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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 649 records · Page 36
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

OpenSNAPI: Toward a Unified API for SmartNICs

The end of Moore’s Law and Dennard Scaling has produced a renaissance in the field of computer architecture. Unable to continue leveraging silicon-level processor improvements to further enhance performance and scalability, system architects have been forced to explore other options. In this new era of heterogeneous architectures and hardware/software codesign, a new class of devices known as “accelerators” has emerged. Independently designed for optimized execution of distinct workloads, these devices have proven critical to the continued advancement of application performance. SmartNICs, accelerator devices integrated with a network controller, have conventionally been utilized to offload low-level networking functionality. However, newer SmartNIC variants, which incorporate a system-on-chip (SoC) with traditional designs, are challenging this precedent. Leveraging significantly augmented resources, these new devices offer increased versatility and the potential to more effectively complement a given architecture’s CPU. In this talk, we introduce the motivation underlying acceleration, explore the fundamentals of SmartNICs, and discuss traditional use cases. We also detail our initial efforts to investigate the feasibility and benefits of SmartNICs as general-purpose accelerators. We present the OpenSNAPI project created to define a uniform application programming interface (API) for this emerging class of devices. Finally, we provide a brief tutorial regarding development of SmartNIC-accelerated applications on Los Alamos National Laboratory’s SmartNIC-enabled platforms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
NASA NTRS2005

Neurovestibular and Sensorimotor Studies in Space and Earth Benefits

This review summarizes what has been learned from studies of human neurovestibular system in weightless conditions, including balance and locomotion, gaze control, vestibular-autonomic function and spatial orientation, and gives some examples of the potential Earth benefits of this research. Results show that when astronauts and cosmonauts return from space flight, both the peripheral and central neural processes are physiologically and functionally altered. There are clear distinctions between the virtually immediate adaptive compensations to weightlessness and those that require longer periods of time to adapt. However, little is known to date about the adaptation of sensory-motor functions to long-duration space missions in weightlessness and to the transitions between various reduced gravitational levels, such as on the Moon and Mars. Results from neurovestibular research in space have substantially enhanced our understanding of the mechanisms and characteristics of postural, gaze, and spatial orientation deficits, analogous to clinical cases of labyrinthine-defective function. Also, space neurosciences research has participated in the development and application of significant new technologies, such as video recording and processing of three-dimensional eye movements and posture, hardware for the unencumbered measurement of head and body movement, and procedures for investigating otolith function on Earth. In particular, devices such as centrifugation or off-vertical axis rotation could enhance clinical neurological testing because it provides linear acceleration which specifically stimulates the otolith organs in a frequency range close to natural head and body movement.

Clement, Gilles↗
NASA NTRS2005

Force Limited Vibration Testing

This slide presentation reviews the concept and applications of Force Limited Vibration Testing. The goal of vibration testing of aerospace hardware is to identify problems that would result in flight failures. The commonly used aerospace vibration tests uses artificially high shaker forces and responses at the resonance frequencies of the test item. It has become common to limit the acceleration responses in the test to those predicted for the flight. This requires an analysis of the acceleration response, and requires placing accelerometers on the test item. With the advent of piezoelectric gages it has become possible to improve vibration testing. The basic equations have are reviewed. Force limits are analogous and complementary to the acceleration specifications used in conventional vibration testing. Just as the acceleration specification is the frequency spectrum envelope of the in-flight acceleration at the interface between the test item and flight mounting structure, the force limit is the envelope of the in-flight force at the interface . In force limited vibration tests, both the acceleration and force specifications are needed, and the force specification is generally based on and proportional to the acceleration specification. Therefore, force limiting does not compensate for errors in the development of the acceleration specification, e.g., too much conservatism or the lack thereof. These errors will carry over into the force specification. Since in-flight vibratory force data are scarce, force limits are often derived from coupled system analyses and impedance information obtained from measurements or finite element models (FEM). Fortunately, data on the interface forces between systems and components are now available from system acoustic and vibration tests of development test models and from a few flight experiments. Semi-empirical methods of predicting force limits are currently being developed on the basis of the limited flight and system test data. A simple two degree of freedom system is shown and the governing equations for basic force limiting results for this system are reviewed. The design and results of the shuttle vibration forces (SVF) experiments are reviewed. The Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) also was used to validate force limiting. Test instrumentation and supporting equipment are reviewed including piezo-electric force transducers, signal processing and conditioning systems, test fixtures, and vibration controller systems. Several examples of force limited vibration testing are presented with some results.

