between systems at each level of recursion using aggregate failure correlation functions, and within basic systems using the multiplier functions, and (ii) using utility functions expressed in terms of the number of basic system components attacked and reinforced. At Nash Equilibrium, we derive expressions for the expected capacity of the infrastructure given by the number of computing nodes that are operational and connected to the network.

Rao, Nageswara↗

Understanding the evolution of conditions data access through Frontier for the ATLAS Experiment

The ATLAS Distributed Computing system uses the Frontier system to access the Conditions, Trigger, and Geometry database data stored in the Oracle Offline Database at CERN by means of the HTTP protocol. All ATLAS computing sites use Squid web proxies to cache the data, greatly reducing the load on the Frontier servers and the databases. One feature of the Frontier client is that in the event of failure, it retries with different services. While this allows transient errors and scheduled maintenance to happen transparently, it does open the system up to cascading failures if the load is high enough. Throughout LHC Run 2 there has been an ever increasing demand on the Frontier service. There have been multiple incidents where parts of the service failed due to high load. A significant improvement in the monitoring of the Frontier service was required. The monitoring was needed to identify both problematic tasks, which could then be killed or throttled, and to identify failing site services as the consequence of a cascading failure is much higher. This presentation describes the implementation and features of the monitoring system.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Quantum simulation: From spin models to gauge-gravity correspondence

Quantum many-body systems with coherent and controllable interactions enable the realization of novel quantum materials, the quantum simulation of problems that cannot be simulated on classical computers, computational systems that are exponentially faster than existing classical algorithms, and the direct investigation of the conjectured duality between gravitational theories and quantum field theories. This project focusses on quantum phase transitions in strongly interacting many-body spin systems, and in particular on the dynamical evolution near the critical point and across the phase transition. The dynamics of a large quantum system containing more than 50 qubits is investigated in various critical regimes. In particular, the Kibble-Zurek transition has been characterized and critical exponents have been measured. Furthermore, quantum many-body scars have been observed and characterized for the first time. We are investigating the Kibble-Zurek mechanism in the quantum phase transition in one dimension from a disordered system to a system with ordering induced by Rydberg interactions between neighboring atoms. The Kibble-Zurek mechanism describes the formation of topological defects as a system evolves across a phase transitions, and is expected to apply to a large number of problems, including cosmology, where it should describe the structure of domain formation in the early universe.

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS↗

RSE-Ops

If DevOps is the intersection of "Developer" and "Operations," then how does this concept map to high performance computing? The answer is RSE-ops, or the intersection of Research Software Engineering and Operations. Research Software Engineers (RSEs) are the individuals writing code for scientific software, and supporting researchers to use codes on high performance computing systems. RSE-ops, then, generally refers to best practices for development and operations of scientific software, which typically happens in a high performance computing environment. A comparison can be made to Cloud Native Devops, which is a similar term that has emerged around Cloud Native Computing. It refers to the application of DevOps practices to the cloud.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Whole program Adaptive Error Detection and Mitigation

Our project investigated methods to detect soft errors in computing systems. Such detection schemes must have low overheads and also generate no false positives. Our solutions focused on control-space error detection based on changing addressing schemes so that faults tend to cascade – rather than being masked. Our solutions also addressed data-space error detection by synthesizing error detectors based on rigorous floating-point error analysis.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Reducing Waste in Extreme Scale Systems through Introspective Analysis

Resilience is an important challenge for extreme- scale supercomputers. Today, failures in supercomputers are assumed to be uniformly distributed in time. However, recent studies show that failures in high-performance computing systems are partially correlated in time, generating periods of higher failure density. Our study of the failure logs of multiple supercomputers show that periods of higher failure density occur with up to three times more than the average. We design a monitoring system that listens to hardware events and forwards important events to the runtime to detect those regime changes. We implement a runtime capable of receiving notifications and adapt dynamically. In addition, we build an analytical model to predict the gains that such dynamic approach could achieve. We demonstrate that in some systems, our approach can reduce the wasted time by over 30%.

Bautista-Gomez, Leonardo↗

Toward Transparent Data Management in Multi-layer Storage Hierarchy for HPC Systems

