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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 541 records · Page 30

Teaching Software Sustainability for High Performance Computing at ATPESC

The Argonne Training Program in Extreme Scale Computing (ATPESC) was started by Argonne National Laboratory with the objective of expanding the ranks of better-prepared users of high-performance computing (HPC) machines. One of the unique aspects of the program was inclusion of a track on software engineering and community codes. The inclusion was motivated by the observation that the projects with good software processes were better able to meet their scientific goals. Over the years, with greater awareness of software sustainability issues in the community, the track has evolved into a software productivity and sustainability track. In this paper we present our experience in choosing and disseminating the content related to the topic of software engineering in high performance computing science from the beginning of the program until now. We discuss the motivations and the reception of the tracks. We also document the evolution of the track over the years based on student feedback and also the growth of awareness about software productivity in high performance computing.

Dubey, Anshu↗

Overview of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at NASA Goddard

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a collection of advanced technologies that allows machines to think and act, both humanly and rationally, through sensing, comprehending, acting and learning. AI's foundations lie at the intersection of several traditional fields Philosophy, Mathematics, Economics, Neuroscience, Psychology and Computer Science. Although the inception of AI started in the 1950's, it has recently made a strong comeback in all aspects of society and all over the world; this is mainly due to the timely combination of increased data volumes, advanced and mature algorithms, and improvements in computing power and storage. Current AI applications include big data analytics, robotics, intelligent sensing, assisted decision making, and speech recognition just to name a few. During the Tour, we will show a few examples of the current AI activities at NASA Goddard.

Le Moigne, Jacqueline↗

Data-driven modeling of dislocation mobility from atomistics using physics-informed machine learning

Dislocation mobility, which dictates the response of dislocations to an applied stress, is a fundamental property of crystalline materials that governs the evolution of plastic deformation. Traditional approaches for deriving mobility laws rely on phenomenological models of the underlying physics, whose free parameters are in turn fitted to a small number of intuition-driven atomic scale simulations under varying conditions of temperature and stress. This tedious and time-consuming approach becomes particularly cumbersome for materials with complex dependencies on stress, temperature, and local environment, such as body-centered cubic crystals (BCC) metals and alloys. In this paper, we present a novel, uncertainty quantification-driven active learning paradigm for learning dislocation mobility laws from automated high-throughput large-scale molecular dynamics simulations, using Graph Neural Networks (GNN) with a physics-informed architecture. We demonstrate that this Physics-informed Graph Neural Network (PI-GNN) framework captures the underlying physics more accurately compared to existing phenomenological mobility laws in BCC metals.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Community Organizations: Changing the Culture in Which Research Software Is Developed and Sustained

Software is the key crosscutting technology that enables advances in mathematics, computer science, and domain-specific science and engineering to achieve robust simulations and analysis for science, engineering, and other research fields. However, software itself has not traditionally received focused attention from research communities; rather, software has evolved organically and inconsistently, with its development largely as by-products of other initiatives. Moreover, challenges in scientific software are expanding due to disruptive changes in computer hardware, increasing scale and complexity of data, and demands for more complex simulations involving multiphysics, multiscale modeling and outer-loop analysis. In recent years, community members have established a range of grass-roots organizations and projects to address these growing technical and social challenges in software productivity, quality, reproducibility, and sustainability. This article provides an overview of such groups and discusses opportunities to leverage their synergistic activities while nurturing work toward emerging software ecosystems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Modernizing Mechatronics Course With Quantum Engineering

Mechatronics is the synergistic application of mechanics, electronics, control engineering, and computer science in the development of electromechanical products and systems, through integrated design. This paper proposes to extend the mechatronics course beyond traditional engineering topics, and to modernize the mechatronics instructions with complementary quantum engineering topics. With the recent rapid advances in quantum technologies such as quantum communications, sensing, computers, and algorithms, it is imperative to train the next generation of engineers and prepare them for their future careers in the ever-changing industry in such areas. Furthermore, due to such progress and advances in the fields associated with quantum mechanics, the integration of quantum technologies with classical mechanical systems will be inevitable both in terms of educational and technological standpoints in future. To address the educational needs of the future engineers in such areas of significant importance, quantum entanglement and quantum cryptography experiments, as two fundamental topics in quantum mechanics, are brought into the mechatronics course in an initiative that is reported in this paper. The integrated quantum and mechatronics topics also provides opportunities for open discussions on exploring the interface of quantum technologies and classical engineering systems, which can potentially push the engineering boundaries beyond classical possibilities by accessing the quantum advantages. An innovative online remote demonstration of such quantum experiments are developed and presented to the students. This course has been offered to undergraduate students once with successful results. The students were able to remotely access the experiments, perform the experiments and collect data. The successful result of such quantum experiments is also reflected in a course survey, presented in this paper, even though the quantum mechanics topics offered in this course are unfamiliar to engineering students and hence more challenging. The paper reports, and aims to promote, the integration of selected quantum technology topics with the mechatronics course for training engineering students in this rapidly growing area.

