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Collaborative Research: Continuous Dynamic Grid Adaptation in a Global Atmospheric Model - Application and Refinement

This project had goals of advancing the performance capabilities of the numerical general circulation model EULAG and using it to produce a fully operational atmospheric global climate model (AGCM) that can employ either static or dynamic grid stretching for targeted phenomena. The resulting AGCM combined EULAG's advanced dynamics core with the "physics" of the NCAR Community Atmospheric Model (CAM). Effort discussed below shows how we improved model performance and tested both EULAG and the coupled CAM-EULAG in several ways to demonstrate the grid stretching and ability to simulate very well a wide range of scales, that is, multi-scale capability. We leveraged our effort through interaction with an international EULAG community that has collectively developed new features and applications of EULAG, which we exploited for our own work summarized here. Overall, the work contributed to over 40 peer-reviewed publications and over 70 conference/workshop/seminar presentations, many of them invited. 3a. EULAG Advances EULAG is a non-hydrostatic, parallel computational model for all-scale geophysical flows. EULAG's name derives from its two computational options: EULerian (flux form) or semi-LAGrangian (advective form). The model combines nonoscillatory forward-in-time (NFT) numerical algorithms with a robust elliptic Krylov solver. A signature feature of EULAG is that it is formulated in generalized time-dependent curvilinear coordinates. In particular, this enables grid adaptivity. In total, these features give EULAG novel advantages over many existing dynamical cores. For EULAG itself, numerical advances included refining boundary conditions and filters for optimizing model performance in polar regions. We also added flexibility to the model's underlying formulation, allowing it to work with the pseudo-compressible equation set of Durran in addition to EULAG's standard anelastic formulation. Work in collaboration with others also extended the demonstrated range of validity of soundproof models, showing that they are more broadly applicable than some had previously thought. Substantial testing of EULAG included application and extension of the Jablonowski-Williamson baroclinic wave test - an archetype of planetary weather - and further analysis of multi-scale interactions arising from collapse of temperature fronts in both the baroclinic wave test and simulations of the Held-Suarez idealized climate. These analyses revealed properties of atmospheric gravity waves not seen in previous work and further demonstrated the ability of EULAG to simulate realistic behavior over several orders of magnitude of length scales. Additional collaborative work enhanced capability for modeling atmospheric flows with adaptive moving meshes and demonstrated the ability of EULAG to move into petascale computing. 3b. CAM-EULAG Advances We have developed CAM-EULAG in collaboration with former project postdoc, now University of Cape Town Assistant Professor, Babatunde Abiodun. Initial study documented good model performance in aqua-planet simulations. In particular, we showed that the grid adaptivity (stretching) implemented in CAM-EULAG allows higher resolution in selected regions without causing anomalous behavior such as spurious wave reflection. We then used the stretched-grid version to analyze simulated extreme precipitation events in West Africa, comparing the precipitation and event environment with observed behavior. The model simulates fairly well the spatial scale and the interannual and intraseasonal variability of the extreme events, although its extreme precipitation intensity is weaker than observed. In addition, both observations and the simulations show possible forcing of extreme events by African easterly waves. 3c. Other Contributions Through our collaborations, we have made contributions to a wide range of outcomes. For research focused on terrestrial behavior, these have included (1) upwind schemes for gas dynamics, (2) a nonlinear perspective on the dynamics of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, (3) numerical realism of thermal convection, (4) extreme precipitation processes, (5) unstructured meshes, (6) porous-media analogies for simulating flow in urban environments, (7) Monge-Ampere enhancements of semi-Lagrangian methods and (8) further extensions of the generality of EULAG applications to geophysical problems. The generality of EULAG for multi-scale flow was also demonstrated through solar applications. Simulations of solar magnetohydrodynamics showed that EULAG produces the solar cycle fairly well. Although the model's solar cycle is significantly longer than observed, it shows remarkable agreement with observations in features of spatial evolution. These efforts in environments that are extreme from a geophysical perspective have helped to establish the robustness of EULAG as an all-scale code for geophysical applications.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Permutationally Invariant Polynomial Expansions with Unrestricted Complexity