Upcoming exascale high performance computing (HPC) systems are expected to comprise multi-tier storage hierarchy, and thus will necessitate innovative storage and I/O mechanisms. Traditional disk and block-based interfaces and file systems face severe challenges in utilizing capabilities of storage hierarchies due to the lack of hierarchy support and semantic interfaces. Object-based and semantically-rich data abstractions for scientific data management on large scale systems offer a sustainable solution to these challenges. Such data abstractions can also simplify users involvement in data movement. Here, we take the first steps of realizing such an object abstraction and explore storage mechanisms for these objects to enhance I/O performance, especially for scientific applications. We explore how an object-based interface can facilitate next generation scalable computing systems by presenting the mapping of data I/O from two real world HPC scientific use cases: a plasma physics simulation code (VPIC) and a cosmology simulation code (HACC). Our storage model stores data objects in different physical organizations to support data movement across layers of memory/storage hierarchy. Our implementation sclaes well to 16K parallel processes, and compared to the state of the art, such as MPI-IO and HDF5, our object-based data abstractions and data placement strategy in multi-level storage hierarchy achieves up to 7 X I/O performance improvement for scientific data.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Advanced Scientific Computing Research Exascale Requirements Review. An Office of Science review sponsored by Advanced Scientific Computing Research, September 27-29, 2016, Rockville, Maryland

The widespread use of computing in the American economy would not be possible without a thoughtful, exploratory research and development (R&D) community pushing the performance edge of operating systems, computer languages, and software libraries. These are the tools and building blocks — the hammers, chisels, bricks, and mortar — of the smartphone, the cloud, and the computing services on which we rely. Engineers and scientists need ever-more specialized computing tools to discover new material properties for manufacturing, make energy generation safer and more efficient, and provide insight into the fundamentals of the universe, for example. The research division of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Advanced Scientific Computing and Research (ASCR Research) ensures that these tools and building blocks are being developed and honed to meet the extreme needs of modern science. See also http://exascaleage.org/ascr/ for additional information.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Performance Analysis and Optimization for Scientific Data Workloads

Scientific data generated at experimental and observational facilities are increasingly being processed on large-scale compute systems. Most of the experimental data analysis workflows are not designed or implemented to run on large scale environments and take full advantage of HPC compute and storage resources. These applications are unlike the traditional tightly-coupled scientific applications and hence face significant performance and scalability challenges as the volume of data increases exponentially. In this paper, we conduct a performance and scalability analysis for experimental analysis applications and workflows operating on data from light sources. Our analysis detects and quantifies I/O performance, scalability and runtime bottlenecks for three data analysis applications that run on NERSC resources. Based on our analysis we propose and implement a set of optimizations that lead to reducing the amount of time spent on I/O operations by almost 90%.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Scalable fault tolerance runtime technology for petascale computers (Final Project Report)

With the massive number of components comprising the forthcoming petascale computer systems, hardware failures will be routinely encountered during execution of large-scale applications. Due to the multidisciplinary, multiresolution, and multiscale nature of scientific problems that drive the demand for high end systems, applications place increasingly differing demands on the system resources: disk, network, memory, and CPU. In addition to MPI, future applications are expected to use advanced programming models such as those developed under the DARPA HPCS program as well as existing global address space programming models such as Global Arrays, UPC, and Co-Array Fortran. While there has been a considerable amount of work in fault tolerant MPI with a number of strategies and extensions for fault tolerance proposed, virtually none of advanced models proposed for emerging petascale systems is currently fault aware. To achieve fault tolerance, development of underlying runtime and OS technologies able to scale to petascale level is needed. This project has evaluated range of runtime techniques for fault tolerance for advanced programming models.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Role-based access control permissions

Devices, systems, and methods for role-based access control permissions are disclosed. One method includes a policy decision point that receives up-to-date security context information from one or more outside sources to determine whether to grant access for a data client to a portion of the system and creates an access vector including the determination; receiving, via a policy agent, a request by the data client for access to the portion of the computing system by the data client, wherein the policy agent checks to ensure there is a session established with communications and user/application enforcement points; receiving, via communications policy enforcement point, the request from the policy agent, wherein the communications policy enforcement point determines whether the data client is an authorized node, based upon the access vector received from the policy decision point; and receiving, via the user/application policy enforcement point, the request from the communications policy enforcement point.

42 ENGINEERING↗

A Performance Study of Quantum ESPRESSO’s PWscf Code on Multi-core and GPU Systems

We describe the porting of PWscf (Plane-Wave Self Consistent Field), a key component of the Quantum ESPRESSO open-source suite of codes for materials modeling, to GPU systems using CUDA Fortran. Kernel loop directives (CUF kernels) have been extensively used in order to have a single source code for both CPU and GPU implementations. The results of the GPU version have been carefully validated and the performance of the code on several GPU systems (both x86 and POWER8 based) has been compared with traditional Intel multi-core (CPU only) systems. This current GPU version can reduce the time-to-solution by an average factor of 2–3 running two different input cases widely used as benchmarks on small and large high performance computing systems.