Ghazinejad, Maziar↗

Finalizing Construction of a New Data Center at BNL

Computational science, data management and analysis have been key factors in the success of Brookhaven National Laboratory's scientific programs at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), and in biological, atmospheric, and energy systems science, Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) and Materials Science, as well as our participation in international research collaborations, such as the ATLAS experiment at Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Switzerland) and the Belle II experiment at KEK (Japan). The construction of a new data center is an acknowledgement of the increasing demand for computing and storage services at BNL in the near term and enable the Lab to address the needs of the future experiments at the High-Luminosity LHC at CERN and the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at BNL in the long term.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Data Science and Machine Learning in Education

The growing role of data science (DS) and machine learning (ML) in high-energy physics (HEP) is well established and pertinent given the complex detectors, large data, sets and sophisticated analyses at the heart of HEP research. Moreover, exploiting symmetries inherent in physics data have inspired physics-informed ML as a vibrant sub-field of computer science research. HEP researchers benefit greatly from materials widely available materials for use in education, training and workforce development. They are also contributing to these materials and providing software to DS/ML-related fields. Increasingly, physics departments are offering courses at the intersection of DS, ML and physics, often using curricula developed by HEP researchers and involving open software and data used in HEP. In this white paper, we explore synergies between HEP research and DS/ML education, discuss opportunities and challenges at this intersection, and propose community activities that will be mutually beneficial.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Science-Driven Data Management for Multi-Tiered Storage (Final Report)

Scientific discovery at the exascale will not be possible without significant new research in the management, storage and retrieval over the long lifespan of the extreme amounts of data that will be produced. Our thesis is that adding application level knowledge about data to guide the actions of the storage system provides substantial benefits to the organization, storage, and access to extreme scale data, resulting in improved productivity for computational science. In this project we will demonstrate novel techniques to facilitate efficient mapping of data objects, even partitioning individual variables, from the user space onto multiple storage tiers, and enable application-guided data reductions and transformations to address capacity and bandwidth bottlenecks. Our goal is to address the associated Input/ Output (I/O) and storage challenges in the context of current and emerging storage landscapes, and expedite insights into mission critical scientific processes.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Big PanDa Workflow Management on Titan for High Energy and Nuclear Physics and for Future Extreme Scale Scientific Application

Over a three year period, from 2016-2019, this project demonstrated the scientific benefits of integrating the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility into traditional high throughput grid based distributed computing systems managed by PanDA, the workflow management system used for the execution of all distributed computing applications by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. PanDA manages millions of batch jobs daily at hundreds of clusters worldwide on request by thousands of physicist users, and processes more than an exabyte of data annually using grid middleware. High levels of operational use of Titan was sustained by PanDA in order to meet the physics goals of ATLAS. The success of this project led to the use of other supercomputers worldwide by ATLAS, and to the adoption of PanDA by other experiments and other scientists. Multiple innovative operational and computer science research goals were achieved supporting the use of supercomputers for scientific domains with large scale distributed data and distributed processing needs.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Incorporating CLIPS into a personal-computer-based Intelligent Tutoring System

A large number of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS's) have been built since they were first proposed in the early 1970's. Research conducted on the use of the best of these systems has demonstrated their effectiveness in tutoring in selected domains. Computer Sciences Corporation, Applied Technology Division, Houston Operations has been tasked by the Spacecraft Software Division at NASA/Johnson Space Center (NASA/JSC) to develop a number of lTS's in a variety of domains and on many different platforms. This paper will address issues facing the development of an ITS on a personal computer using the CLIPS (C Language Integrated Production System) language. For an ITS to be widely accepted, not only must it be effective, flexible, and very responsive, it must also be capable of functioning on readily available computers. There are many issues to consider when using CLIPS to develop an ITS on a personal computer. Some of these issues are the following: when to use CLIPS and when to use a procedural language such as C, how to maximize speed and minimize memory usage, and how to decrease the time required to load your rule base once you are ready to deliver the system. Based on experiences in developing the CLIPS Intelligent Tutoring System (CLIPSITS) on an IBM PC clone and an intelligent Physics Tutor on a Macintosh 2, this paper reports results on how to address some of these issues. It also suggests approaches for maintaining a powerful learning environment while delivering robust performance within the speed and memory constraints of the personal computer.

