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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

Simulation-based inference for parameter estimation of complex watershed simulators

High-resolution, spatially distributed process-based (PB) simulators are widely employed in the study of complex catchment processes and their responses to a changing climate. However, calibrating these PB simulators using observed data remains a significant challenge due to several persistent issues, including the following: (1) intractability stemming from the computational demands and complex responses of simulators, which renders infeasible calculation of the conditional probability of parameters and data, and (2) uncertainty stemming from the choice of simplified representations of complex natural hydrologic processes. Here, we demonstrate how simulation-based inference (SBI) can help address both of these challenges with respect to parameter estimation. SBI uses a learned mapping between the parameter space and observed data to estimate parameters for the generation of calibrated simulations. To demonstrate the potential of SBI in hydrologic modeling, we conduct a set of synthetic experiments to infer two common physical parameters – Manning's coefficient and hydraulic conductivity – using a representation of a snowmelt-dominated catchment in Colorado, USA. We introduce novel deep-learning (DL) components to the SBI approach, including an “emulator” as a surrogate for the PB simulator to rapidly explore parameter responses. We also employ a density-based neural network to represent the joint probability of parameters and data without strong assumptions about its functional form. While addressing intractability, we also show that, if the simulator does not represent the system under study well enough, SBI can yield unreliable parameter estimates. Approaches to adopting the SBI framework for cases in which multiple simulator(s) may be adequate are introduced using a performance-weighting approach. The synthetic experiments presented here test the performance of SBI, using the relationship between the surrogate and PB simulators as a proxy for the real case.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Journey over Destination: Dynamic Sensor Placement Enhances Generalization

Reconstructing complex, high-dimensional global fields from limited data points is a challenge across various scientific and industrial domains. This is particularly important for recovering spatio-temporal fields using sensor data from, for example, laboratory-based scientific experiments, weather forecasting, or drone surveys. Given the prohibitive costs of specialized sensors and the inaccessibility of
certain regions of the domain, achieving full field coverage is typically not feasible. Therefore, the development of machine learning algorithms trained to reconstruct fields given a limited dataset is of critical importance. In this study, we introduce a general
approach that employs moving sensors to enhance data exploitation during the training of an attention based neural network, thereby improving field reconstruction. The training of sensor locations is accomplished using an end-to-end workflow, ensuring
differentiability in the interpolation of field values associated to the sensors, and is simple to implement using differentiable programming. Additionally, we have incorporated a correction mechanism to prevent sensors from entering invalid regions within the domain. We evaluated our method using two distinct datasets; the results show that our approach enhances learning, as evidenced by improved test scores.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Complexity of many-body interactions in transition metals via machine-learned force fields from the TM23 data set

Abstract This work examines challenges associated with the accuracy of machine-learned force fields (MLFFs) for bulk solid and liquid phases ofd-block elements. In exhaustive detail, we contrast the performance of force, energy, and stress predictions across the transition metals for two leading MLFF models: a kernel-based atomic cluster expansion method implemented using sparse Gaussian processes (FLARE), and an equivariant message-passing neural network (NequIP). Early transition metals present higher relative errors and are more difficult to learn relative to late platinum- and coinage-group elements, and this trend persists across model architectures. Trends in complexity of interatomic interactions for different metals are revealed via comparison of the performance of representations with different many-body order and angular resolution. Using arguments based on perturbation theory on the occupied and unoccupieddstates near the Fermi level, we determine that the large, sharpddensity of states both above and below the Fermi level in early transition metals leads to a more complex, harder-to-learn potential energy surface for these metals. Increasing the fictitious electronic temperature (smearing) modifies the angular sensitivity of forces and makes the early transition metal forces easier to learn. This work illustrates challenges in capturing intricate properties of metallic bonding with current leading MLFFs and provides a reference data set for transition metals, aimed at benchmarking the accuracy and improving the development of emerging machine-learned approximations.

