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At least 667 records · Page 37

Prediction of DIII-D Pedestal Structure From Externally Controllable Parameters

The sharp increase of pressure at the edge of a high confinement mode (H-mode) plasma, the pedestal, strongly impacts overall plasma performance. Predicting the pedestal is a necessity to control and optimize tokamak operations. Here, an experimental data-driven machine learning (ML) approach is presented that predicts the pedestal heights and widths of electron density (n e ) and electron temperature (T e ) profiles as well as the separatrix ne from externally controllable parameters such as the plasma shape, heating method and power, and gas puff rate and integrated gas puff. The OMFIT framework was used with DIII-D data to efficiently, robustly, and automatically build a database of pedestal parameters to train machine learning models. Database creation was enabled by the search engine tool for DIII-D data, TokSearch, which parallelizes data fetching, enabling fast searches through basic signals of thousands of DIII-D shots and selection of relevant time intervals. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) separated the database into three clusters that represent classes of plasma shapes that are regularly used in DIII-D. The most important parameters for setting the pedestal structure were plasma current (I p ), toroidal magnetic field (B Φ ), neutral beam heating power (P NBI ) and shaping quantities. The Deep Jointly Informed Neural Networks (DJINN) algorithm was applied to identify suitable neural network (NN) architectures that appropriately capture the features of the pedestal database. Separate NNs were implemented for each pedestal parameter, and ensembling methods were used to improve the prediction accuracy and allowed estimation of the prediction uncertainty. The pedestal predictions of the test dataset lie within the measurement uncertainties of the pedestal parameters. The NN outperformed simple Linear Regression (LR) analysis, indicating non-linear dependencies in the pedestal structure. The presented achievements illustrate a promising path for future research, using feature extraction to infer experimental trends and thereby improve pedestal models as well as deploying NN for a fast pedestal prediction in DIII-D scenario development.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Attribute-Aware RBFs: Interactive Visualization of Time Series Particle Volumes Using RT Core Range Queries

Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is a mesh-free method used to simulate volumetric media in fluids, astrophysics, and solid mechanics. Visualizing these simulations is problematic because these datasets often contain millions, if not billions of particles carrying physical attributes and moving over time. Radial basis functions (RBFs) are used to model particles, and overlapping particles are interpolated to reconstruct a high-quality volumetric field; however, this interpolation process is expensive and makes interactive visualization difficult. Existing RBF interpolation schemes do not account for color-mapped attributes and are instead constrained to visualizing just the density field. To address these challenges, we exploit ray tracing cores in modern GPU architectures to accelerate scalar field reconstruction. We use a novel RBF interpolation scheme to integrate per-particle colors and densities, and leverage GPU-parallel tree construction and refitting to quickly update the tree as the simulation animates over time or when the user manipulates particle radii. We also propose a Hilbert reordering scheme to cluster particles together at the leaves of the tree to reduce tree memory consumption. Finally, we reduce the noise of volumetric shadows by adopting a spatially temporal blue noise sampling scheme. Our method can provide a more detailed and interactive view of these large, volumetric, time-series particle datasets than traditional methods, leading to new insights into these physics simulations.

Particle Volumes↗

Prediction of DIII-D Pedestal Structure from Externally Controllable Parameters

The sharp increase of pressure at the edge of a high confinement mode (H-mode) plasma, the pedestal, strongly impacts overall plasma performance. Predicting the pedestal is a necessity to control and optimize tokamak operations. An experimental data-driven machine learning (ML) approach is presented that predicts the pedestal heights and widths of electron density (ne) and electron temperature (Te) profiles as well as the separatrix ne from externally controllable parameters such as the plasma shape, heating method and power, and gas puff rate and integrated gas puff. The OMFIT framework was used with DIII-D data to efficiently, robustly, and automatically build a database of pedestal parameters to train machine learning models. Database creation was enabled by the search engine tool for DIII-D data, TokSearch, which parallelizes data fetching, enabling fast searches through basic signals of thousands of DIII-D shots and selection of relevant time intervals. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) separated the database into three clusters that represent classes of plasma shapes that are regularly used in DIII-D. The most important parameters for setting the pedestal structure were plasma current (Ip), toroidal magnetic field (Bφ), neutral beam heating power (PNBI) and shaping quantities. The Deep Jointly Informed Neural Networks (DJINN) algorithm was applied to identify suitable neural network (NN) architectures that appropriately capture the features of the pedestal database. Separate NNs were implemented for each pedestal parameter, and ensembling methods were used to improve the prediction accuracy and allowed estimation of the prediction uncertainty. The pedestal predictions of the test dataset lie within the measurement uncertainties of the pedestal parameters. The NN outperformed simple Linear Regression (LR) analysis, indicating non-linear dependencies in the pedestal structure. The presented achievements illustrate a promising path for future research, using feature extraction to infer experimental trends and thereby improve pedestal models as well as deploying NN for a fast pedestal prediction in DIII-D scenario development.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Hybrid MPI+OpenMP Programming of an Overset CFD Solver and Performance Investigations

