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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 559 records · Page 31

Laboratory Testing of Portable Air Cleaner Products for Energy Efficiency and Clean Air Performance at Various Fan Settings [Slides]

This document contains the results of a product review and laboratory testing experiment of portable air cleaning devices (PACs). Thirty-four commercially available PACs were reviewed, and from those, 7 products were purchased and underwent AHAM AC-7 clean air delivery rate (CADR) testing. The following research questions were explored: 1) What is the relationship between clean air delivery rate (CADR) and energy across a range of products and what is the general decrement in CADR as a result of operating at lower fan speeds? 2) How might the multiple units at lower power compare to fewer, larger units at full power in terms of energy efficiency and total cost? 3) How do the measured CADR, power, and efficiency compare to the manufacturer specs? 4) Are there product attributes that can be identified that might contribute to better CADR/W performance?

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Exploring code portability solutions for HEP with a particle tracking test code

Traditionally, high energy physics (HEP) experiments have relied on x86 CPUs for the majority of their significant computing needs. As the field looks ahead to the next generation of experiments such as DUNE and the High-Luminosity LHC, the computing demands are expected to increase dramatically. To cope with this increase, it will be necessary to take advantage of all available computing resources, including GPUs from different vendors. A broad landscape of code portability tools—including compiler pragma-based approaches, abstraction libraries, and other tools—allow the same source code to run efficiently on multiple architectures. In this paper, we use a test code taken from a HEP tracking algorithm to compare the performance and experience of implementing different portability solutions. While in several cases portable implementations perform close to the reference code version, we find that the performance varies significantly depending on the details of the implementation. Achieving optimal performance is not easy, even for relatively simple applications such as the test codes considered in this work. Several factors can affect the performance, such as the choice of the memory layout, the memory pinning strategy, and the compiler used. The compilers and tools are being actively developed, so future developments may be critical for their deployment in HEP experiments.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

A portable battery for objective, non-obstrusive measures of human performances

The need for a standardized battery of human performance tests to measure the effects of various treatments is pointed out. Progress in such a program is reported. Three batteries are available which differ in length and the number of tests in the battery. All tests are implemented on a portable, lap held, briefcase size microprocessor. Performances measured include: information processing, memory, visual perception, reasoning, and motor skills, programs to determine norms, reliabilities, stabilities, factor structure of tests, comparisons with marker tests, apparatus suitability. Rationale for the battery is provided.

Kennedy, R. S.↗

The Minos Computing Library: Efficient Parallel Programming for Extremely Heterogeneous Systems

Hardware specialization has become the silver bullet to achieve efficient high performance, from Systems-on-Chip systems, where hardware specialization can be ``extreme'', to large-scale HPC systems. As the complexity of the systems increases, so does the complexity of programming such architectures in a portable way. This work introduces the Minos Computing Library (MCL), as system software, programming model, and programming model runtime that facilitate programming extremely heterogeneous systems. MCL supports the execution of several multi-threaded applications within the same compute node, performs asynchronous execution of application tasks, efficiently balances computation across hardware resources, and provides performance portability. We show that code developed on a personal desktop automatically scales up to fully utilize powerful workstations with 8 GPUs and down to power-efficient embedded systems. MCL provides up to 17.5x speedup over OpenCL on NVIDIA DGX-1 systems and up to 1.88x speedup on single-GPU systems. In multi-application workloads, MCL dynamically resource allocation provides up to 2.43x performance improvement over manual, static allocation of computing resources.

Gioiosa, Roberto↗

Graphics processing unit accelerated phase field dislocation dynamics: Application to bi-metallic interfaces

We present the first high-performance computing implementation of the meso-scale phase field dislocation dynamics (PFDD) model on a graphics processing unit (GPU)-based platform. The implementation takes advantage of the portable OpenACC standard directive pragmas along with Nvidia's compute unified device architecture (CUDA) fast Fourier transform (FFT) library called CUFFT to execute the FFT computations within the PFDD formulation on the same GPU platform. The overall implementation is termed ACCPFDD-CUFFT. The package is entirely performance portable due to the use of OPENACC-CUDA inter-operability, in which calls to CUDA functions are replaced with the OPENACC data regions for a host central processing unit (CPU) and device (GPU). A comprehensive benchmark study has been conducted, which compares a number of FFT routines, the Numerical Recipes FFT (FOURN), Fastest Fourier Transform in the West (FFTW), and the CUFFT. The last one exploits the advantages of the GPU hardware for FFT calculations. The novel ACCPFDD-CUFFT implementation is verified using the analytical solutions for the stress field around an infinite edge dislocation and subsequently applied to simulate the interaction and motion of dislocations through a bi-phase copper-nickel (Cu–Ni) interface. It is demonstrated that the ACCPFDD-CUFFT implementation on a single TESLA K80 GPU offers a 27.6X speedup relative to the serial version and a 5X speedup relative to the 22-multicore Intel Xeon CPU E5-2699 v4 @ 2.20 GHz version of the code.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The MPI_T events interface: An early evaluation and overview of the interface