random vibration testing↗
NASA NTRS2016

Change in Mouse Bone Turnover in Response to Microgravity on RR-1

Mechanical unloading during spaceflight is known to adversely affect mammalian physiology. Our previous studies using the Animal Enclosure Module on short duration Shuttle missions enabled us to identify a deficit in stem cell based-tissue regeneration as being a significant concern for long-duration spaceflight. Specifically, we found that mechanical unloading in microgravity resulted in inhibition of differentiation of mesenchymal and hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow compartment. Also, we observed overexpression of a cell cycle arrest molecule, CDKN1ap21, in osteoprecursor cells on the bone surface, chondroprogenitors in the articular cartilage, and in myofibers attached to bone tissue. Specifically in bone tissue during both short (15-day) and long (30-day) microgravity experiments, we observed significant loss of bone tissue and structure in both the pelvis and the femur. After 15-days of microgravity on STS-131, pelvic ischium displayed a 6.23 decrease in bone fraction (p0.005) and 11.91 decrease in bone thickness (p0.002). Furthermore, during long-duration spaceflight we observed onset of an accelerated aging-like phenotype and osteoarthritic disease state indicating that stem cells within the bone tissue fail to repair and regenerate tissues in a normal manner, leading to drastic tissue alterations in response to microgravity. The Rodent Research Hardware System provides the capability to investigate these effects during long-duration experiments on the International Space Station. During the Rodent Research-1 mission 10 16-week-old female C57Bl6J mice were exposed to 37-days of microgravity. All flight animals were euthanized and frozen on orbit for future dissection. Ground (n10) and vivarium controls (n10) were housed and processed to match the flight animal timeline. During this study we collected pelvis, femur, and tibia from all animal groups to test the hypothesis that stem cell-based tissue regeneration is significantly altered after 37-days of spaceflight. To do this, we will analyze differences in bone morphometric parameters using MicroCT. The pelvis, femur, and tibia are key in supporting and distributing weight under normal conditions. Therefore, we expect to see altered remodeling in flight animals in response to microgravity with respect to ground controls. In combination with histomorphometry, these results will help elucidate the complex mechanisms underlying bone tissue maintenance and stem cell regeneration.

bone↗
NASA NTRS2016

Changes in Mouse Bone Turnover in Response to Microgravity

Mechanical unloading during spaceflight is known to adversely affect mammalian physiology. Our previous studies using the Animal Enclosure Module on short duration Shuttle missions enabled us to identify a deficit in stem cell based-tissue regeneration as being a significant concern for long-duration spaceflight. Specifically, we found that mechanical unloading in microgravity resulted in inhibition of differentiation of mesenchymal and hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow compartment. Also, we observed overexpression of a cell cycle arrest molecule, CDKN1a/p21, in osteoprecursor cells on the bone surface, chondroprogenitors in the articular cartilage, and in myofibers attached to bone tissue. Specifically in bone tissue during both short (15-day) and long (30-day) microgravity experiments, we observed significant loss of bone tissue and structure in both the pelvis and the femur. After 15-days of microgravity on STS-131, pelvic ischium displayed a 6.23% decrease in bone fraction (p=0.005) and 11.91% decrease in bone thickness (p=0.002). Furthermore, during long-duration spaceflight we observed onset of an accelerated aging-like phenotype and osteoarthritic disease state indicating that stem cells within the bone tissue fail to repair and regenerate tissues in a normal manner, leading to drastic tissue alterations in response to microgravity. The Rodent Research Hardware System provides the capability to investigate these effects during long-duration experiments on the International Space Station. During the Rodent Research-1 mission 10 16-week-old female C57Bl/6J mice were exposed to 37-days of microgravity. All flight animals were euthanized and frozen on orbit for future dissection. Ground (n=10) and vivarium controls (n=10) were housed and processed to match the flight animal timeline. During this study we collected pelvis, femur, and tibia from all animal groups to test the hypothesis that stem cell-based tissue regeneration is significantly altered after 37-days of spaceflight. To do this, we will analyze differences in bone morphometric parameters using MicroCT. The pelvis, femur, and tibia are key in supporting and distributing weight under normal conditions. Therefore, we expect to see altered remodeling in flight animals in response to microgravity with respect to ground controls. In combination with histomorphometry, these results will help elucidate the complex mechanisms underlying bone tissue maintenance and stem cell regeneration.

