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High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) Middleware Update

High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) is a joint project between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to develop a high-performance multi-core radiation hardened flight processor. HPSC offers a new flight computing architecture to meet the needs of NASA missions through 2030 and beyond. Providing on the order of 100X the computational capacity of current flight processors for the same amount of power, the multicore architecture of the HPSC processor, or "Chiplet" provides unprecedented flexibility in a flight computing system by enabling the operating point to be set dynamically, trading among needs for computational performance, energy management and fault tolerance. The HPSC Chiplet is being developed by Boeing under contract to NASA, and is expected to provide prototypes, an evaluation board, system emulators, comprehensive system software, and a software development kit. In addition to the vendor deliverables, the AFRL is funding the development of a flexible Middleware to be developed by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The HPSC Middleware provides a suite of thirteen high level services to manage the compute, memory and I/O resources of this complex device.This presentation will provide an HPSC project update, an overview of the latest HPSC System Software release, an overview of HPSC Middleware Release 2, and a preview of the third HPSC Middleware release. The presentation will begin with a project update that will provide a look at the high-level changes since the project was introduced at the Flight Software Workshop last year. Next, the presentation will provide an overview of the current suite of HPSC System Software which includes the vendor provided bootloaders, operating systems, emulator, and development tools. Next, the HPSC Middleware progress will be presented, which includes an overview of the features and capabilities of HPSC Middleware Release 2, followed by a look at the reference flight software applications which utilize the Middleware. Finally, the presentation will give a preview of the HPSC Middleware Release 3.

Cudmore, Alan↗

Sparse Linear Algebra Toolkit for Computational Aerodynamics

Finding solutions to sparse linear systems of equations is an essential step in Computational Engineering applications of interest to NASA. Linear systems of equations are composed and solved in almost every computational engineering application. The characteristics of linear systems vary greatly from one application to another. Accordingly, there are a wide variety of methods for the solution of linear systems of equations. The operations and methods prepared by the authors are focused on linear systems of interest to NASA, primarily those associated with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Aeroelasticity, and Aeroacoustics. The Sparse Linear Algebra Toolkit (SLAT) is a coordinated collection of software featuring operations, methods, and data structures that are useful when solving sparse linear systems of equations on modern computer architectures. The implemented operations and methods are designed and tuned for parallelism in shared memory, in distributed memory, and across the hybrid combination of distributed-shared memory. The toolkit includes novel methods and implementations for modern architectures and facilitates development of new approaches for meeting NASA’s evolving computational engineering challenges using evolving computer architectures that are not available in vendor libraries. In this paper, significant features and interfaces within SLAT are presented and verified for simulations performed with NASA’s CFD solver, FUN3D. The runtime and scaling performance of the Generalized Minimum Residual (GMRES) method implemented in SLAT is analyzed for the linear subproblems within the solution of turbulent Navier-Stokes equations employed in the simulation of high-lift configurations. Prior to this work, the SPARSKIT GMRES implementation was the only Krylov subspace method available within FUN3D. A strong scaling study shows the SLAT GMRES implementation facilitates accurate Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes CFD solutions between 15% and 56% faster than the SPARSKIT GMRES implementation.

Stephen L Wood↗

Improving Computational Efficiency of Prognostics Algorithms in Resource-Constrained Settings

The field of prognostics and health management provides quantitative methods for monitoring and predicting the health of physical systems. Prognostics algorithms are useful in that they can be employed to assess the current state of a system, propagate the system state throughout time, and predict potential anomalies or failures that may occur. However, effective prognosis can be challenging to achieve in resource-constrained settings due to computational limitations and high computational latency, leading to obsolete predictions. Thus, computationally efficient and accurate algorithms are necessary for some prognostics applications. In this work, we implement three new algorithmic approaches to prediction (sampling methods, variable prediction time step, variable prediction sample size) with the goal of improving computational efficiency while minimizing decrease in model accuracy. To quantitatively analyze our results, we examine a use-case of degradation of a Lithium-ion battery. Notably, through this work it was found that none of the sampling approaches had a significant impact on computational efficiency or model accuracy in predicting EOD of the battery. However, our results show that prediction accuracy is highly dependent on the time step used, and that an appropriate time step can optimize both model accuracy and simulation efficiency. Finally, implementing a variable sample size also affected prediction, and our results show that tuning both the magnitude and timing of the sample size adjustment in an application-specific manner may prove useful in some applications. Taken together, our findings highlight the challenge of performing prognostics in resource-constrained settings, and illustrate the potential of developing new prediction algorithms to improve computational efficiency of prognosis.