Understanding the behavior of parallel applications that use the Message Passing Interface (MPI) is critical for optimizing communication performance. Performance tools for MPI currently rely on the PMPI Profiling Interface or the MPI Tool Information Interface, MPI_T, for portably collecting information for performance measurement and analysis. While tools using these interfaces have proven to be extremely valuable for performance tuning, these interfaces only provide synchronous information, i.e., when an MPI or an MPI_T function is called. There is currently no option for collecting information about asynchronous events from within the MPI library. Here, we propose a callback-driven interface for event notification from MPI implementations. Our approach is integrated in the existing MPI_T interface and provides a portable API for tools to discover and register for events of interest. We implement our MPI_T Events interface in Open MPI and demonstrate its functionality and usability with a small logging tool (MEL) as well as an early integration into the comprehensive measurement infrastructure Score-P.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) 11 Foot Vacuum Chamber Upgrades Test Results

The Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) uncrewed 11 foot vacuum chamber testing evaluated the capabilities of the 11 foot vacuum chamber facility to support advanced spacesuit testing. The government reference design xEMU spacesuit provided a high-fidelity test article to demonstrate 11 foot vacuum chamber capabilities which included: gas loading of the chamber at varying simulated metabolic rates and open loop suit abort operations, Intravehicular Activity (IVA) vacuum access, consumables recharge, IVA vehicle-provided thermal loop cooling, and IVA vehicle-provided power. To demonstrate the xEMU airlock operations transitioning from IVA to EVA conditions without a test subject in the suit, test support equipment was developed to remotely actuate both the Exploration, Servicing, and Cooling Umbilical (ESCU) and the vacuum access umbilical. This test also evaluated the performance of the Exploration Portable Life Support System (xPLSS) at vacuum conditions. Data was collected and analyzed for carbon dioxide (CO2) scrubbing performance of the Rapid Cycle Amine (RCA) swingbed, for thermal regulation performance of the Suit Water Membrane Evaporator (SWME), and for sensor performance across the xPLSS. This paper will detail the findings of the testing performed with these upgrades which discussed previously laid out in ICES-2025-342.

Robert F Marsch↗

Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit 11 Foot Vacuum Chamber Upgrades Test Results

The Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) uncrewed 11 foot vacuum chamber testing evaluated the capabilities of the 11 foot vacuum chamber facility to support advanced spacesuit testing. The government reference design xEMU spacesuit provided a high-fidelity test article to demonstrate 11 foot vacuum chamber capabilities which included: gas loading of the chamber at varying simulated metabolic rates and open loop suit abort operations, Intravehicular Activity (IVA) vacuum access, consumables recharge, IVA vehicle-provided thermal loop cooling, and IVA vehicle-provided power. To demonstrate the xEMU airlock operations transitioning from IVA to EVA conditions without a test subject in the suit, test support equipment was developed to remotely actuate both the Exploration, Servicing, and Cooling Umbilical (ESCU) and the vacuum access umbilical. This test also evaluated the performance of the Exploration Portable Life Support System (xPLSS) at vacuum conditions. Data was collected and analyzed for carbon dioxide (CO2) scrubbing performance of the Rapid Cycle Amine (RCA) swingbed, for thermal regulation performance of the Suit Water Membrane Evaporator (SWME), and for sensor performance across the xPLSS. This paper will detail the findings of the testing performed with these upgrades which discussed previously laid out in ICES-2025-342.

Robert Marsch↗

Optimization with the OpenACC-to-FPGA framework on the Arria 10 and Stratix 10 FPGAs

The reconfigurable computing paradigm with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has received renewed interest in the high-performance computing field due to FPGAs’ unique combination of performance and energy efficiency. However, difficulties in programming and optimizing FPGAs have prevented them from being widely accepted as general-purpose computing devices. In accelerator-based heterogeneous computing, portability across diverse heterogeneous devices is also an important issue, but the unique architectural features in FPGAs make this difficult to achieve. To address these issues, a directive-based, high-level FPGA programming and optimization framework was previously developed. In this work, developed optimizations were combined holistically using the directive-based approach to show that each individual benchmark requires a unique set of optimizations to maximize performance. We perform this exploration on Intel Arria 10 and Stratix 10 FPGAs. We also explored the relationships between performance, resource usages, and compilation times, and investigated implications for performance portability. Finally, we present an initial evaluation of a real-world proxy application, LULESH.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Domain-specific virtual processors as a portable programming and execution model for parallel computational workloads on modern heterogeneous high-performance computing architectures