A general strategy is presented for constructing and validating permutationally invariant polynomial (PIP) expansions for chemical systems of any stoichiometry. Demonstrations are made for three categories of gas-phase dynamics and kinetics: collisional energy-transfer trajectories for predicting pressure-dependent kinetics, three-body collisions for describing transient van der Waals adducts relevant to atmospheric chemistry, and nonthermal reactivity via quasiclassical trajectories. In total, 30 systems are considered with up to 15 atoms and 39 degrees of freedom. Permutational invariance is enforced in PIP expansions with as many as 13 million terms and 13 permutationally distinct atom types by taking advantage of petascale computational resources. The quality of the PIP expansions is demonstrated through the systematic convergence of in-sample and out-of-sample errors with respect to both the number of training data and the order of the expansion, and these errors are shown to predict errors in the dynamics for both reactive and nonreactive applications. Here, the parallelized code distributed as part of this work enables the automation of PIP generation for complex systems with multiple channels and flexible user-defined symmetry constraints and for automatically removing unphysical unconnected terms from the basis set expansions, all of which are required for simulating complex reactive systems.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Methodology for the Simulation of Molecular Motors at Different Scales

Millisecond-scale conformational transitions represent a seminal challenge for traditional molecular dynamics simulations, even with the help of high-end supercomputer architectures. Such events are particularly relevant to the study of molecular motors—proteins or abiological constructs that convert chemical energy into mechanical work. Here, we present a hybrid-simulation scheme combining an array of methods including elastic network models, transition path sampling, and advanced free-energy methods, possibly in conjunction with generalized-ensemble schemes to deliver a viable option for capturing the millisecond-scale motor steps of biological motors. The methodology is already implemented in large measure in popular molecular dynamics programs, and it can leverage the massively parallel capabilities of petascale computers. The applicability of the hybrid method is demonstrated with two examples, namely cyclodextrin-based motors and V-type ATPases.

Chemistry↗

A lightweight I/O scheme to facilitate spatial and temporal queries of scientific data analytics

In the era of petascale computing, more scientific applications are being deployed on leadership scale computing platforms to enhance the scientific productivity. Many I/O techniques have been designed to address the growing I/O bottleneck on large-scale systems by handling massive scientific data in a holistic manner. While such techniques have been leveraged in a wide range of applications, they have not been shown as adequate for many mission critical applications, particularly in data postprocessing stage. One of the examples is that some scientific applications generate datasets composed of a vast amount of small data elements that are organized along many spatial and temporal dimensions but require sophisticated data analytics on one or more dimensions. Including such dimensional knowledge into data organization can be beneficial to the efficiency of data post-processing, which is often missing from exiting I/O techniques. In this study, we propose a novel I/O scheme named STAR (Spatial and Temporal AggRegation) to enable high performance data queries for scientific analytics. STAR is able to dive into the massive data, identify the spatial and temporal relationships among data variables, and accordingly organize them into an optimized multi-dimensional data structure before storing to the storage. This technique not only facilitates the common access patterns of data analytics, but also further reduces the application turnaround time. In particular, STAR is able to enable efficient data queries along the time dimension, a practice common in scientific analytics but not yet supported by existing I/O techniques. In our case study with a critical climate modeling application GEOS-5, the experimental results on Jaguar supercomputer demonstrate an improvement up to 73 times for the read performance compared to the original I/O method.