This report describes a two level parallelization of a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) solver with multi-zone overset structured grids. The approach is based on a hybrid MPI+OpenMP programming model suitable for shared memory and clusters of shared memory machines. The performance investigations of the hybrid application on an SGI Origin2000 (O2K) machine is reported using medium and large scale test problems.

Djomehri, M. Jahed↗

Hierarchical Image Segmentation of Remotely Sensed Data using Massively Parallel GNU-LINUX Software

A hierarchical set of image segmentations is a set of several image segmentations of the same image at different levels of detail in which the segmentations at coarser levels of detail can be produced from simple merges of regions at finer levels of detail. In [1], Tilton, et a1 describes an approach for producing hierarchical segmentations (called HSEG) and gave a progress report on exploiting these hierarchical segmentations for image information mining. The HSEG algorithm is a hybrid of region growing and constrained spectral clustering that produces a hierarchical set of image segmentations based on detected convergence points. In the main, HSEG employs the hierarchical stepwise optimization (HSWO) approach to region growing, which was described as early as 1989 by Beaulieu and Goldberg. The HSWO approach seeks to produce segmentations that are more optimized than those produced by more classic approaches to region growing (e.g. Horowitz and T. Pavlidis, [3]). In addition, HSEG optionally interjects between HSWO region growing iterations, merges between spatially non-adjacent regions (i.e., spectrally based merging or clustering) constrained by a threshold derived from the previous HSWO region growing iteration. While the addition of constrained spectral clustering improves the utility of the segmentation results, especially for larger images, it also significantly increases HSEG s computational requirements. To counteract this, a computationally efficient recursive, divide-and-conquer, implementation of HSEG (RHSEG) was devised, which includes special code to avoid processing artifacts caused by RHSEG s recursive subdivision of the image data. The recursive nature of RHSEG makes for a straightforward parallel implementation. This paper describes the HSEG algorithm, its recursive formulation (referred to as RHSEG), and the implementation of RHSEG using massively parallel GNU-LINUX software. Results with Landsat TM data are included comparing RHSEG with classic region growing.

Tilton, James C.↗

Preliminary results of teleseismic double-difference relocation of earthquakes around Indonesian archipelago region

Indonesian archipelago region is located in active tectonic setting and high seismicity zone. During the last decade, Indonesian was experienced with destructive major earthquakes causing damage and victims. The information of precise earthquake location parameters are very important in partular for earthquake early warning to the society and for advance seismic studies. In this study, we attempted to improve hypocenter location compiled by BMKG for time periods of April, 2009 up to June, 2014 for about 22,000 earthquake events around Indonesian region. For the firts time, we applied teleseismic double-difference relocation algorithm (teletomoDD) to improve hypocenter region in Indonesia region combining regional and teleseismic stations. Hypocenter relocation was performed utilizing local, regional, and teleseismic P-wave arrival time data. Our relocation result show that travel-time RMS errors were greatly reduced compared to the BMKG catalog. Seismicity at shallower depth (less than 50 km) shows significantly improvement especially in depth, and refined shallow geological structures, e.g. trench and major strike slip faults. Clustered seismicity is also detected beneath volcanic region, and probably related volcano activities and also major faults nearby. In the Sunda arc region, seismicity at shallower depth centered at two major distributions parallel to the trench strike direction, i.e. around fore-arc and in mainland that related to major fault, e.g. the Sumatran fault, and volcanic fronts. Below Central Java region, relocated hypocenter result showed double seismic zone pattern. A seismic gap is detected around the Sunda-Banda transition zone where transition between oceanic subduction to continental crust collision of Australian plate occurs. In Eastern Indonesia region, shallow earthquakes are observed related to major strike slip faults, e.g. Sorong and Palu-Koro fault, volcanism, and shallow part of subduction and collision zones. We also compare our result in the Sunda Arc region with slab1.0 model and our relocated seismicity shows good agreement with the previous slab geometry. Horizontal position shift of relocated events are mostly perpendicular to the trench directions.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