Chemistry↗

A Prototype Software to Demonstrate a Data Catalog for Hanford Environmental Datasets

Ensuring that data on long-term environmental remediation at the Hanford Site is high-quality, traceable, and easily accessible is an ongoing challenge, complicated by decades of data collection, multiple contractors maintaining data sources, and the wide range of data types. A centralized data catalog, known as the Hanford Environmental Information and Data Index (HEIDI), has been under development as part of the Hanford Environmental Data Management (HEDM) program to address these challenges. HEIDI fulfills a critical need to bring together a wide range of data types and sizes from multiple authoritative data sources, while documenting the data pedigree and quality information (i.e., traceable to the data source/originator). This document describes additional development and maturation of the HEIDI prototype. Key accomplishments included deploying the catalog software, Esri Geoportal Server, on a server accessible to Hanford Local Area Network users, conducting cybersecurity evaluations, investigating integrated authentication solutions, and conducting functional testing of the catalog prototype. The server-based deployment enabled targeted feedback, leading to enhancements including improved accessibility features and an expanded metadata schema. Specifications for the server-based deployment of the prototype catalog and the HEIDI metadata schema are provided in this document to support subsequent HEIDI deployment by the U.S. Department of Energy Richland Operations Office.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Building an Integrated Ecosystem of Computational and Observational Facilities to Accelerate Scientific Discovery

Future scientific discoveries will rely on flexible ecosystems that incorporate modern scientific instruments, high performance computing resources, parallel distributed data storage, and performant networks across multiple, independent facilities. In addition to connecting physical resources, such an ecosystem presents many challenges in logistics and accessibility, especially in orchestrating computations and experiments that span across leadership computing systems and experimental instruments. Past efforts have typically been application-specific or limited to interfaces for computing resources. This paper proposes a general framework for integrating computation resources and instrument operations, addressing challenges in code development/execution, data staging and collection, software stack, control mechanisms, resource authorization and governance, and hardware integration. We also describe a demonstration use case wherein a Bayesian optimization algorithm running on an edge computing resource guides a scanning probe microscope to autonomously and intelligently characterize a material sample. This science edge ecosystem framework will provide a blueprint for federating multi-institutional, disparate resources and orchestrating scientific workflows across them to enable next-generation discoveries.

Somnath, Suhas↗

Advances in Multimodal Characterization of Structural Materials

The myriad detectors and instruments now available for materials characterization provide researchers with an ever-growing suite of tools to probe material behavior. Progress in the development of instrumentation and workflows that enable the collection, and leverage the potential, of various data modalities have provided novel insights into material behavior. Using data across multiple length scales, or performing complementary analyses of in situ and ex situ data, can help reveal a more complete picture of dynamic processes or material structure. However, the accurate combination, or fusion, of these disparate data modalities presents new challenges. Differences in resolution, as well as the varying length scales at which physical phenomena are exploited to generate these data, necessitate novel approaches to accurately interpret and combine these data. Furthermore, the papers within this special topic focus on the collection and fusion of multimodal data to better understand structural materials. From new frameworks and workflows for data segmentation and analysis, process monitoring, enhancing simulations, or interrogating mechanical response, these papers reveal the potential benefits of utilizing multimodal data.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

The Manufacturing Data and Machine Learning Platform: Enabling Real-time Monitoring and Control of Scientific Experiments via IoT

IoT devices and sensor networks present new opportunities for measuring, monitoring, and guiding scientific experiments. Sensors, cameras, and instruments can be combined to provide previously unachievable insights into the state of ongoing experiments. However, IoT devices can vary greatly in the type, volume, and velocity of data they generate, making it challenging to fully realize this potential. Indeed, synergizing diverse IoT data streams in near-real time can require the use of machine learning (ML). In addition, new tools and technologies are required to facilitate the collection, aggregation, and manipulation of sensor data in order to simplify the application of ML models and in turn, fully realize the utility of IoT devices in laboratories. Here we will demonstrate how the use of the Argonne-developed Manufacturing Data and Machine Learning (MDML) platform can analyze and use IoT devices in a manufacturing experiment. MDML is designed to standardize the research and operational environment for advanced data analytics and AI-enabled automated process optimization by providing the infrastructure to integrate AI in cyber-physical systems for in situ analysis. We will show that MDML is capable of processing diverse IoT data streams, using multiple computing resources, and integrating ML models to guide an experiment.