We advocate domain-specific virtual processors (DSVP) as a portability layer for expressing and executing domain-specific computational workloads on modern heterogeneous HPC architectures, with applications in quantum chemistry. Specifically, in this article we extend, generalize and better formalize the concept of a domain-specific virtual processor as applied to scientific high-performance computing. In particular, we introduce a system-wide recursive (hierarchical) hardware encapsulation mechanism into the DSVP architecture and specify a concrete microarchitectural design of an abstract DSVP from which specialized DSVP implementations can be derived for specific scientific domains. Furthermore, we demonstrate, an example of a domain-specific virtual processor specialized to numerical tensor algebra workloads, which is implemented in the ExaTENSOR library developed by the author with a primary focus on the quantum many-body computational workloads on large-scale GPU-accelerated HPC platforms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

SYMBIOSYS: A Methodology for Performance Analysis of Composable HPC Data Services

Microservices are a powerful new way of building, customizing, and deploying distributed services owing to their flexibility and maintainability. Several large-scale distributed platforms have emerged to serve the growing needs of data-centric workloads and services in commercial computing. Concurrently, high-performance computing (HPC) systems and software are rapidly evolving to meet the demands of diversified applications and heterogeneity. The interplay of hardware factors, software configuration parameters, and the flexibility offered with a microservice architecture makes it nontrivial to estimate the optimal service instantiation for a given application workload. Further, this problem is exacerbated when considering that these services operate in a dynamic and heterogeneous HPC environment. An optimally integrated service can be vastly more performant than a haphazardly integrated one. Existing performance tools for HPC either fail to understand the request-response model of communication inherent to microservices or they operate within a narrow scope, limiting the insight that can be gleaned from employing them in isolation. We propose a methodology for integrated performance analysis of HPC microservices frameworks and applications called SYMBIOSYS. We describe its design and implementation within the context of the Mochi framework. This integration is achieved by combining distributed callpath profiling and tracing with a performance data exchange strategy that collects fine-grained, low-level metrics from the RPC communication library and network layers. The result is a portable, low-overhead performance analysis setup that provides a holistic profile of the dependencies among microservices and how they interact with the Mochi RPC software stack. Using HEPnOS, a production-quality Mochi data service, we demonstrate the low-overhead operation of SYMBIOSYS at scale and use it to identify the root causes of poorly performing service configurations.

microservices↗

Design of a portable powered seat lift

People suffering from degenerative hip or knee joints find sitting and rising from a seated position very difficult. These people can rely on large stationary chairs at home, but must ask others for assistance when rising from any other chair. An orthopedic surgeon identified to the MSFC Technology Utilization Office the need for development of a portable device that could perform a similar function to the stationary lift chairs. The MSFC Structural Development Branch answered the Technology Utilization Office's request for design of a portable powered seat lift. The device is a seat cushion that opens under power, lifting the user to near-standing positions. The largest challenge was developing a mechanism to provide a stable lift over the large range of motion needed, and fold flat enough to be comfortable to sit on. CAD 3-D modeling was used to generate complete drawings for the prototype, and a full-scale working model of the Seat lift was made based on the drawings. The working model is of low strength, but proves the function of the mechanism and the concept.

Weddendorf, Bruce↗

PSI/J: A Portable Interface for Submitting, Monitoring, and Managing Jobs

It is generally desirable for high-performance computing (HPC) applications to be portable between HPC systems, for example to make use of more performant hardware, make effective use of allocations, and to co-locate compute jobs with large datasets. Unfortunately, moving scientific applications between HPC systems is challenging for various reasons, most notably that HPC systems have different HPC schedulers. We introduce PSI/J, a job management abstraction API intended to simplify the construction of software components and applications that are portable over various HPC scheduler implementations. We argue that such a system is both necessary and that no viable alternative currently exists. We analyze similar notable APIs and attempt to determine the factors that influenced their evolution and adoption by the HPC community. We base the design of PSI/J on that analysis. We describe how PSI/J has been integrated in three workflow systems and one application, and also show via experiments that PSI/J imposes minimal overhead.

Hategan, Mihael↗

Demonstrating GPU code portability and scalability for radiative heat transfer computations

High performance computing frameworks utilizing CPUs, Nvidia GPUs, and/or Intel Xeon Phis necessitate portable and scalable solutions for application developers. Nvidia GPUs in particular present numerous portability challenges with a different programming model, additional memory hierarchies, and partitioned execution units among streaming multiprocessors. This work presents modifications to the Uintah asynchronous many-task runtime and the Kokkos portability library to enable one single codebase for complex multiphysics applications to run across different architectures. Scalability and performance results are shown on multiple architectures for a globally coupled radiation heat transfer simulation, ranging from a single node to 16,384 Titan compute nodes.