The Secret Life of Quarks, Final Report for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This final report summarizes activities and results at the University of North Carolina as part of the the SciDAC-2 Project The Secret Life of Quarks: National Computational Infrastructure for Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics. The overall objective of the project is to construct the software needed to study quantum chromo- dynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong interactions of subatomic physics, and similar strongly coupled gauge theories anticipated to be of importance in the LHC era. It built upon the successful efforts of the SciDAC-1 project National Computational Infrastructure for Lattice Gauge Theory, in which a QCD Applications Programming Interface (QCD API) was developed that enables lat- tice gauge theorists to make effective use of a wide variety of massively parallel computers. In the SciDAC-2 project, optimized versions of the QCD API were being created for the IBM Blue- Gene/L (BG/L) and BlueGene/P (BG/P), the Cray XT3/XT4 and its successors, and clusters based on multi-core processors and Infiniband communications networks. The QCD API is being used to enhance the performance of the major QCD community codes and to create new applications. Software libraries of physics tools have been expanded to contain sharable building blocks for inclusion in application codes, performance analysis and visualization tools, and software for au- tomation of physics work flow. New software tools were designed for managing the large data sets generated in lattice QCD simulations, and for sharing them through the International Lattice Data Grid consortium. As part of the overall project, researchers at UNC were funded through ASCR to work in three general areas. The main thrust has been performance instrumentation and analysis in support of the SciDAC QCD code base as it evolved and as it moved to new computation platforms. In support of the performance activities, performance data was to be collected in a database for the purpose of broader analysis. Third, the UNC work was done at RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute), which has extensive expertise and facilities for scientific data visualization, so we acted in an ongoing consulting and support role in that area.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

TURBULENCE-GENERATED PROTON-SCALE STRUCTURES IN THE TERRESTRIAL MAGNETOSHEATH

Recent results of numerical magnetohydrodynamic simulations suggest that in collisionless space plasmas, turbulence can spontaneously generate thin current sheets. These coherent structures can partially explain the intermittency and the non-homogenous distribution of localized plasma heating in turbulence. In this Letter, Cluster multi-point observations are used to investigate the distribution of magnetic field discontinuities and the associated small-scale current sheets in the terrestrial magnetosheath downstream of a quasi-parallel bow shock. It is shown experimentally, for the first time, that the strongest turbulence-generated current sheets occupy the long tails of probability distribution functions associated with extremal values of magnetic field partial derivatives. During the analyzed one-hour time interval, about a hundred strong discontinuities, possibly proton-scale current sheets, were observed.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Experiences Using OpenMP Based on Compiler Directed Software DSM on a PC Cluster

In this work we report on our experiences running OpenMP (message passing) programs on a commodity cluster of PCs (personal computers) running a software distributed shared memory (DSM) system. We describe our test environment and report on the performance of a subset of the NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) Parallel Benchmarks that have been automatically parallelized for OpenMP. We compare the performance of the OpenMP implementations with that of their message passing counterparts and discuss performance differences.

Hess, Matthias↗

Hypercluster - Parallel processing for computational mechanics

An account is given of the development status, performance capabilities and implications for further development of NASA-Lewis' testbed 'hypercluster' parallel computer network, in which multiple processors communicate through a shared memory. Processors have local as well as shared memory; the hypercluster is expanded in the same manner as the hypercube, with processor clusters replacing the normal single processor node. The NASA-Lewis machine has three nodes with a vector personality and one node with a scalar personality. Each of the vector nodes uses four board-level vector processors, while the scalar node uses four general-purpose microcomputer boards.

