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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 55 records · Page 3

On the Training and Generalization of Deep Operator Networks

Here, we present a novel training method for deep operator networks (DeepONets), one of the most popular neural network models for operators. DeepONets are constructed by two subnetworks, namely the branch and trunk networks. Typically, the two subnetworks are trained simultaneously, which amounts to solving a complex optimization problem in a high dimensional space. In addition, the nonconvex and nonlinear nature makes training very challenging. To tackle such a challenge, we propose a two-step training method that trains the trunk network first and then sequentially trains the branch network. The core mechanism is motivated by the divide-and-conquer paradigm and is the decomposition of the entire complex training task into two subtasks with reduced complexity. Therein the Gram–Schmidt orthonormalization process is introduced which significantly improves stability and generalization ability. On the theoretical side, we establish a generalization error estimate in terms of the number of training data, the width of DeepONets, and the number of input and output sensors. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the two-step training method, including Darcy flow in heterogeneous porous media.

deep operator networks↗

NFPA Distributed Energy Resources Safety Training (DERST) For Emergency Responders

The National Fire Protection Association, with support from the Department of Energy, executed a multi-year initiative to develop, enhance, and disseminate Distributed Energy Resources Safety Training (DERST) tools for U.S. emergency responders. As Distributed Energy Resources (DER)—such as solar photovoltaics, battery energy storage systems (ESS), electric vehicles (EVs), and associated infrastructure—become increasingly prevalent, the NFPA identified a critical need for up-to-date standardized, accessible, and effective safety training tailored for the fire service and related public safety professionals. The project delivered a comprehensive suite of educational resources to improve responders’ abilities to safely manage DER-related incidents. This included: • Revised Modular Training Courses: Updated classroom-based DER safety courses, now modular and accessible nationwide through fire academies and the North American Fire Training Directors (NAFTD) network. • Live Burn Testing & Research: A full-scale controlled burn of a DER-equipped residential structure provided real-world data and insights, forming the basis for updated best practices. • A Gamified Simulation Tool – Firefighters Incident Response Simulation Tool (FIRST): A first-of-its-kind, multiplayer, scenario-based simulation using the Unreal Engine 5.0 to train responders in a realistic virtual, multi-DER incident environment. • Field Familiarization Software Tools & Prop Guide: Digital DER field familiarization evolutions software guide and a prop development manual to support field-based DER training exercises, enhancing responders' hands-on familiarity with DER infrastructure and collaboration on virtual incident responses. • National Dissemination Strategy: Strategic partnerships with NAFTD, Vector Solutions, and others enabled wide-scale distribution, with over 5,000 departments accessing resources and 1,100+ departments adopting the simulator in the first seven months. Also provided a web portal for easy access to all training and simulation programs developed under this grant for the U.S. responder community. Key findings from the project—particularly from the burn test—led to paradigm shifts in fire response tactics. For example, traditional approaches to garage fires may be hazardous if DERs are present, due to explosive off gassing and thermal runaway risks. The new training emphasizes scene assessment, stand-off approaches, thermal imaging verification, and careful post-incident cooling of DER components to prevent reignition. This initiative has had a significant national impact, raising awareness, enhancing preparedness, and supporting safer DER incident response practices. Significant engagement from the media, public safety organizations, and PBS coverage has further amplified the reach and adoption of NFPA’s DER safety training, tools, and simulations.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Best Practices for NERSC Training