Mueller, Stephen J.↗

Reconfigurability in MDO Problem Synthesis

Integrating autonomous disciplines into a problem amenable to solution presents a major challenge in realistic multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO). We propose a linguistic approach to MDO problem description, formulation, and solution we call reconfigurable multidisciplinary synthesis (REMS). With assistance from computer science techniques, REMS comprises an abstract language and a collection of processes that provide a means for dynamic reasoning about MDO problems in a range of contexts. The approach may be summarized as follows. Description of disciplinary data according to the rules of a grammar, followed by lexical analysis and compilation, yields basic computational components that can be assembled into various MDO problem formulations and solution algorithms, including hybrid strategies, with relative ease. The ability to re-use the computational components is due to the special structure of the MDO problem. The range of contexts for reasoning about MDO spans tasks from error checking and derivative computation to formulation and reformulation of optimization problem statements. In highly structured contexts, reconfigurability can mean a straightforward transformation among problem formulations with a single operation. We hope that REMS will enable experimentation with a variety of problem formulations in research environments, assist in the assembly of MDO test problems, and serve as a pre-processor in computational frameworks in production environments. This paper, Part 1 of two companion papers, discusses the fundamentals of REMS. Part 2 illustrates the methodology in more detail.

Alexandrov, Natalia M.↗

Reconfigurability in MDO Problem Synthesis

Integrating autonomous disciplines into a problem amenable to solution presents a major challenge in realistic multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO). We propose a linguistic approach to MDO problem description, formulation, and solution we call reconfigurable multidisciplinary synthesis (REMS). With assistance from computer science techniques, REMS comprises an abstract language and a collection of processes that provide a means for dynamic reasoning about MDO problems in a range of contexts. The approach may be summarized as follows. Description of disciplinary data according to the rules of a grammar, followed by lexical analysis and compilation, yields basic computational components that can be assembled into various MDO problem formulations and solution algorithms, including hybrid strategies, with relative ease. The ability to re-use the computational components is due to the special structure of the MDO problem. The range of contexts for reasoning about MDO spans tasks from error checking and derivative computation to formulation and reformulation of optimization problem statements. In highly structured contexts, reconfigurability can mean a straightforward transformation among problem formulations with a single operation. We hope that REMS will enable experimentation with a variety of problem formulations in research environments, assist in the assembly of MDO test problems, and serve as a pre-processor in computational frameworks in production environments. Part 1 of two companion papers, discusses the fundamentals of REMS. This paper, Part 2 illustrates the methodology in more detail.

Alexandrov, Natalia M.↗

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility: 2021 Operational Assessment Report

This Operational Assessment Report describes how the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) met or exceeded every one of its goals for calendar year (CY) 2021 as an advanced scientific computing center. In CY 2021, the ALCF operated its production resource, Theta, an Intel-based Cray XC40 system (11.7-petaflops) augmented with 24 NVIDIA DGX A100-based nodes (3.9-petaflops) that supports diverse workloads, integrating data analytics with artificial intelligence (AI) training and learning in a single platform. In 2021, we began deploying Polaris, our newest 40- petaflops system, and augmented this powerful testbed system with an additional 28 nodes to support the integration of real-time experiments and HPC resources. We also deployed our two largest storage systems yet, named Grand and Eagle, that will bring new services to our users and will power data-driven research for years to come. Last year, Theta delivered a total of 20.8 million node-hours to 16 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) projects and 7.2 million node-hours to ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) projects (32 awarded during the 2020–2021 ALCC year and 17 awarded during the 2021–2022 ALCC year), as well as substantial support to Director’s Discretionary (DD) projects (5.5 million node-hours). As Table ES.1 shows, Theta performed exceptionally well in terms of overall availability (95.1 percent), scheduled availability (99.4 percent), and utilization (98.1 percent; Table 2.1). As of the submission date of this document, ALCF’s user community has published 249 papers in high-quality, peer-reviewed journals and technical proceedings. At the 2021 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC’21), Argonne researchers won two HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards and were part of a Gordon Bell Prize finalist team recognized for developing an AI-enabled, multi-resolution simulation framework for studying complex biomolecular machines. Their framework was used to observe the SARS-CoV-2 replication-transcription machinery in action, by directly integrating experimental data. ALCF also provided a comprehensive program of high-performance computing (HPC) support services to help our community make productive use of the facility’s diverse and growing collection of resources. We are now entering the exascale era, with exascale machines being planned for national laboratories across the country, including Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne) in 2023. ALCF researchers have been leading and guiding numerous strategic activities that will push the boundaries of what’s possible in computational science and engineering and allow us to deliver science on day one.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Implementing a neural network interatomic model with performance portability for emerging exascale architectures