Blech, Richard A.↗

Exploring Anomalous Photoelectron Angular Distributions in the Photoelectron Spectra of Gd 3 O 3 – : Study of Gd 3 O 2 – and Gd 3 O 3 – Using Photoelectron Spectroscopy and Density Functional Theory Calculations

Anion photoelectron (PE) spectra of lanthanide oxide clusters obtained previously have exhibited anomalous photoelectron angular distributions which were attributed to strong PE–valence electron (PEVE) interactions. Here, to further explore this effect, we have obtained the PE spectra of Gd 3 O 2 – and Gd 3 O 3 – , two clusters that have similarly complex electronic structures but contrasting symmetries. The spectra exhibit manifolds of detachment transitions at similar binding energies in a 0.5 eV window of energy. The electron affinity of Gd 3 O 2 is measured to be 1.29 ± 0.05 eV, and that of Gd 3 O 3 is 1.31 ± 0.05 eV. As seen in previous studies on lanthanide oxide cluster anions in lower than conventional oxidation states, transitions in spectra obtained lower photon energies are more congested than those obtained with higher photon energy, a signature of strong PEVE interactions. While the detachment transitions have predominantly parallel photoelectron angular distributions (PAD), the PAD varies across the manifold of transitions in the PE spectrum of Gd 3 O 3 – in a way that suggests four different subgroups of transitions. Results of calculations on Gd 3 O 2 – suggest kite or V-shape structures with antiferromagnetic coupling between one of the 4f 7 subshells with the two others. Calculations on Gd 3 O 3 – more definitively point to ring structures with a nearly isoenergetic ferromagnetically coupled high spin (24-tet) state and a dectet state in which one of the 4f 7 subshells is antiferromagnetically coupled with the other two. Taking these results as qualitative, we propose that strong mixing between the unperturbed states predicted computationally leads to overlapping transitions with different PADs.

anions↗

A large-scale study of soft-errors on GPUs in the field

Parallelism provided by the GPU architecture has enabled domain scientists to simulate physical phenomena at a much faster rate and finer granularity than what was previously possible by CPU-based large-scale clusters. Architecture researchers have been investigating reliability characteristics of GPUs and innovating techniques to increase the reliability of these emerging computing devices. Such efforts are often guided by technology projections and simplistic scientific kernels, and performed using architectural simulators and modeling tools. Lack of large-scale field data impedes the effectiveness of such efforts. This study attempts to bridge this gap by presenting a large-scale field data analysis of GPU reliability. We characterize and quantify different kinds of soft-errors on the Titan supercomputer's GPU nodes. Our study uncovers several interesting and previously unknown insights about the characteristics and impact of soft-errors.

Nie, Bin↗

Synthesis and crystal structure of a new organic compound: Bis(4,4 Prime -diaminodiphenylmethane) (4,4 Prime -diammoniodiphenylmethane) dichloride monohydrate

A new organic compound with the formula C{sub 39}H{sub 46}Cl{sub 2}N{sub 6}O was synthesized from aqueous solution of 4,4 Prime -diaminodiphenylmethane and hydrochloric acid at room temperature. This compound crystallizes in the monoclinic space group C2: a = 25.6525(16), b = 5.7107(3), c = 13.7777(8) A, {beta} = 118.862(2) Degree-Sign , V = 1767.64(22) A{sup 3} and Z = 2, giving D{sub x} = 1.288 g cm{sup -3}. The refinement converged to R{sub 1} = 0.027 and wR{sub 2} = 0.0649. The structural arrangement can be described as infinite layers parallel to bc plane. In these layers cations and non protonated molecules are linked with N-H...N hydrogen bonds building [C{sub 39}H{sub 44}N{sub 6}]{sup 2+} organic clusters. These clusters, in turn, are linked by N-H...Cl and O-H...Cl hydrogen bonds.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Revisiting Theoretical Predictions of the Motion and Direction of FTE's

Flux Transfer Events (FTEs) are magnetopause signatures that result from the passage of flux ropes produced by transient bursts of reconnection. They exhibit bipolar signatures in the component of the magnetic field normal to the magnetopause and transient increases or crater-like structures in the magnetic field strength. We use the bipolar magnetic field signatures and magnetic field strength variations observed by all four Cluster spacecrafts during the years of 2002 and 2003 to determine the velocity and direction fof FTE motion for comparison with predictions for the motion of FTEs generated by the component and anti-parallel reconnection models.