The National Energy Research Supercomputing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) organizes approximately 20 training events per year for its 8,000 users from 800 projects, who have varying levels of High Performance Computing (HPC) knowledge and familiarity with NERSC's HPC resources. Due to the novel circumstances of the pandemic, NERSC began transforming our traditional smaller-scale, on-site training events to larger-scale, fully virtual sessions in March 2020. We treated this as an opportunity to try new approaches and improve our training best practices. This paper describes the key practices we have developed since the start of this transformation, including considerations for organizing events; collaboration with other HPC centers and the DOE ECP Program to increase reach and impact of events; targeted emails to users to increase attendance; efficient management of user accounts for computational resource access; strategies for preventing Zoombombing; streamlining the publication of professional-quality, closed-captioned videos on the NERSC YouTube channel for accessibility; effective communication channels for Q&A; tailoring training contents to NERSC user needs via close collaboration with vendors and presenters; standardized training procedures and publishing of training materials; and considerations for planning HPC training topics. Additionally, most of these practices will be continued after the pandemic as effective norms for training.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Training data selection for event classification in a highly variable environment

A problem of interest for nuclear nonproliferation is monitoring activities at nuclear facilities, where proliferation events may only take place a few times and often under variable conditions. Machine learning has revolutionized data analytics by enabling the use of measurable signatures to generate predictive models of facility operations. However, traditional methods for training these models require large, reliable data sets with labeled observations, a challenge for nonproliferation. Highly variable conditions further complicate this as events from training data may have occurred in conditions quite different from the event of interest. Our hypothesis is that when events occur in a highly variable environment, careful training data selection for each test event could outperform the standard approach of using all available training data. We developed a method to optimize training data selection for the given test event and applied it to predicting the power level of the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In this study, the reactor startup exhibits variability between occurrences due to natural variability in environmental conditions and operational procedures. Using a combination of analysis techniques, a similitude assessment was performed on data collected from HFIR to isolate clusters that were optimal for training a predictive model. Concepts such as dynamic time warping and Jaccard similarity were used in conjunction with clustering analysis. In order to validate this approach, the model was trained on every combination of unique training events and the predictive performance was compared to the performance using a subset of the training data selected by isolated clusters found through the similitude assessment.

Iyer, A↗

Final Evaluation Report for the Sandia National Laboratories Recorded Information Management Training Program

The Recorded Information Management (RIM) training and guidance materials were originally evaluated to determine the current status of the training program. Specifically, how and where are training materials implemented and are members of the workforce (MOWs) regularly accessing them. The evaluation highlighted that there is a breadth of training materials and guidance available; however, the materials are often outdated, point to old Sandia Policies, and/or are in outdated templates. Additionally, there is currently no single-entry point for training, meaning that training is available via the RIM homepage, TEDs, etc. This means that MOWs must search in various webpages or systems for training. To ensure RIM training materials are regularly updated and are accessible for MOWs it is recommended to assign one staff member to manage the program training materials.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Optimizing Distributed Training on Frontier for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success as foundational models, benefiting various downstream applications through fine-tuning. Loss scaling studies have demonstrated the superior performance of larger LLMs compared to their smaller counterparts. Nevertheless, training LLMs with billions of parameters poses significant challenges and requires considerable computational resources. For example, training a one trillion parameter GPT-style model on 20 trillion tokens requires a staggering 120 million exaflops. This research explores efficient distributed training strategies to extract this computation from Frontier, the world's first exascale supercomputer. We enable and investigate various model and data parallel training techniques, such as tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and sharded data parallelism, to facilitate training a trillion-parameter model on Frontier. We empirically assess these techniques and their associated parameters to determine their impact on memory footprint, communication latency, and GPU's computational efficiency. We analyze the complex interplay among these techniques and find a strategy to combine them to achieve high throughput through hyperparameter tuning. We have identified efficient strategies for training large LLMs of varying sizes through empirical analysis and hyperparameter tuning. For 22 Billion, 175 Billion, and 1 Trillion parameters, we achieved GPU throughputs of 38.38%, 36.14%, and 31.96%, respectively. For the training of the 175 Billion parameter model and the 1 Trillion parameter model, we achieved 100% weak scaling efficiency on 1024 and 3072 Mi250X GPUs, respectively. We also achieved strong scaling efficiencies of 89% and 87% for these two models. We trained these models only tens of iterations instead of training till completion.