Prognostics↗

NASA’s Vision for Spaceflight Computing

Future NASA mission applications demand onboard computing performance, power efficiency, and flexibility not available from current products. To address these needs, NASA’s High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) project is developing a radiation hardened, general purpose multi-core processor. Key HPSC objectives include natural space radiation hardness, fault tolerance, computation performance and extensibility, and power scalability. This presentation will first highlight how advances in spaceflight computing are key to NASA’s envisioned future for advanced avionics. Descriptions will then be provided for NASA mission applications and use cases that demand advanced spaceflight computing. The presentation will then provide an overview of NASA’s HPSC project and how it will address the computational demands of future missions.

Wesley Powell↗

Empowering Scientific Innovation Through An Integrated Research Infrastructure: The Role of the Advanced Computing Ecosystem

As the landscape of computational science evolves, the Department of Energy (DOE) is reimagining the roles of its large-scale computing facilities to meet emerging research challenges. The Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) program aims to transform how experiments are designed, conducted, and shared, with significant impacts on all stakeholders. In response, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) has established the Advanced Computing Ecosystem (ACE), a strategic framework to prepare its hardware, software, and experimental capabilities for the IRI era. ACE focuses on integrating novel compute environments, orchestrating advanced workflows, and developing foundational technologies, ensuring a seamless transition to IRI while accelerating scientific discovery. This paper outlines ACE's role in advancing OLCF's mission and its impact on the future of computational science.

Widener, Patrick↗

Approaches for the Simulation of Coupled Processes in Evolving Fractured Porous Media Enabled by Exascale Computing

Models have historically represented fractured porous media with continuum descriptions that characterize the media using bulk parameters. The impact of small-scale features is not captured in these models, although they may be controlling the performance of subsurface applications. Pore-scale models can simulate processes in small-scale features by representing the pore space geometry explicitly but are computationally expensive for large domains. The alternative multiscale approach entails the combination of pore-scale and continuum-scale descriptions in a single framework. We use Chombo-Crunch, a computational capability that discretizes complex geometries with an adaptive, embedded boundary method to contrast these two approaches. Chombo-Crunch takes advantage of recent computational performance and memory bandwidth improvements resulting from the emergence of exascale computing resources. These combined improvements enable the efficient simulation of reactive transport in fractured media with a high degree of fidelity and the ability to capture the control small-scale processes exert on the overall medium evolution.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Integrating quantum computing resources into scientific HPC ecosystems

Quantum Computing (QC) offers significant potential to enhance scientific discovery in fields such as quantum chemistry, optimization, and artificial intelligence. Yet QC faces challenges due to the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era’s inherent external noise issues. Here, this paper discusses the integration of QC as a computational accelerator within classical scientific high-performance computing (HPC) systems. By leveraging a broad spectrum of simulators and hardware technologies, we propose a hardware-agnostic framework for augmenting classical HPC with QC capabilities. Drawing on the HPC expertise of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the HPC lifecycle management of the Department of Energy (DOE), our approach focuses on the strategic incorporation of QC capabilities and acceleration into existing scientific HPC workflows. This includes detailed analyses, benchmarks, and code optimization driven by the needs of the DOE and ORNL missions. Our comprehensive framework integrates hardware, software, workflows, and user interfaces to foster a synergistic environment for quantum and classical computing research. This paper outlines plans to unlock new computational possibilities, driving forward scientific inquiry and innovation in a wide array of research domains.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

Scalable quantum computational science: A perspective from block-encodings and polynomial transformations