Collado-Vega, Y. M.↗

Performance Measurement, Visualization and Modeling of Parallel and Distributed Programs

This paper presents a methodology for debugging the performance of message-passing programs on both tightly coupled and loosely coupled distributed-memory machines. The AIMS (Automated Instrumentation and Monitoring System) toolkit, a suite of software tools for measurement and analysis of performance, is introduced and its application illustrated using several benchmark programs drawn from the field of computational fluid dynamics. AIMS includes (i) Xinstrument, a powerful source-code instrumentor, which supports both Fortran77 and C as well as a number of different message-passing libraries including Intel's NX Thinking Machines' CMMD, and PVM; (ii) Monitor, a library of timestamping and trace -collection routines that run on supercomputers (such as Intel's iPSC/860, Delta, and Paragon and Thinking Machines' CM5) as well as on networks of workstations (including Convex Cluster and SparcStations connected by a LAN); (iii) Visualization Kernel, a trace-animation facility that supports source-code clickback, simultaneous visualization of computation and communication patterns, as well as analysis of data movements; (iv) Statistics Kernel, an advanced profiling facility, that associates a variety of performance data with various syntactic components of a parallel program; (v) Index Kernel, a diagnostic tool that helps pinpoint performance bottlenecks through the use of abstract indices; (vi) Modeling Kernel, a facility for automated modeling of message-passing programs that supports both simulation -based and analytical approaches to performance prediction and scalability analysis; (vii) Intrusion Compensator, a utility for recovering true performance from observed performance by removing the overheads of monitoring and their effects on the communication pattern of the program; and (viii) Compatibility Tools, that convert AIMS-generated traces into formats used by other performance-visualization tools, such as ParaGraph, Pablo, and certain AVS/Explorer modules.

Yan, Jerry C.↗

ENHANCED MAGNETIC COMPRESSIBILITY AND ISOTROPIC SCALE INVARIANCE AT SUB-ION LARMOR SCALES IN SOLAR WIND TURBULENCE

The anisotropic nature of solar wind magnetic turbulence fluctuations is investigated scale by scale using high cadence in situ magnetic field measurements from the Cluster and ACE spacecraft missions. The data span five decades in scales from the inertial range to the electron Larmor radius. In contrast to the inertial range, there is a successive increase toward isotropy between parallel and transverse power at scales below the ion Larmor radius, with isotropy being achieved at the electron Larmor radius. In the context of wave-mediated theories of turbulence, we show that this enhancement in magnetic fluctuations parallel to the local mean background field is qualitatively consistent with the magnetic compressibility signature of kinetic Alfven wave solutions of the linearized Vlasov equation. More generally, we discuss how these results may arise naturally due to the prominent role of the Hall term at sub-ion Larmor scales. Furthermore, computing higher-order statistics, we show that the full statistical signature of the fluctuations at scales below the ion Larmor radius is that of a single isotropic globally scale-invariant process distinct from the anisotropic statistics of the inertial range.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Hybrid algorithms in quantum Monte Carlo

With advances in algorithms and growing computing powers, quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods have become a leading contender for high accuracy calculations for the electronic structure of realistic systems. The performance gain on recent HPC systems is largely driven by increasing parallelism: the number of compute cores of a SMP and the number of SMPs have been going up, as the Top500 list attests. However, the available memory as well as the communication and memory bandwidth per element has not kept pace with the increasing parallelism. This severely limits the applicability of QMC and the problem size it can handle. OpenMP/MPI hybrid programming provides applications with simple but effective solutions to overcome efficiency and scalability bottlenecks on large-scale clusters based on multi/many-core SMPs. We discuss the design and implementation of hybrid methods in QMCPACK and analyze its performance on current HPC platforms characterized by various memory and communication hierarchies.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Automatic Parallelization of Numerical Python Applications using the Global Arrays Toolkit

Global Arrays is a software system from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory that enables an efficient, portable, and parallel shared-memory programming interface to manipulate distributed dense arrays. The NumPy module is the de facto standard for numerical calculation in the Python programming language, a language whose use is growing rapidly in the scientific and engineering communities. NumPy provides a powerful N-dimensional array class as well as other scientific computing capabilities. However, like the majority of the core Python modules, NumPy is inherently serial. Using a combination of Global Arrays and NumPy, we have reimplemented NumPy as a distributed drop-in replacement called Global Arrays in NumPy (GAiN). Serial NumPy applications can become parallel, scalable GAiN applications with only minor source code changes. Scalability studies of several different GAiN applications will be presented showing the utility of developing serial NumPy codes which can later run on more capable clusters or supercomputers.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