Yin, Junqi↗

PANTHER: A Programmable Architecture for Neural Network Training Harnessing Energy-Efficient ReRAM

The wide adoption of deep neural networks has been accompanied by ever-increasing energy and performance demands due to the expensive nature of training them. Additionally, numerous special-purpose architectures have been proposed to accelerate training: both digital and hybrid digital-analog using resistive RAM (ReRAM) crossbars. ReRAM-based accelerators have demonstrated the effectiveness of ReRAM crossbars at performing matrix-vector multiplication operations that are prevalent in training. However, they still suffer from inefficiency due to the use of serial reads and writes for performing the weight gradient and update step. A few works have demonstrated the possibility of performing outer products in crossbars, which can be used to realize the weight gradient and update step without the use of serial reads and writes. However, these works have been limited to low precision operations which are not sufficient for typical training workloads. Moreover, they have been confined to a limited set of training algorithms for fully-connected layers only. To address these limitations, we propose a bit-slicing technique for enhancing the precision of ReRAM-based outer products, which is substantially different from bit-slicing for matrix-vector multiplication only. We incorporate this technique into a crossbar architecture with three variants catered to different training algorithms. To evaluate our design on different types of layers in neural networks (fully-connected, convolutional, etc.) and training algorithms, we develop PANTHER, an ISA-programmable training accelerator with compiler support. Our design can also be integrated into other accelerators in the literature to enhance their efficiency. Our evaluation shows that PANTHER achieves up to 8.02×, 54.21×, and 103× energy reductions as well as 7.16×, 4.02×, and 16× execution time reductions compared to digital accelerators, ReRAM-based accelerators, and GPUs, respectively.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Large Scale Caching and Streaming of Training Data for Online Deep Learning

The training of deep neural network models on large data remains a difficult problem, despite progress towards scalable techniques. In particular, there is a mismatch between the random but predetermined order in which AI flows select training samples and the streaming I/O patterns for which traditional HPC data storage (e.g., parallel file systems) are designed. In addition, as more data are obtained, it is feasible neither simply to train learning models incrementally, due to catastrophic forgetting (i.e., bias towards new samples), nor to train frequently from scratch, due to prohibitive time and/or resource constraints. In this paper, we study data management techniques that combine caching and streaming with rehearsal support in order to enable efficient access to training samples in both offline training and continual learning. We revisit state-of-art streaming approaches based on data pipelines that transparently handle prefetching, caching, shuffling, and data augmentation, and discuss the challenges and opportunities that arise when combining these methods with data-parallel training techniques. We also report on preliminary experiments that evaluate the I/O overheads involved in accessing the training samples from a parallel file system (PFS) under several concurrency scenarios, highlighting the impact of the PFS on the design of the data pipelines.

data pipelines↗

Embedded training of neural-network subgrid-scale turbulence models

We report that the weights of a deep neural-network model are optimized in conjunction with the governing flow equations to provide a model for subgrid-scale stresses in a temporally developing plane turbulent jet at Reynolds number Re 0 = 6000 . The objective function for training is first based on the instantaneous filtered velocity fields from a corresponding direct numerical simulation, and the training is by a stochastic gradient descent method, which uses the adjoint Navier-Stokes equations to provide the end-to-end sensitivities of the model weights to the velocity fields. In-sample and out-of-sample testing on multiple dual-jet configurations show that its required mesh density in each coordinate direction for prediction of mean flow, Reynolds stresses, and spectra is half that needed by the dynamic Smagorinsky model for comparable accuracy. The same neural-network model trained directly to match filtered subgrid-scale stresses, without the constraint of being embedded within the flow equations during the training, fails to provide a qualitatively correct prediction. The coupled formulation is generalized to train based only on mean-flow and Reynolds stresses, which are more readily available in experiments. The mean-flow training provides a robust model, which is important, though a somewhat less accurate prediction for the same coarse meshes, as might be anticipated due to the reduced information available for training in this case. The anticipated advantage of the formulation is that the inclusion of resolved physics in the training increases its capacity to extrapolate. This is assessed for the case of passive scalar transport, for which it outperforms established models due to improved mixing predictions.