Tian, Yuan↗

A Scalable O(N) Algorithm for Large-Scale Parallel First-Principles Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Traditional algorithms for first-principles molecular dynamics (FPMD) simulations only gain a modest capability increase from current petascale computers, due to their O(N 3 ) complexity and their heavy use of global communications. To address this issue, we are developing a truly scalable O(N) complexity FPMD algorithm, based on density functional theory (DFT), which avoids global communications. The computational model uses a general nonorthogonal orbital formulation for the DFT energy functional, which requires knowledge of selected elements of the inverse of the associated overlap matrix. We present a scalable algorithm for approximately computing selected entries of the inverse of the overlap matrix, based on an approximate inverse technique, by inverting local blocks corresponding to principal submatrices of the global overlap matrix. The new FPMD algorithm exploits sparsity and uses nearest neighbor communication to provide a computational scheme capable of extreme scalability. Accuracy is controlled by the mesh spacing of the finite difference discretization, the size of the localization regions in which the electronic orbitals are confined, and a cutoff beyond which the entries of the overlap matrix can be omitted when computing selected entries of its inverse. We demonstrate the algorithm's excellent parallel scaling for up to O(100K) atoms on O(100K) processors, with a wall-clock time of O(1) minute per molecular dynamics time step.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Institute for Scalable Application Development Software

Work by the University of Wisconsin as part of the DOE SciDAC CScADS includes the following accomplishments: Research on tool componentization, with concentration on the: InstructionAPI and InstructionSemanticsAPI ParseAPI DataflowAPI Co-organized a series of high successful workshops with Prof. John Mellor-Crummey, Rice University, on Performance Tools for Petascale Computing, held in Snowbird, Utah and Lake Tahoe, California in July or August of 2007 through 2012. Investigated the use of multicore in numerical libraries Dyninst porting to 32- and 64bit Power/PowerPC (including BlueGene) and 32- and 64-bit Pentium platforms. Applying our toolkits to advanced problems in binary code parsing associated with dealing with legacy and malicious code.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Wedgehog Manual and Interface Guide, Jayenne-7_0_0

Wedgehog is an IMC package developed by the CCS–2’s Monte Carlo Team1 . Wedgehog is designed to interface with a time-split radiation-hydrodynamics (rad-hydro) code and supports one-dimensional R, two-dimensional RZ or three dimensional XY Z geometry. The geometry is confined to logically rectangular Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) meshes with unit aspect ratios and 2:1 refinement between adjacent cells. Wedgehog supports both two and three temperature simulations. Available scattering models for photon-electron interaction include Compton and isotropic scattering. It maintains a census of particles in between time steps to preserve the contents of the radiation field. Wedgehog can accommodate frequency dependence by using a “Multigroup” (MG) approximation that essentially averages the frequency-dependent opacity information into discrete bins. Additionally, Wedge hog includes a capability to use Opacity Distribution Factors (ODFs) that may be generated with the XCP-5 code TOPS. A previous version of Wedgehog that utilizes IBM’s Cell chip is available for the Roadrunner petascale computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory (circa 2006-2013, estimated). However, as Roadrunner is going out of service in the near future, we have dropped support for the interfaces that were deprecated in Jayenne 6 4 0 and removed in Jayenne-7 0 0. The Roadrunner version had the same interface as the mainline code and is available in RZ and XYZ geometry with all the same features except for flux tallies across a surface (i.e., tally sphere and RZ line-segment).

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Accurate Numerical Simulations Of Chemical Phenomena Involved in Energy Production and Storage with MADNESS and MPQC: ALCF-2 Early Science Program Technical Report

In order to solve the electronic structure of large molecular systems on petascale computers using MADNESS, a numerical tool kit, are required fast and accurate implementations for linear algebra. MADNESS uses multiresolution analysis and low separation rank which translates high dimensional functions in tensor products using Legendre polynomial. The multiple tensor products make to the singular value decomposition and matrix multiplication the most intense operations in MADNESS. This work discusses the interfacing of Eigen3 as a C++ substitute of LAPACK and introduces Elemental for the diagonalization of large matrices. Furthermore, the present paper shows the performance these libraries on Blue Gene/ Q.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

A Lightweight I/O Scheme to Facilitate Spatial and Temporal Queries of Scientific Data Analytics