The two main thrusts of computational science are increasingly accurate predictions and faster calculations; to this end, the zeitgeist in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations is pursuing machine learned and data driven interatomic models, e.g. neural network potentials, and novel hardware architectures, e.g. GPUs. Current implementations of neural network potentials are orders of magnitude slower than traditional interatomic models and while looming exascale computing offers the ability to run large, accurate simulations with these models, achieving portable performance for MD with new and varied exascale hardware requires rethinking traditional algorithms, using novel data structures, and library solutions. We re-implement a neural network interatomic model in CabanaMD, an MD proxy application, built on libraries developed for performance portability. Our implementation shows significantly improved thread scaling in this complex kernel as compared to a current LAMMPS implementation, across both strong and weak scaling. Our single-source solution enables simulations up to 20 million atoms on a single CPU node and 4 million atoms with improved performance on a single GPU. Furthermore, we also explore parallelism and data layout choices (using flexible data structures called AoSoAs) and their effect on performance, seeing up to ~50% and ~5% improvements in performance on a GPU by choosing the right level of parallelism and data layout respectively.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Uncertainty-aware mixed-variable machine learning for materials design

Abstract Data-driven design shows the promise of accelerating materials discovery but is challenging due to the prohibitive cost of searching the vast design space of chemistry, structure, and synthesis methods. Bayesian optimization (BO) employs uncertainty-aware machine learning models to select promising designs to evaluate, hence reducing the cost. However, BO with mixed numerical and categorical variables, which is of particular interest in materials design, has not been well studied. In this work, we survey frequentist and Bayesian approaches to uncertainty quantification of machine learning with mixed variables. We then conduct a systematic comparative study of their performances in BO using a popular representative model from each group, the random forest-based Lolo model (frequentist) and the latent variable Gaussian process model (Bayesian). We examine the efficacy of the two models in the optimization of mathematical functions, as well as properties of structural and functional materials, where we observe performance differences as related to problem dimensionality and complexity. By investigating the machine learning models’ predictive and uncertainty estimation capabilities, we provide interpretations of the observed performance differences. Our results provide practical guidance on choosing between frequentist and Bayesian uncertainty-aware machine learning models for mixed-variable BO in materials design.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

dCache – Efficient Message Encoding For Inter-Service Communication in dCache: Evaluation of Existing Serialization Protocols as a Replacement for Java Object Serialization

As a well established, large-scale distributed storage system, dCache is used to manage and serve huge amounts of data collected by high energy physics, astrophysics and photon science experiments. Based on a microservices-like architecture, dCache is built as a modular distributed system, where each component provides a different core functionality. These services communicate by passing serialized messages to each other, a core behavior whose performance properties can consequently affect the entire system.This paper compares and evaluates different data serialization protocols in computer science with the objective of replacing and improving upon Java Object Serialization (JOS), which has increasingly presented itself as no longer being sufficiently performant for encoding messages. The criteria for choosing a new framework are collected, analyzed and formalized. The primary motivation for replacing Java serialization for encoding dCache messages is increasing the general speed of message-passing and thereby reducing the round-trip time for user requests. Emphasis is also placed on schema evolution capabilities and framework usability. Approaches for generalizing (de)serialization speed and size measurements based on data structure complexity are introduced, criteria for measuring documentation, learning curve, maintainability and introduction effort are defined. Finally, several selected serialization protocols are evaluated and compared accordingly, concluding with a recommendation for a suitable JOS replacement.

Morschel, Lea↗

Electronic access to ONREUR/ONRAISIA S and T reports

The Office of Naval Research maintains two foreign field offices in London, England and in Tokyo, Japan. These offices survey world-wide findings, trends and achievements in science and technology. These offices maintain liaison between U.S. Navy and foreign scientific research and development organizations conducting programs of naval interest. Expert personnel survey foreign scientific and technical activities, identify new directions and progress of potential interest, and report their findings. Report topics cover a broad range of basic scientific thrusts in mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science, and oceanography, as well as advances in technologies such as electronics, materials, optics, and robotics. These unclassified reports will be made available via the Internet in 1995, replacing hard-copy publication.

Mccluskey, William↗

Restricted access processor - An application of computer security technology

This paper describes a security guard device that is currently being developed by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). The methods used to provide assurance that the system meets its security requirements include the system architecture, a system security evaluation, and the application of formal and informal verification techniques. The combination of state-of-the-art technology and the incorporation of new verification procedures results in a demonstration of the feasibility of computer security technology for operational applications.

Mcmahon, E. M.↗