Machine Learning↗

QProR: An Efficient Framework for Quantity-of-Interest Based Progressive Retrieval with Guaranteed Error Control

Scientific applications generate an unprecedented volume of data, overwhelming the network and file systems’ bandwidth and posing challenges for efficient and scalable data retrieval and analysis. Progressive data compression offers a promising solution by enabling on-demand retrieval at reduced size. However, existing progressive methods either fail to bound the errors in essential quantities of interest (QoIs) derived from raw data or suffer from suboptimal retrieval efficiency. In this work, we propose QProR, an efficient QoI-based progressive framework that optimizes progressive retrieval for target QoIs. Our key contributions include: (1) a systematic framework that integrates error-controlled lossy compressors with bitplane encoding while decoupling the two processes for high flexibility and adaptability; (2) a novel weighted bitplane encoding method which incorperates QoI knowledge into data refactoring to enhance retrieval efficiency; (3) an optimized retrieval strategy that accounts for the varying impacts of different variables on multivariate QoIs; (4) comprehensive evaluations using six real-world datasets from multiple scientific applications and thorough comparisons against state of the arts. Experimental results demonstrate that QProR achieves up to 80.38% reduction in the retrieval size under the same requested QoI error tolerance, when compared with the best-performing existing methods. When transferring 384 GB of scientific data to remote sites, QProR delivers up to 1.68 × speedup in the end-to-end data transfer performance.

Li, Wenbo [University of Kentucky]↗

Big Data Processing for Power Grid Event Detection

In this paper we present the application of big data processing for the development of machine learning(ML) models to detect relevant events in power gridoperations. This is based on almost 20TB of phasormeasurement unit data corresponding to up to two years of operation of three grid interconnections which provide power to most of the United States. A significant aspect of the work consists in having all data processing performed on a single standard GPU server, from pre-processing to ML model training and testing. We describe the data and computational infrastructure, challenges faced and methods used in dataprocessing, main findings and results. The ML approach employed for best utilization of the big data is also discussed, including sample results.

Paes Leao, Bruno↗

Livewire: A Model Platform for Data Quality Assessment and AI Readiness Across DOE Missions

High-quality, well-governed data is essential for accelerating discovery and achieving operational excellence across DOE and national laboratory missions. The Livewire Data Platform is a DOE-supported platform that offers automated assessments of data quality, standardization, provenance, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness. It allows researchers and data practitioners to systematically and easily evaluate datasets against established governance criteria and prepare them for advanced analytics. Livewire addresses critical challenges in DOE's data ecosystem with integrated capabilities for metadata validation, provenance tracking, and schema alignment. This platform's automated workflows assist users in identifying data quality gaps, enhancing interoperability between datasets collected from various stakeholders, and ensuring compliance with DOE data standards, all while reducing manual curation efforts. Additionally, we will discuss its AI readiness framework, which is being developed to prepare datasets for training models, developing advanced analytic tools, and machine learning applications. Using some of the more than one hundred tabular datasets on Livewire, processed with this open-source methodology, we will demonstrate how Livewire can serve as a model for scalable, standards-driven data management. This approach provides a pathway to leverage existing and future datasets within the DOE, boosting innovation and efficiency across national laboratories.