Computer Science↗

Digital acoustic sensor performance across the infrasound range in non-isolated conditions

The next generation of acoustic sensors is emerging to supplement legacy sensors traditionally used in regional and global networks. These devices operate under similar principles as traditional sensors, without the need of a separate external digitizer. The calibration of these sensors against their predecessors is crucial to the modernization of conventional technologies. This work describes the characterization of the next-generation MB3 digital microbarometer and the iPrecision smartphone microphone in a non-isolated calibration room across the infrasound (i.e., 0.01–20 Hz) range. The intent is to evaluate nominal instrument performance before deployment. A portable rotary subwoofer is used as a controllable infrasound source to generate single-tone sinusoidal and broadband noise pressure waves in a room configured for calibration purposes. For each device, comparison measurements are made, from which the digital sensitivity and the parametric response is developed. The results provide insight into the performance of the sensors in non-isolated environments. By overlapping the responses of the test sensors, digital sensor performance across the infrasound range can be benchmarked. These responses may serve as a double-reference scheme in future pressure measurements and digital calibrations of acoustic sensors.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Sparse Matrix-Based HPC Tomography

Tomographic imaging has benefited from advances in X-ray sources, detectors and optics to enable novel observations in science, engineering and medicine. These advances have come with a dramatic increase of input data in the form of faster frame rates, larger fields of view or higher resolution, so high performance solutions are currently widely used for analysis. Tomographic instruments can vary significantly from one to another, including the hardware employed for reconstruction: from single CPU workstations to large scale hybrid CPU/GPU supercomputers. Furthermore, flexibility on the software interfaces and reconstruction engines are also highly valued to allow for easy development and prototyping. This paper presents a novel software framework for tomographic analysis that tackles all aforementioned requirements. The proposed solution capitalizes on the increased performance of sparse matrix-vector multiplication and exploits multi-CPU and GPU reconstruction over MPI. Furthermore, the solution is implemented in Python and relies on CuPy for fast GPU operators and CUDA kernel integration, and on SciPy for CPU sparse matrix computation. As opposed to previous tomography solutions that are tailor-made for specific use cases or hardware, the proposed software is designed to provide flexible, portable and high-performance operators that can be used for continuous integration at different production environments, but also for prototyping new experimental settings or for algorithmic development. The experimental results demonstrate how our implementation can even outperform state-of-the-art software packages used at advanced X-ray sources worldwide.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

GASNet-EX Performance Improvements Due to Specialization for the Cray Aries Network

GASNet-EX is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models on future exascale machines. This paper reports on the improvements in performance observed on Cray XC-series systems due to enhancements made to the GASNet-EX software. These enhancements, known as "specializations", primarily consist of replacing network-independent implementations of several recently added features with implementations tailored to the Cray Aries network. Performance gains from specialization include (1) Negotiated-Payload Active Messages improve bandwidth of a ping-pong test by up to 14%, (2) Immediate Operations reduce running time of a synthetic benchmark by up to 93%, (3) non-bulk RMA Put bandwidth is increased by up to 32%, (4) Remote Atomic performance is 70% faster than the reference on a point-to-point test and allows a hot-spot test to scale robustly, and (5) non-contiguous RMA interfaces see up to 8.6x speedups for an intra-node benchmark and 26% for inter-node. These improvements are all available in GASNet-EX version 2018.3.0 and later.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

I/O Parallelization for the Goddard Earth Observing System Data Assimilation System (GEOS DAS)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Data Assimilation Office (DAO) at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has developed the GEOS DAS, a data assimilation system that provides production support for NASA missions and will support NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) in the coming years. The DAO's support of the EOS project along with the requirement of producing long-term reanalysis datasets with an unvarying system levy a large I/O burden on the future system. The DAO has been involved in prototyping parallel implementations of the GEOS DAS for a number of years and is now converting the production version from shared-memory parallelism to distributed-memory parallelism using the portable Message-Passing Interface (MPI). If the MPI-based GEOS DAS is to meet these production requirements, we must make I/O from the parallel system efficient. We have designed a scheme that allows efficient I/O processing while retaining portability, reducing the need for post-processing, and producing data formats that are required by our users, both internal and external. The first phase of the GEOS DAS Parallel I/O System (GPIOS) will expand upon the common method of gathering global data to a Single PE for output. Instead of using a PE also tasked with primary computation, a number of PEs will be dedicated to I/O and its related tasks. This allows the data transformations and formatting required prior to output to take place asynchronously with respect to the GEOS DAS assimilation cycle, improving performance and generating output data sets in a format convenient for our users. I/O PEs can be added as needed to handle larger data volumes or to meet user file specifications. We will show I/O performance results from a prototype MPI GCM integrated with GPIOS. Phase two of GPIOS development will examine ways of integrating new software technologies to further improve performance and build scalability into the system. The maturing of MPI-IO implementations and other supporting libraries such as parallel HDF should provide performance gains while retaining portability.

Lucchesi, R.↗