Significant developments made in quantum hardware and error correction recently have been driving quantum computing toward practical utility. However, gaps remain between abstract quantum algorithmic development and practical applications in computational sciences. In this perspective article, we propose several properties that scalable quantum computational science methods should possess. We further discuss how block-encodings and polynomial transformations can potentially serve as a unified framework with the desired properties. Recent advancements on these topics are presented, including the construction and assembly of block-encodings, and various generalizations of quantum signal processing (QSP) algorithms to perform polynomial transformations. The scalability of QSP methods on parallel and distributed quantum architectures is also highlighted. Promising applications in simulation and observable estimation in chemistry, physics, and optimization problems are presented. We hope this perspective serves as a gentle introduction to state-of-the-art quantum algorithms for the computational science community and inspires future development of scalable quantum computational science methodologies that bridge theory and practice.

Bayesian inference↗

Analog and symbolic computation through the Koopman framework

We develop a Koopman operator framework for studying the computational structure of dynamical systems. Specifically, we show that the resolvent of the Koopman operator provides a natural abstraction of halting, yielding a ‘Koopman halting problem’ that is recursively enumerable in general. For symbolic systems, such as those defined on Cantor space, this operator formulation captures reachability between clopen sets, while for equicontinuous systems we prove that the Koopman halting problem is decidable. Our framework demonstrates that absorbing (halting) states in coarse-grained finite automata correspond to Koopman eigenfunctions with eigenvalue one, while cycles in the transition graph impose spectral constraints associated with periodic dynamics. These results provide a unifying perspective on computation in symbolic and analog systems, showing how computational universality is reflected in operator spectra, invariant subspaces, and algebraic structures. Beyond symbolic dynamics, this operator-theoretic lens opens pathways to analyze the computational properties of a broader class of dynamical systems, including polynomial and analog models, and suggests that computational hardness may admit dynamical signatures in terms of Koopman spectral structure.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Survey of Deep Learning and Physics-Based Approaches in Computational Wave Imaging

Computational wave imaging (CWI) extracts hidden structure and physical properties of a volume of material by analyzing wave signals that traverse that volume. Applications include seismic exploration of the Earth’s subsurface, acoustic imaging and nondestructive testing (NDT) in material science, and ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) in medicine. Current approaches for solving CWI problems can be divided into two categories: those rooted in traditional physics and those based on deep learning. Physics-based methods stand out for their ability to provide high-resolution and quantitatively accurate estimates of acoustic properties within the medium. However, they can be computationally intensive and are susceptible to ill-posedness and nonconvexity typical of CWI problems. Machine learning (ML)-based computational methods have recently emerged, offering a different perspective to address these challenges. Diverse scientific communities have independently pursued the integration of deep learning in CWI. This review discusses how contemporary scientific ML techniques, and deep neural networks in particular, have been developed to enhance and integrate with traditional physics-based methods for solving CWI problems. We present a structured framework that consolidates existing research spanning multiple domains, including computational imaging, wave physics, and data science. This study concludes with important lessons learned from existing ML-based methods and identifies technical hurdles and emerging trends through a systematic analysis of the extensive literature on this topic.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Brochure for the DOE Office of Science Workshop on Envisioning Frontiers in AI and Computing for Biological Research

In February of 2025 a joint ASCR/BER workshop was held to identify key transformational research directions for understanding biology using artificial intelligence (AI), digital twins and high-performance (HPC) computational methods to facilitate scientific discovery and innovation in support of the Department of Energy mission. AI technologies offer exciting new groundbreaking methods to analyze large volumes of complex biological data, thereby greatly accelerating the ability to understand, predict, and design biological processes for beneficial purposes. In the laboratory, the bridging of AI-enabled automated experimental technologies, HPC and digital twins will provide potent tools for researchers to explore the fundamental nature of biology and harness its inherent metabolic potential for a variety of beneficial purposes. The focus of this workshop was on how high-performance computational methods can impact this objective by exploring digital twins, foundational models, and data-driven approaches with applications to advance automated laboratory experiments, modeling of complex living systems and engineering new functions into plants and microbial systems relevant to DOE mission. Workshop attendees with expertise in plant science, microbiology, mathematics, computer science, and AI assessed the current state of the science, trends, and AI challenges at the interface of plant and microbial systems biology and computational science to identify opportunities for high-impact research. This collaborative effort capitalized on ASCR's advancements in applied mathematics, computer science, and Exascale systems, and BER's expertise in basic genomics-enabled research on DOE relevant plant and microbial systems. The workshop culminated in four key priority research directions to guide future research and development within DOE Office of Science programs.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Advanced Computing Annual Report 2025 [Slides]

In Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) continued to advance computing as a cornerstone of energy innovation, expanding the Kestrel high-performance computing (HPC) system to 56 peak petaflops. This growth strengthened Kestrel's role as a national asset for applied energy research, enabling larger, more complex simulations and accelerating the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) methods across the laboratory's computing portfolio. In FY 2025, AI was a component of most projects running on Kestrel, underscoring its central role in modern energy science and engineering. Kestrel supported a broad and diverse set of 507 modeling and simulation projects, engaging 855 researchers across the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation (CMEI) portfolio and other offices, as well as partners from industry, academia, and utilities. These efforts span critical materials discovery, energy systems modeling, grid modernization, advanced manufacturing, and other areas essential to strengthening U.S. energy security and competitiveness. Together, these collaborations produced 708 technical outputs, including 293 peer-reviewed publications, reflecting both the depth and impact of the science enabled by NLR's computing capabilities. This year's report highlights the growing importance and benefit of AI throughout NLR's research programs and features work by early career researchers who are helping shape the future of computing-enabled energy innovation. Explore these sections and the many project successes captured in the pages that follow.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Human and Robotic Space Mission Use Cases for High-Performance Spaceflight Computing

Spaceflight computing is a key resource in NASA space missions and a core determining factor of spacecraft capability, with ripple effects throughout the spacecraft, end-to-end system, and mission. Onboard computing can be aptly viewed as a "technology multiplier" in that advances provide direct dramatic improvements in flight functions and capabilities across the NASA mission classes, and enable new flight capabilities and mission scenarios, increasing science and exploration return. Space-qualified computing technology, however, has not advanced significantly in well over ten years and the current state of the practice fails to meet the near- to mid-term needs of NASA missions. Recognizing this gap, the NASA Game Changing Development Program (GCDP), under the auspices of the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate, commissioned a study on space-based computing needs, looking out 15-20 years. The study resulted in a recommendation to pursue high-performance spaceflight computing (HPSC) for next-generation missions, and a decision to partner with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) in this development.

use cases↗

Mathematical Foundation for Quantum Computing of Electromagnetic Wave Propagation in Dielectric Media

Can quantum computers effectively simulate the propagation and scattering of electromagnetic waves in a classical plasma? This chapter introduces some of the basic concepts in mathematics and physics essential to answering that question. The numerical simulations of Maxwell equations for wave propagation in dielectrics are constrained by technological limitations of the present-day computers. In contrast, there has been ample fanfare around quantum computers and their potential to far exceed the performance of traditional computers. Whether the enhanced capabilities of a quantum computer can be put to use for simulating topics in classical physics is a source of intrigue and curiosity.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Uncertain quantum computing futures and potential energy and physical resource impacts at scale

Considerable attention has recently focused on the vast energy and water demands of supercomputing, namely large-scale data centers that underpin artificial intelligence (AI), one of the great disruptors of contemporary society. Looking ahead some years from now, quantum computing is poised to disrupt established computing paradigms once again. Scientists and engineers are now working intensely to bring this century-old dream of physicists to fruition. Yet, as quantum computers begin to be integrated with classical supercomputing architectures, the implications for energy and physical resource use also need to be understood, especially how they compare to today’s AI data centers. These impacts have not yet been quantified by the research community – a notable gap in the literature, even if commercial-scale deployment of Quantum-Accelerated Computing Infrastructure (QuACI) is not expected for a few more years. This study is the first to conduct such an assessment. Using publicly available information from academic sources and private industry, we characterize multiple configurations of superconducting qubit-based, fault-tolerant quantum computers (FTQC) that could plausibly be deployed at scale in the 2030s and into the 2040s. By parameterizing these FTQC systems at a process level, we conduct a prospective scenario analysis to quantify their energy and physical resource needs. While these estimates are uncertain, given the current state of quantum technologies and their unknown future trajectories, important insights can already be drawn. One key finding is that while the electricity needs for a fleet of FTQCs are within the bounds of previous modeling studies that have explored high electricity demand futures, the needs for certain physical resources, namely water and helium-3, could pose bottlenecks to QuACI scale-up.