33 - ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Design and Performance of Kokkos Staging Space toward Scalable Resilient Application Couplings

With the growing number of applications designed for heterogeneous HPC devices, application programmers and users are finding it challenging to compose scalable workflows as ensembles of these applications, that are portable, performant and resilient. The Kokkos C++ library has been designed to simplify this cumbersome procedure by providing an intra-application uniform programming model and portable performance. However, assembling multiple Kokkos-enabled applications into a complex workflow is still a challenge. Although Kokkos enables a uniform programming model, the inter-application data exchange still remains a challenge from both performance and software development cost perspectives. In order to address this issue, we propose Kokkos data staging memory space, an extension of Kokkos' data abstraction (memory space) for heterogeneous computing systems. This new abstraction allows to express data on a virtual shared-space for multiple Kokkos applications, thus extending Kokkos to support inter-application data exchange to build an efficient application workflow. Additionally, we study the effectiveness of asynchronous data layout conversions for applications requiring different memory access patterns for the shared data. Our preliminary evaluation with a synthetic benchmark indicate the effectiveness of this conversion adapted to three different scenarios representing access frequency and use patterns of the shared data.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Improved Understanding of Coupled Water and Carbon Cycle Processes through Machine Learning Approaches

Focal Area(s): This white paper addresses how explainable machine learning (ML) algorithms can improve insights gained from complex data (Focal Area 3). We will also address how ML approaches related to sensor compression and low energy AI hardware can be used for efficient data acquisition (Focal Area 1). Science Challenge: We will focus on the coupled water cycle and carbon cycle processes in terrestrial ecosystems and terrestrial-aquatic interfaces. Thus, our approaches will be centered around several data-model integration challenges indicated in EESD strategic plans for two science focus areas: Terrestrial Ecosystem Science and Hydrobiogeochemistry. We can use AI to correct systematic model errors due to biases in either data or model structure/processes. Error patterns in model predictions usually vary by region, model, season etc. But there are systematic patterns in them. e.g., soil moisture tends to be overestimated in the arid western continental United States underestimated in wetter eastern USA; some land surface models tend to underestimate moisture in wet seasons and overestimate in dry seasons. Moreover, the consequences of extreme events (e.g., drought, extreme flooding, storm surges associated with tropical storms, hurricanes) on carbon cycle processes are not well represented in ecosystem and Earth system models. Redox-sensitive processes (e.g., rapid oxidation/reduction of iron and other redox-sensitive elements in soil microsites subjected to fluctuated hydrology) in terrestrial-aquatic interfaces further challenge model predictions of hot-spots (and hot-moments) due to poor understanding of underlying mechanisms. Thus, AI/ML approaches can be used to learn patterns in the data and model errors and use them to build model equations and correct process-based model errors.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Robust Importance Sampling for Bayesian Model Calibration with Spatio-Temporal Data

This paper addresses two challenges in Bayesian calibration: 1) computational speed of existing sampling algorithms, and 2) calibration with spatio-temporal responses. The commonly used Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approaches require many sequential model evaluations making the computational expense prohibitive. This paper proposes an efficient sampling algorithm: iterative importance sampling with genetic algorithm (IISGA). While iterative importance sampling enables computational efficiency, the genetic algorithm enables robustness by preventing sample degeneration and avoids getting stuck in multimodal search spaces. An inflated likelihood further enables robustness in high-dimensional parameter spaces by enlarging the target distribution. Spatio-temporal data complicate both surrogate modeling, which is necessary for expensive computational models, and the likelihood estimation. In this work, singular value decomposition is investigated for reducing the high-dimensional field data to a lower-dimensional space prior to Bayesian calibration. Then the likelihood is formulated and Bayesian inference is performed in the lower-dimension, latent space. An illustrative example is provided to demonstrate IISGA relative to existing sampling methods, and then IISGA is employed to calibrate a thermal battery model with 26 uncertain calibration parameters and spatio-temporal response data.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Geophysical Retrievals in an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Framework for Illuminating Processes Controlling Water Cycle

Focal Area(s): This white paper responds to Focal Area #3: Insight gleaned from complex data (both observed and simulated) using AI, big data analytics, and other advanced methods, including explainable AI and physics- or knowledge-guided AI. Science Challenge: This white paper addresses the water-cycle and data-model integration grand challenge. It leverages data from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, and Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiment (NGEE), and Science Focus Area (SFA). The white paper focuses on controlling cloud, precipitation, and radiative properties as observed and simulated by the Earth System Models (ESM). The described framework can be readily applied to any other ensemble of instruments, including satellites and other ground-based networks.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Predicting climate change impacts on poikilotherms using physiologically guided species abundance models