42 ENGINEERING↗

An Active Learning-Based Streaming Pipeline for Reduced Data Training of Structure Finding Models in Neutron Diffractometry

Structure determination workloads in neutron diffractometry are computationally expensive and routinely require several hours to many days to determine the structure of a material from its neutron diffraction patterns. The potential for machine learning models trained on simulated neutron scattering patterns to significantly speed up these tasks have been reported recently. However, the amount of simulated data needed to train these models grows exponentially with the number of structural parameters to be predicted and poses a significant computational challenge. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel batch-mode active learning (AL) policy that uses uncertainty sampling to simulate training data drawn from a probability distribution that prefers labelled examples about which the model is least certain. We confirm its efficacy in training the same models with ∼ 75% less training data while improving the accuracy. We then discuss the design of an efficient stream-based training workflow that uses this AL policy and present a performance study on two heterogeneous platforms to demonstrate that, compared with a conventional training workflow, the streaming workflow delivers ∼ 20% shorter training time without any loss of accuracy.

Wang, Tianle [Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL)↗

Hindsight logging for model training

In modern Machine Learning, model training is an iterative, experimental process that can consume enormous computation resources and developer time. To aid in that process, experienced model developers log and visualize program variables during training runs. Exhaustive logging of all variables is infeasible, so developers are left to choose between slowing down training via extensive conservative logging, or letting training run fast via minimalist optimistic logging that may omit key information. As a compromise, optimistic logging can be accompanied by program checkpoints; this allows developers to add log statements post-hoc, and "replay" desired log statements from checkpoint---a process we refer to as hindsight logging. Unfortunately, hindsight logging raises tricky problems in data management and software engineering. Done poorly, hindsight logging can waste resources and generate technical debt embodied in multiple variants of training code. In this paper, we present methodologies for efficient and effective logging practices for model training, with a focus on techniques for hindsight logging. Our goal is for experienced model developers to learn and adopt these practices. To make this easier, we provide an open-source suite of tools for Fast Low-Overhead Recovery (flor) that embodies our design across three tasks: (i) efficient background logging in Python, (ii) adaptive periodic checkpointing, and (iii) an instrumentation library that codifies hindsight logging for efficient and automatic record-replay of model-training. Model developers can use each flor tool separately as they see fit, or they can use flor in hands-free mode, entrusting it to instrument their code end-to-end for efficient record-replay. Our solutions leverage techniques from physiological transaction logs and recovery in database systems. Evaluations on modern ML benchmarks demonstrate that flor can produce fast checkpointing with small user-specifiable overheads (e.g. 7%), and still provide hindsight log replay times orders of magnitude faster than restarting training from scratch.

Computer Science↗

Training Restricted Boltzmann Machines With a D-Wave Quantum Annealer

Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) is an energy-based, undirected graphical model. It is commonly used for unsupervised and supervised machine learning. Typically, RBM is trained using contrastive divergence (CD). However, training with CD is slow and does not estimate the exact gradient of the log-likelihood cost function. In this work, the model expectation of gradient learning for RBM has been calculated using a quantum annealer (D-Wave 2000Q), where obtaining samples is faster than Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) used in CD. Training and classification results of RBM trained using quantum annealing are compared with the CD-based method. The performance of the two approaches is compared with respect to the classification accuracies, image reconstruction, and log-likelihood results. The classification accuracy results indicate comparable performances of the two methods. Image reconstruction and log-likelihood results show improved performance of the CD-based method. It is shown that the samples obtained from quantum annealer can be used to train an RBM on a 64-bit “bars and stripes” dataset with classification performance similar to an RBM trained with CD. Though training based on CD showed improved learning performance, training using a quantum annealer could be useful as it eliminates computationally expensive MCMC steps of CD.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Reliable Determination of Pulses and Pulse-Shape Instability in Ultrashort Laser Pulse Trains Using Polarization-Gating and Transient-Grating Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating Using the RANA Approach