microgravity↗
DOE OSTI2022

Smart sensors using artificial intelligence for on-detector electronics and ASICs

Cutting edge detectors push sensing technology by further improving spatial and temporal resolution, increasing detector area and volume, and generally reducing backgrounds and noise. This has led to a explosion of more and more data being generated in next-generation experiments. Therefore, the need for near-sensor, at the data source, processing with more powerful algorithms is becoming increasingly important to more efficiently capture the right experimental data, reduce downstream system complexity, and enable faster and lower-power feedback loops. In this paper, we discuss the motivations and potential applications for on-detector AI. Furthermore, the unique requirements of particle physics can uniquely drive the development of novel AI hardware and design tools. We describe existing modern work for particle physics in this area. Finally, we outline a number of areas of opportunity where we can advance machine learning techniques, codesign workflows, and future microelectronics technologies which will accelerate design, performance, and implementations for next generation experiments.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2025

Record acceleration of the two-dimensional Ising model using a high-performance wafer-scale engine

The versatility and wide-ranging applicability of the Ising model, originally introduced to study phase transitions in magnetic materials, have made it a cornerstone in statistical physics and a valuable tool for evaluating the performance of emerging computer hardware. Here, we present a novel implementation of the two-dimensional Ising model on Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) – a revolutionary processor that is opening new frontiers in computing. In our deployment of the checkerboard algorithm, we optimized the Ising model to take advantage of the unique WSE architecture. Specifically, we employed a compressed bit representation storing 16 spins on each int16 word, and efficiently distributed the spins over the processing units enabling seamless weak scaling and limiting communications to only immediate neighboring units. Our implementation can handle up to 754 simulations in parallel, achieving an aggregate of over 61.8 trillion flip attempts per second for Ising models with up to 200 million spins. This represents a gain of up to 148 times over previously reported single-devices with a highly optimized implementation on NVIDIA V100 and up to 88 times in productivity compared to NVIDIA H100. Our findings highlight the significant potential of the WSE in scientific computing, particularly in the field of materials modeling.

Ising model↗
NASA NTRS1994

Fluids flight hardware

The following are discussed in this viewgraph presentation: Glovebox-2 investigations, study of oscillatory thermocapillary flows and validate physical models on the second U.S. Microgravity Laboratory Mission (USML-2), pool boiling experiment, critical fluid viscosity measurement experiment, Hitchhiker-G typical structural configuration, ZENO-critical fluid light scattering experiment, isothermal dendritic growth experiment, microgravity acceleration environment support, and the space acceleration measurement system (SAMS).

Shaw, Nancy↗
NASA NTRS2008

16 Weeks of Training with the International Space Station Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (aRED) Is not Different than Training with Free Weights