Poikilothermic animals comprise most species on Earth and are especially sensitive to changes in environmental temperatures. Species conservation in a changing climate relies upon predictions of species responses to future conditions, yet predicting species responses to climate change when temperatures exceed the bounds of observed data is fraught with challenges. We present a physiologically guided abundance (PGA) model that combines observations of species abundance and environmental conditions with laboratory-derived data on the physiological response of poikilotherms to temperature to predict species geographical distributions and abundance in response to climate change. The model incorporates uncertainty in laboratory-derived thermal response curves and provides estimates of thermal habitat suitability and extinction probability based on site-specific conditions. We show that temperature-driven changes in distributions, local extinction, and abundance of cold, cool, and warm-adapted species vary substantially when physiological information is incorporated. Notably, cold-adapted species were predicted by the PGA model to be extirpated in 61% of locations that they currently inhabit, while extirpation was never predicted by a correlative niche model. Failure to account for species-specific physiological constraints could lead to unrealistic predictions under a warming climate, including underestimates of local extirpation for cold-adapted species near the edges of their climate niche space and overoptimistic predictions of warm-adapted species.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Researcher Views on Water Data Accessibility, Usability, and Dissemination

Ultimately, the challenges that researchers face with finding, accessing, using, and disseminating water data affect their ability to do mission critical research for DOE and other sponsors. We interviewed PNNL researchers who support DOE’s Water Power Technologies Office and summarize their views on issues pertaining to data access, use, and dissemination. We also take a closer look at approaches to disseminating data to help inform WPTO and lab researcher decisions about incorporating data dissemination into future projects.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗

Let’s get our hands dirty: a comprehensive evaluation of DAQDB, key-value store for petascale hot storage

Data acquisition systems are a key component for successful data taking in any experiment. The DAQ is a complex distributed computing system and coordinates all operations, from the data selection stage of interesting events to storage elements. For the High Luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider, the experiments at CERN need to meet challenging requirements to record data with a much higher occupancy in the detectors. The DAQ system will receive and deliver data with a significantly increased trigger rate, one million events per second, and capacity, terabytes of data per second. An effective way to meet these requirements is to decouple real-time data acquisition from event selection. Data fragments can be temporarily stored in a large distributed key-value store. Fragments belonging to the same event can be then queried on demand, by the data selection processes. Implementing such a model relies on a proper combination of emerging technologies, such as persistent memory, NVMe SSDs, scalable networking, and data structures, as well as high performance, scalable software. In this paper, we present DAQDB (Data Acquisition Database) — an open source implementation of this design that was presented earlier, with an extensive evaluation of this approach, from the single node to the distributed performance. Furthermore, we complement our study with a description of the challenges faced and the lessons learned while integrating DAQDB with the existing software framework of the ATLAS experiment.

Abed Abud, Adam↗

Smart Data Mapping for Connecting Power System Model and Geospatial Data

Knowing the geospatial locations of power system model elements is the foundation for analyzing system vulnerability to natural hazards and connecting loads with end users and their communities. However, power system models and geospatial data for power grid assets may have been developed asynchronously without close coordination. Creating a direct mapping between the two may be a challenging task, considering heterogeneous data structures, target uses, historical legacies, and human errors. This work aims to build an automatic data mapping workflow to connect power system model elements and geospatial data for transmission network, and to support energy grid resilience studies for Puerto Rico. The primary steps in this workflow include constructing graphs using geospatial data, and aligning them to the transmission networks defined in the power system data. The results have been evaluated against existing manual mapping practices for part of the Puerto Rico Power Grid model to illustrate the performance of such auto-mapping solutions.

Resilience, geospatial data, grid transmission net↗