Devices that measure the presence of instability in the pulse shapes in trains of ultrashort laser pulses do not exist, so this task necessarily falls to pulse-measurement devices, like Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating (FROG) and its variations, which have proven to be a highly reliable class of techniques for measuring stable trains of ultrashort laser pulses. Fortunately, multi-shot versions of FROG have also been shown to sensitively distinguish trains of stable from those of unstable pulse shapes by displaying readily visible systematic discrepancies between the measured and retrieved traces in the presence of unstable pulse trains. However, the effects of pulse-shape instability and algorithm stagnation can be indistinguishable, so a never-stagnating algorithm—even when instability is present—is required and is generally important. In previous work, we demonstrated that our recently introduced Retrieved-Amplitude N-grid Algorithmic (RANA) approach produces highly reliable (100%) pulse-retrieval in the second-harmonic-generation (SHG) version of FROG for thousands of sample trains of pulses with stable pulse shapes. Further, it does so even for trains of unstable pulse shapes and thus both reliably distinguishes between the two cases and provides a rough measure of the degree of instability as well as a reasonable estimate of most typical pulse parameters. Here, we perform the analogous study for the polarization-gating (PG) and transient-grating (TG) versions of FROG, which are often used for higher-energy pulse trains. We conclude that PG and TG FROG, coupled with the RANA approach, also provide reliable indicators of pulse-shape instability. In addition, for PG and TG FROG, the RANA approach provides an even better estimate of a typical pulse in an unstable pulse train than SHG FROG does, even in cases of significant pulse-shape instability.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Propagating Uncertainties in the SALT3 Model-training Process to Cosmological Constraints

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are standardizable candles that must be modeled empirically to yield cosmological constraints. To understand the robustness of this modeling to variations in the model-training procedure, we build an end-to-end pipeline to test the recently developed SALT3 model. We explore the consequences of removing pre-2000s low-z or poorly calibrated U-band data, adjusting the amount and fidelity of SN Ia spectra, and using a model-independent framework to simulate the training data. We find that the SALT3 model surfaces are improved by having additional spectra and U-band data, and can be shifted by ~5% if host-galaxy contamination is not sufficiently removed from SN spectra. We find that resulting measurements of w are consistent to within 2.5% for all of the training variants explored in this work, with the largest shifts coming from variants that add color-dependent calibration offsets or host-galaxy contamination to the training spectra and those that remove pre-2000s low-z data. These results demonstrate that the SALT3 model-training procedure is largely robust to reasonable variations in the training data, but that additional attention must be paid to the treatment of spectroscopic data in the training process. We also find that the training procedure is sensitive to the color distributions of the input data—the resulting w measurement can be biased by ~2% if the color distribution is not sufficiently wide. Future low-z data, particularly u-band observations and high signal-to-noise ratio SN Ia spectra, will help to significantly improve SN Ia modeling in the coming years.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Geographic Information System Based Emergency Response Training Assessments for DOE Radioactive Materials Transport - 20027