CUDA Fortran↗

LLRF System Analysis for the Fermilab PIP-II LINAC

Developing long-lived quantum processing units (QPUs) capable of supporting high-fidelity quantum operations is a crucial challenge on the path toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. TESLA-shaped superconducting RF (SRF) cavities, known for photon relaxation times on the order of seconds, provide an excellent foundation for 3D QPUs and quantum memory. This talk presents a novel design that leverages TESLA cavity modes coupled to ancillary transmon qubits, optimized to preserve coherence and control. By carefully engineering the package geometry, optimizing Hamiltonian parameters, and minimizing lossy participation ratios, we achieve photon relaxation times of over 16 ms and 20 ms for the two cavity modes, representing a significant improvement over previous multimode quantum memories. Despite the reduced coupling between the qubit and cavity modes, which is necessary to preserve long lifetimes, the platform supports robust and universal control schemes that are not limited by low coupling strength. We will also discuss how this architecture can lead to scalable, modular quantum computing systems.

Varghese, P. [Fermilab]↗

Characterization of bandwidth requirements of algorithms for extreme scale science

Technology trends have resulted in widely different rates of improvement in computational throughput as compared to data movement rates in computer systems. With future systems, the cost of data movement through the memory hierarchy is expected to become even more dominant relative to the cost of performing arithmetic operations, both in terms of time and energy. Therefore, optimizing data access costs will become ever more critical in the coming years. However, unlike the well understood model of computational complexity in terms of the number of elementary operations to execute an algorithm, the inherent data-movement complexity of computations is unknown for most algorithms. Given the crucial importance of optimizing data access costs in scalable parallel systems, it is of great interest to develop techniques for understanding the inherent data movement complexity of an algorithm. In this project, we focus on this fundamental and significant problem.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Interstate-24 MOTION: Closing the Loop on Smart Mobility

We introduce the I-24 Mobility Technology Interstate Observation Network (MOTION), a transportation cyber-physical systems testbed under development in Tennessee. It consists of a six-mile freeway segment instrumented with 400 4K resolution cameras, processed by a real-time compute system to enable continuous performance monitoring of freeway traffic. The testbed is being developed to support next generation connected and autonomous vehicle technologies and advanced traffic management. When complete, the testbed will be the longest continuously observed freeway segment in the world. This article introduces the testbed, discusses the core design choices, and outlines the preliminary work conducted to support the design.

Gloudemans, Derek↗

A fast particle-based approach for calibrating a 3-D model of the Antarctic ice sheet

We consider the scientifically challenging and policy-relevant task of understanding the past and projecting the future dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheet. The Antarctic ice sheet has shown a highly nonlinear threshold response to past climate forcings. Triggering such a threshold response through anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions would drive drastic and potentially fast sea level rise with important implications for coastal flood risks. Previous studies have combined information from ice sheet models and observations to calibrate model parameters. These studies have broken important new ground but have either adopted simple ice sheet models or have limited the number of parameters to allow for the use of more complex models. These limitations are largely due to the computational challenges posed by calibration as models become more computationally intensive or when the number of parameters increases. Here, we propose a method to alleviate this problem: a fast sequential Monte Carlo method that takes advantage of the massive parallelization afforded by modern high-performance computing systems. We use simulated examples to demonstrate how our sample-based approach provides accurate approximations to the posterior distributions of the calibrated parameters. The drastic reduction in computational times enables us to provide new insights into important scientific questions, for example, the impact of Pliocene era data and prior parameter information on sea level projections. These studies would be computationally prohibitive with other computational approaches for calibration such as Markov chain Monte Carlo or emulation-based methods. We also find considerable differences in the distributions of sea level projections when we account for a larger number of uncertain parameters. For example, based on the same ice sheet model and data set, the 99th percentile of the Antarctic ice sheet contribution to sea level rise in 2300 increases from 6.5 m to 13.1 m when we increase the number of calibrated parameters from three to 11. With previous calibration methods, it would be challenging to go beyond five parameters. Here, this work provides an important next step toward improving the uncertainty quantification of complex, computationally intensive and decision-relevant models.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

System, method, and computer program product for warming a cache for a task launch

A system, method, and computer program product for warming a cache for a task launch is described. The method includes the steps of receiving a task data structure that defines a processing task, extracting information stored in a cache warming field of the task data structure, and, prior to executing the processing task, generating a cache warming instruction that is configured to load one or more entries of a cache storage with data fetched from a memory.

Ricketts, Scott↗

System, method, and computer program product for bulk synchronous binary program translation and optimization

A system, method, and computer program product are provided for. The method includes the steps of executing a block of translated binary instructions by multiple threads and gathering profiling data during execution of the block of translated binary instructions. The multiple threads are then synchronized at a barrier instruction associated with the block of translated binary instructions and the block of translated binary instructions is replaced with optimized binary instructions, where the optimized binary instructions are produced based on the profiling data.

Diamos, Gregory Frederick↗