The advanced Resistive Exercise Device (aRED) is a resistive exercise system designed to maintain muscle mass and strength in microgravity by simulating free weight (FW) exercise. aRED utilizes vacuum cylinders and inertial flywheels to replicate the constant mass and inertial components, respectively, of FW exercise in normal gravity. PURPOSE: To compare the effectiveness of aRED and FW resistive exercise training in ambulatory subjects. METHODS: Untrained subjects were assigned to two groups, FW (6 males, 3 females) and aRED (8 males, 3 females), and performed squat (SQ), heel raise (HR), and deadlift (DL) exercises 3 d wk-1 for 16 wks. SQ, HR and DL strength (1RM) were measured using FW hardware pre-, mid- and post-training. Subjects participated in a periodized training protocol with the exercise prescription based on a percentage of 1RM. Thigh and lower leg muscle volume were assessed using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and leg (LLM) and total body lean mass (BLM) were measured using Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA) pre- and post-training. RESULTS: SQ 1RM increased in both FW (48.9+/-6.1%) and aRED (31.2+/-3.8%) groups, and there was a greater training response in FW compared with aRED (p=0.01). HR and DL 1RM increased in FW (HR: 12.3+/-2.4%, DL: 23.3+/-4.4%) and aRED (HR: 18.0+/-1.6%, DL: 23.2+'-2.8%), but there were no differences between groups. Thigh muscle volume was greater following training in both groups (FW: 9.8+/-0.9%, aRED: 7.1+/-1.2%) but lower leg muscle volume increased only in the FW group (3.0+/-1.1%). Lean tissue mass increased in both FW (LLM: 3.9+/-1.1%, BLM: 2.5+/-0.7%) and aRED (LLM: 4.8+/-0.7%, BLM: 2.6 0.7%). There were no between group differences in muscle volume or lean mass in response to training. CONCLUSIONS: In general, the increase in muscle strength, muscle volume, and lean tissue mass when training with aRED was not different than when using the same training protocol with FW. The smaller increase in SQ 1RM in the aRED group may be the result of undersizing the aRED flywheels which were intended to mimic the inertial component of the SQ movement when performing FW exercises. However, the biomechanical differences observed in body position during the performance of the aRED SQ, which may have affected training and testing, cannot be excluded as a factor that may have affected SQ 1RM results. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS: Improvements in muscle strength, muscle volume and lean mass similar to FW exercise training may be elicited using an alternative source of resistance during exercise training. The acceleration of a mass during resistive exercise may result in greater muscle tension when changing the direction of movement resulting in enhanced strength gains. Therefore, to maximize the benefits of resistive exercise, the inertial components of FW exercise should be considered during exercise selection and hardware design. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This investigation was supported by NASA-JSC s Exercise Countermeasures Project.

Loehr, J. A.↗
DOE OSTI2018

Multiple Laser Tracker Synchronization for the Vibration Analysis

Measuring the mechanical coupling and rigidity of a large apparatus presents unique challenges for 3D metrology. In this case the motion of well separated points attached to a rotor blade must be rapidly and repeatedly measured and the resulting data synchronized. This presentation describes the methodology and results for the mechanical coupling test of the magnetic field mapping system (FMS) for the Mu2e experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). Three laser trackers, 2 API Radians and an API TIII, simultaneously measured the position of three cylindrical corner cube reflectors mounted on the FMS while the system was in motion and after coming to rest. The laser trackers took measurements at 83Hz for the T3 and 100Hz for the Radians, with fine spatial resolution, resulting in over 20,000 points measured per instrument in observation cycle. The laser tracker hardware and utilized software are unable to synchronize the three independent data streams directly during the measurement process. Instead a custom software program was developed to perform this synchronization of the data sequences during post-processing using features of the targets motion common to all three fiducial locations.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Indicator-directed Dynamic Power Management for Iterative Workloads on GPU-Accelerated Systems

Modern high-performance and warehouse computing centers show strong interest in minimizing system power consumption while satisfying customers’ quality of service (QoS). Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is effective for achieving this goal. Nevertheless, automating the process online and making it transparent to users must address three major challenges: (1) Complexity — today’s hardware components (e.g., CPUs, GPUs, memory, network, etc.) can be configured in several or dozens of frequency/voltage states for satisfying divergent system demands. Given their combination and the emergence of heterogeneity, searching the optimal configuration in the design space online can be timing consuming. (2) QoS guarantee — user-defined objectives such as power constraint and performance target must be monitored, predicted and ensured at the best effort. (3) Adaptability — various known and unknown workloads run on systems. Workloads characteristics should be quickly determined and configurations dynamically adjusted in accord with workloads and QoS. In this work, we focus on applications exhibiting an interesting feature – iterative or periodic, which is common among conventional HPC and emerging machine learning workloads. We propose an online dynamic power-performance (ODPP) management framework to dynamically adjust GPU DVFS configurations to meet performance and power objectives and constraints, without any code annotation or intrusion. Particularly, ODPP extracts the performance and power indicators for applications from their resources utilization profiles in a short episode. It further automatically constructs an accurate model that infers from the indicators how the application's performance and power vary with GPU core and memory frequencies. Aided with the model, for both seen and unseen applications, ODPP can quickly determine the most appropriate DVFS configuration for their execution. We evaluate ODPP on an NVIDIA GPU using multiple exascale computing (ECP) and deep learning applications.