Safety and security are priorities of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) radioactive materials shipping campaigns. In the more than 70-year history of domestic transport of spent nuclear fuel (SNF), there has never been a transportation-related radiological injury. To support transportation planning, among the tools that DOE uses is the Stakeholder Tool for Assessing Radioactive Transportation (START). START contains geospatial data and transportation route analyses capabilities designed to support a range of DOE transportation planning initiatives. One of those functions is the capability to support emergency response planning and training for State and Tribal jurisdictions located on routes used for DOE shipments of radioactive materials. As part of the Department's commitment to public safety, DOE provides federally-funded radiological response training to emergency responders along DOE radioactive materials transportation corridors through its Transportation Emergency Preparedness Program (TEPP). START contains spatial data representing the locations and emergency-response capabilities of fire departments, police, hospitals, State emergency response centers, and where TEPP-trained personnel are based. The START tool supports State and Tribal users' ability to evaluate emergency-response coverage on active and potential DOE radioactive materials transport routes through their jurisdictions, provide expected response times to reach the scene of an incident, identify equipment available to support a response, and identify the number of response personnel and their respective training levels. In addition, START can be used to identify gaps in coverage along a transportation corridor where additional radiological emergency response training may be needed. This paper describes the data, features, and functionality DOE uses to provide a resource for emergency response training needs assessments for States and Tribes along active and potential routes for transporting radioactive materials, and illustrates its use. It also discusses future plans to integrate TEPP and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) radiological training data to provide a more comprehensive source of geospatial information on personnel who have received equivalent radiological response training. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Evaluation of pre-training large language models on leadership-class supercomputers

Large language models (LLMs) have arisen rapidly to the center stage of artificial intelligence as the foundation models applicable to many downstream learning tasks. However, how to effectively build, train, and serve such models for many high-stake and first-principle-based scientific use cases are both of great interests and of great challenges. Moreover, pre-training LLMs with billions or even trillions of parameters can be prohibitively expensive not just for academic institutions, but also for well-funded industrial and government labs. Furthermore, the energy cost and the environmental impact of developing LLMs must be kept in mind. Here, in this work, we conduct a first-of-its-kind performance analysis to understand the time and energy cost of pre-training LLMs on the Department of Energy (DOE)’s leadership-class supercomputers. Employing state-of-the-art distributed training techniques, we evaluate the computational performance of various parallelization approaches at scale for a range of model sizes, and establish a projection model for the cost of full training. Our findings provide baseline results, best practices, and heuristics for pre-training such large models that should be valuable to HPC community at large. We also offer insights and optimization strategies for using the first exascale computing system, Frontier, to train models of the size of GPT-3 and beyond.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Current Status of the DOE/NNSA Nuclear Criticality Safety Program Hands-on Criticality Safety Training Courses

In 2011, the US Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP) developed and piloted a 2-week nuclear criticality safety (NCS) practitioner course to support training and qualification of new NCS staff. The course was developed in accordance with the American National Standard Institute/American Nuclear Society (ANSI/ANS) standard for NCS training and qualifications (ANSI/ANS-8.26-2007). In 2013, an NCS manager’s course was developed for process supervisors, managers, regulators, and other professionals with NCS-related responsibilities. These courses consist of classroom education, facility training, and hands-on subcritical and critical experiments training. Each course is currently offered twice per year. The 2-week practitioner course offers a week of classroom training, with practical workshops and exercises focused on teaching students how to perform an NCS evaluation. The second week of training involves hands-on critical and subcritical experiments and measurements. The first week is offered in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the DOE Nevada Field Office or the National Atomic Testing Museum. Depending on the student’s clearance level, the second week is offered at Sandia National Laboratory (SNL) (uncleared and L-cleared students) or at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC) (Q-cleared students). The 1-week manager’s course is offered at SNL or NCERC, depending on clearance or interest, and includes classroom and hands-on critical and subcritical experiments and measurements. This paper provides an overview and status report for the DOE/NNSA NCSP training courses in NCS and provides information about future course offerings.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Nuclear Criticality Safety Training: Needs and Efforts

Nuclear criticality safety (NCS) training is essential and required for NCS professionals to ensure that fissionable materials outside of nuclear reactors are safely processed, handled, stored, and transported. Furthermore, the requirement of training in NCS is mandated in several international and domestic documents. In this regard, management has an obligation to establish an NCS training program that provides confidence in the continuing proficiency of personnel, and supervisors must ensure that their staff is suitably trained. Training of all personnel in nuclear facilities is required to support the robust performance of operations. There is a continuing need to maintain, enhance, and develop new training courses to support the NCS community. This paper provides an outline of some of the ongoing and future training courses in the United States to support the field of NCS.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