Computing↗

Integration of scanning probe microscope with high-performance computing: Fixed-policy and reward-driven workflows implementation

The rapid development of computation power and machine learning algorithms has paved the way for automating scientific discovery with a scanning probe microscope (SPM). The key elements toward operationalization of the automated SPM are the interface to enable SPM control from Python codes, availability of high computing power, and development of workflows for scientific discovery. Here, we build a Python interface library that enables controlling an SPM from either a local computer or a remote high-performance computer, which satisfies the high computation power need of machine learning algorithms in autonomous workflows. We further introduce a general platform to abstract the operations of SPM in scientific discovery into fixed-policy or reward-driven workflows. Furthermore, our work provides a full infrastructure to build automated SPM workflows for both routine operations and autonomous scientific discovery with machine learning.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Dynamic, symmetry-preserving, and hardware-adaptable circuits for quantum computing many-body states and correlators of the Anderson impurity model

We present a hardware-reconfigurable ansatz on N q -qubits for the variational preparation of many-body states of the Anderson impurity model (AIM) with N imp + N bath = N q /2 sites, which conserves total charge and spin z component within each variational search subspace. The many-body ground state of the AIM is determined as the minimum over all minima of O(N$^2_ q$) distinct charge-spin sectors. Hamiltonian expectation values are shown to require ω(N q ) < N meas. $\leqslant$ O(N imp N bath ) symmetry-preserving, parallelizable measurement circuits, each amenable to postselection. To obtain the one-particle impurity Green’s function we show how initial Krylov vectors can be computed via midcircuit measurement and how Lanczos iterations can be computed using the symmetry-preserving ansatz. For a single-impurity Anderson model with a number of bath sites increasing from one to seven, we show using numerical emulation that the ease of variational ground-state preparation is suggestive of linear scaling in circuit depth and subquartic scaling in optimizer complexity. We therefore expect that, combined with time-dependent methods for Green’s function computation, our ansatz provides a useful tool to account for electronic correlations on early fault-tolerant processors. Finally, with a view towards computing real materials properties of interest like magnetic susceptibilities and electron-hole propagators, we provide a straightforward method to compute many-body, time-dependent correlation functions using a combination of time evolution, midcircuit measurement-conditioned operations, and the Hadamard test.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

The environmental impact, carbon emissions and sustainability of computing in the ATLAS experiment

ATLAS, a general-purpose experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), makes use of a large internationally-distributed computing infrastructure, including over 10 6 TB of managed data on disk and tape and almost one million simultaneously running CPU cores. Upgrades for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) will increase the required computing resources by a factor of 3–4 by the beginning of the 2030s, and by an order of magnitude before the conclusion of data taking at the beginning of the 2040s. These resources are spread over around 100 computing sites worldwide. Efforts are underway within the experiment to evaluate and mitigate various aspects of the environmental impact of the sites, with the additional long-term goal of making recommendations to the sites that will significantly reduce the total expected environmental impact in the HL-LHC era. These efforts take several forms: building awareness in the experiment community, adjusting aspects of the computing policy, and modifications of data center configurations, either in ways that take advantage of particular features of ATLAS workloads or in generic ways that reduce the environmental impact of the computing resources. This paper describes the ongoing investigations and approaches that have already provided useful and actionable outcomes.

Aad, G. [CNRS/IN2P3] (ORCID:0000000266654934)↗