In the era of petascale computing, more scientific applications are being deployed on leadership scale computing platforms to enhance the scientific productivity. Many I/O techniques have been designed to address the growing I/O bottleneck on large-scale systems by handling massive scientific data in a holistic manner. While such techniques have been leveraged in a wide range of applications, they have not been shown as adequate for many mission critical applications, particularly in data post-processing stage. One of the examples is that some scientific applications generate datasets composed of a vast amount of small data elements that are organized along many spatial and temporal dimensions but require sophisticated data analytics on one or more dimensions. Including such dimensional knowledge into data organization can be beneficial to the efficiency of data post-processing, which is often missing from exiting I/O techniques. In this study, we propose a novel I/O scheme named STAR (Spatial and Temporal AggRegation) to enable high performance data queries for scientific analytics. STAR is able to dive into the massive data, identify the spatial and temporal relationships among data variables, and accordingly organize them into an optimized multi-dimensional data structure before storing to the storage. This technique not only facilitates the common access patterns of data analytics, but also further reduces the application turnaround time. In particular, STAR is able to enable efficient data queries along the time dimension, a practice common in scientific analytics but not yet supported by existing I/O techniques. In our case study with a critical climate modeling application GEOS-5, the experimental results on Jaguar supercomputer demonstrate an improvement up to 73 times for the read performance compared to the original I/O method.

Temporal Queries↗

Active Storage with Analytics Capabilities and I/O Runtime System for Petascale Systems

Computational scientists must understand results from experimental, observational and computational simulation generated data to gain insights and perform knowledge discovery. As systems approach the petascale range, problems that were unimaginable a few years ago are within reach. With the increasing volume and complexity of data produced by ultra-scale simulations and high-throughput experiments, understanding the science is largely hampered by the lack of comprehensive I/O, storage, acceleration of data manipulation, analysis, and mining tools. Scientists require techniques, tools and infrastructure to facilitate better understanding of their data, in particular the ability to effectively perform complex data analysis, statistical analysis and knowledge discovery. The goal of this work is to enable more effective analysis of scientific datasets through the integration of enhancements in the I/O stack, from active storage support at the file system layer to MPI-IO and high-level I/O library layers. We propose to provide software components to accelerate data analytics, mining, I/O, and knowledge discovery for large-scale scientific applications, thereby increasing productivity of both scientists and the systems. Our approaches include 1) design the interfaces in high-level I/O libraries, such as parallel netCDF, for applications to activate data mining operations at the lower I/O layers; 2) Enhance MPI-IO runtime systems to incorporate the functionality developed as a part of the runtime system design; 3) Develop parallel data mining programs as part of runtime library for server-side file system in PVFS file system; and 4) Prototype an active storage cluster, which will utilize multicore CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs to carry out the data mining workload.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Long History of Supercomputing

As part of its national security science mission, Los Alamos National Laboratory and HPC have a long, entwined history dating back to the earliest days of computing. From bringing the first problem to the nation’s first computer to building the first machine to break the petaflop barrier, Los Alamos holds many “firsts” in HPC breakthroughs. Today, supercomputers are integral to stockpile stewardship and the Laboratory continues to work with vendors in developing the future of HPC.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Analysis Report for Exascale Storage Requirements for Scientific Data.

Over the next 10 years, the Department of Energy will be transitioning from Petascale to Exascale Computing resulting in data storage, networking, and infrastructure requirements to increase by three orders of magnitude. The technologies and best practices used today are the result of a relatively slow evolution of ancestral technologies developed in the 1950s and 1960s. These include magnetic tape, magnetic disk, networking, databases, file systems, and operating systems. These technologies will continue to evolve over the next 10 to 15 years on a reasonably predictable path. Experience with the challenges involved in transitioning these fundamental technologies from Terascale to Petascale computing systems has raised questions about how these will scale another 3 or 4 orders of magnitude to meet the requirements imposed by Exascale computing systems. This report is focused on the most concerning scaling issues with data storage systems as they relate to High Performance Computing- and presents options for a path forward. Given the ability to store exponentially increasing amounts of data, far more advanced concepts and use of metadata will be critical to managing data in Exascale computing systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Toward Exascale: Overview of Large Eddy Simulations and Direct Numerical Simulations of Nuclear Reactor Flows with the Spectral Element Method in Nek5000