Zou, Pengfei↗
DOE OSTI2023

VTK-m: Visualization for the Exascale Era and Beyond

A recent trend in modern high-performance computing is the increasing use of hybrid architectures, where the vast majority of performance comes from accelerators. Modern accelerators are based on Graphics Processing Units (GPU) that contain many low power cores that in their aggregate provides an extremely high computation rate. Current and future CPU processors are requiring more explicit parallelism as each successive version of the hardware packs in more cores, and technologies like hyperthreading and vector operations require even more parallel processing to leverage each core’s full potential. As an example, the Frontier supercomputer installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratories recently hit a record breaking 1.1 exaflops1 on the LINPACK HPC benchmark [Shoemaker 2022]. The system contains 37632 AMD MI250x GPUs which requires more than half a billion threads to keep the system fully utilized [Khizeran 2022].VTK-m is a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for these emerging processor architectures. VTK-m supports the fine-grained concurrency for data analysis and visualization algorithms required to drive extreme scale computing by providing abstract models for data and execution that can be applied to a variety of algorithms across many different processor architectures.

Bolstad, Mark↗
DOE OSTI2019

Simulation of Transparent Spin Experiment in RHIC

The transparent spin mode has been proposed as a new technique for preservation and control of the spin polarization of an ion beam in a synchrotron. The ion rings of the proposed Jefferson Lab Electron-Ion Collider adopted this technique in their figure-8 design. The transparent spin mode can also be setup in a racetrack with two identical Siberian snakes. There is a proposal to test the predicted features of the spin transparent mode in RHIC, which already has all of the necessary hardware capabilities. We have earlier analytically estimated the setup parameters and developed a preliminary experimental plan. In this paper we describe simulations of the proposed experiment using a Zgoubi model of RHIC. We present simulation of the polarization preservation during acceleration in the transparent spin mode. We also demonstrate polarization control by simulating an adiabatic polarization adjustment. A procedure to measure the strength of the spin transparent resonance is illustrated.

Morozov, Vasiliy↗
DOE OSTI2025

ComPort: Rigorous Testing Methods to Safeguard Software Porting (Final Technical Report)

This is a technical report from the lead institution – University of Utah, Kahlert School of Computing – funded under the Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research under award number DE-SC0022252. We summarize our work done over the three years of funding received. The relevant papers and software have already been uploaded at the DOE site.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2026

Design and Prototyping of the 162.5 MHz PIP-II RF Reference-Line Station

The Proton Improvement Plan II (PIP-II) Reference Line distributes phase-stable radio-frequency signals so accelerating cavities transfer energy to the proton beam at the correct point in each RF cycle. The full system contains 162.5, 325, and 650 MHz sections; this project focuses on the 162.5 MHz station. Commercial filters, amplifiers, splitters, mixers, and hardware were assembled into a compact, serviceable heat-plate layout and tested to verify performance metrics at 162.5 MHz.