At the beginning of the last decade, Petascale supercomputers (i.e., computers capable of more than 1 petaFLOP) emerged. Now, at the dawn of exascale supercomputing, we provide a review of recent landmark simulations of portions of reactor components with turbulence-resolving techniques that this computational power has made possible. In fact, these simulations have provided invaluable insight into flow dynamics, which is difficult or often impossible to obtain with experiments alone. We focus on simulations performed with the spectral element method, as this method has emerged as a powerful tool to deliver massively parallel calculations at high fidelity by using large eddy simulation or direct numerical simulation. We also limit this paper to constant-property incompressible flow of a Newtonian fluid in the absence of other body or external forces, although the method is by no means limited to this class of flows. We briefly review the fundamentals of the method and the reasons it is compelling for the simulation of nuclear engineering flows. We review in detail a series of Petascale simulations, including the simulations of helical coil steam generators, fuel assemblies, and pebble beds. Even with Petascale computing, however, limitations for nuclear modeling and simulation tools remain. In particular, the size and scope of turbulence-resolving simulations are still limited by computing power and resolution requirements, which scale with the Reynolds number. In the final part of this paper, we discuss the future of the field, including recent advancements in emerging architectures such as GPUbased supercomputers, which are expected to power the next generation of high-performance computers.

computational fluid dynamics↗

Combinatorial Algorithms to Enable Computational Science and Engineering: Work from the CSCAPES Institute

This final progress report summarizes the work accomplished at the Combinatorial Scientific Computing and Petascale Simulations Institute. We developed Zoltan, a parallel mesh partitioning library that made use of accurate hypergraph models to provide load balancing in mesh-based computations. We developed several graph coloring algorithms for computing Jacobian and Hessian matrices and organized them into a software package called ColPack. We developed parallel algorithms for graph coloring and graph matching problems, and also designed multi-scale graph algorithms. Three PhD students graduated, six more are continuing their PhD studies, and four postdoctoral scholars were advised. Six of these students and Fellows have joined DOE Labs (Sandia, Berkeley), as staff scientists or as postdoctoral scientists. We also organized the SIAM Workshop on Combinatorial Scientific Computing (CSC) in 2007, 2009, and 2011 to continue to foster the CSC community.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Applying Graph Analytics to Understand Compute Core Usage and Publication Trends in a Petascale Supercomputing Facility

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) runs Titan, the No. 4 supercomputer in the world, to deliver over four billion compute core hours every year to several scientific domains, in their pursuit of leadership science. In this paper, we analyze four years worth of heterogeneous log data sources from the OLCF resource fabric, capturing metadata on entities such as users (2,546), scientific project allocations (674), jobs (1,352,402) and publications (1,146), to derive insights into the trends in core hour usage and publications, across 35 science domains. We have constructed a scalable graph to represent the OLCF entities and apply rich graph analytics for our analysis. Based on this, we have analyzed the metadata across five dimensions, namely (1) quantitative analysis of Titan system usage, (2) quantitative analysis of OLCF publications, (3) correlation analysis between system usage and publications, (4) text analysis to derive OLCF research trends, and (5) utilization of graph mining for association analysis. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first of its kind to apply graph- based big data techniques to provide comprehensive insights on an HPC center's core hour usage and users' publication trends. Our results provide valuable details into an HPC center's core allocation program, measuring the productivity of scientific domains, the interplay between core usage and research output, accelerating collaboration, and in predicting new connections between resource entities.

Lee, Sangkeun (Matt)↗