Subedi, Harsheet [Unlisted, US]↗
NASA NTRS1993

A transient FETI methodology for large-scale parallel implicit computations in structural mechanics, part 2

Explicit codes are often used to simulate the nonlinear dynamics of large-scale structural systems, even for low frequency response, because the storage and CPU requirements entailed by the repeated factorizations traditionally found in implicit codes rapidly overwhelm the available computing resources. With the advent of parallel processing, this trend is accelerating because explicit schemes are also easier to parallellize than implicit ones. However, the time step restriction imposed by the Courant stability condition on all explicit schemes cannot yet and perhaps will never be offset by the speed of parallel hardware. Therefore, it is essential to develop efficient and robust alternatives to direct methods that are also amenable to massively parallel processing because implicit codes using unconditionally stable time-integration algorithms are computationally more efficient than explicit codes when simulating low-frequency dynamics. Here we present a domain decomposition method for implicit schemes that requires significantly less storage than factorization algorithms, that is several times faster than other popular direct and iterative methods, that can be easily implemented on both shared and local memory parallel processors, and that is both computationally and communication-wise efficient. The proposed transient domain decomposition method is an extension of the method of Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting (FETI) developed by Farhat and Roux for the solution of static problems. Serial and parallel performance results on the CRAY Y-MP/8 and the iPSC-860/128 systems are reported and analyzed for realistic structural dynamics problems. These results establish the superiority of the FETI method over both the serial/parallel conjugate gradient algorithm with diagonal scaling and the serial/parallel direct method, and contrast the computational power of the iPSC-860/128 parallel processor with that of the CRAY Y-MP/8 system.

Farhat, Charbel↗
NASA NTRS1992

A transient FETI methodology for large-scale parallel implicit computations in structural mechanics

Explicit codes are often used to simulate the nonlinear dynamics of large-scale structural systems, even for low frequency response, because the storage and CPU requirements entailed by the repeated factorizations traditionally found in implicit codes rapidly overwhelm the available computing resources. With the advent of parallel processing, this trend is accelerating because explicit schemes are also easier to parallelize than implicit ones. However, the time step restriction imposed by the Courant stability condition on all explicit schemes cannot yet -- and perhaps will never -- be offset by the speed of parallel hardware. Therefore, it is essential to develop efficient and robust alternatives to direct methods that are also amenable to massively parallel processing because implicit codes using unconditionally stable time-integration algorithms are computationally more efficient when simulating low-frequency dynamics. Here we present a domain decomposition method for implicit schemes that requires significantly less storage than factorization algorithms, that is several times faster than other popular direct and iterative methods, that can be easily implemented on both shared and local memory parallel processors, and that is both computationally and communication-wise efficient. The proposed transient domain decomposition method is an extension of the method of Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting (FETI) developed by Farhat and Roux for the solution of static problems. Serial and parallel performance results on the CRAY Y-MP/8 and the iPSC-860/128 systems are reported and analyzed for realistic structural dynamics problems. These results establish the superiority of the FETI method over both the serial/parallel conjugate gradient algorithm with diagonal scaling and the serial/parallel direct method, and contrast the computational power of the iPSC-860/128 parallel processor with that of the CRAY Y-MP/8 system.

Farhat, Charbel↗
NASA NTRS2012

GPU Lossless Hyperspectral Data Compression System for Space Applications

On-board lossless hyperspectral data compression reduces data volume in order to meet NASA and DoD limited downlink capabilities. At JPL, a novel, adaptive and predictive technique for lossless compression of hyperspectral data, named the Fast Lossless (FL) algorithm, was recently developed. This technique uses an adaptive filtering method and achieves state-of-the-art performance in both compression effectiveness and low complexity. Because of its outstanding performance and suitability for real-time onboard hardware implementation, the FL compressor is being formalized as the emerging CCSDS Standard for Lossless Multispectral & Hyperspectral image compression. The FL compressor is well-suited for parallel hardware implementation. A GPU hardware implementation was developed for FL targeting the current state-of-the-art GPUs from NVIDIA(Trademark). The GPU implementation on a NVIDIA(Trademark) GeForce(Trademark) GTX 580 achieves a throughput performance of 583.08 Mbits/sec (44.85 MSamples/sec) and an acceleration of at least 6 times a software implementation running on a 3.47 GHz single core Intel(Trademark) Xeon(Trademark) processor. This paper describes the design and implementation of the FL algorithm on the GPU. The massively parallel implementation will provide in the future a fast and practical real-time solution for airborne and space applications.

Graphic Processor Units↗