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At least 667 records · Page 37

Exploring GlideinWMS and HTCondor scalability frontiers for an expanding CMS Global Pool

The CMS Submission Infrastructure Global Pool, built on Glidein-WMS andHTCondor, is a worldwide distributed dynamic pool responsible for the allocation of resources for all CMS computing workloads. Matching the continuously increasing demand for computing resources by CMS requires the anticipated assessment of its scalability limitations. In addition, the Global Plmust be able to expand in a more heterogeneous environment, in terms of resource provisioning (combining Grid, HPC and Cloud) and workload submissi.A dedicated testbed has been set up to simulate such conditions with the purpose of finding potential bottlenecks in the software or its configuration. This report provides a thorough description of the various scalabilitydimensions in size and complexity that are being explored for the future Global Pool, along with the analysis and solutions to the limitations proposed with the support of the GlideinWMS and HTCondor developer teams.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Scalable Circuit Cutting and Scheduling in a Resource-constrained and Distributed Quantum System

Despite quantum computing's rapid development, current systems remain limited in practical applications due to their limited qubit count and quality. Various technologies, such as superconducting, trapped ions, and neutral atom quantum computing technologies are progressing towards a fault tolerant era, however they all face a diverse set of challenges in scalability and control. Recent efforts have focused on multi-node quantum systems that connect multiple smaller quantum devices to execute larger circuits. Future demonstrations hope to use quantum channels to couple systems, however current demonstrations can leverage classical communication with circuit cutting techniques. This involves cutting large circuits into smaller subcircuits and reconstructing them post-execution. However, existing cutting methods are hindered by lengthy search times as the number of qubits and gates increases. Additionally, they often fail to effectively utilize the resources of various worker configurations in a multi-node system. To address these challenges, we introduce FitCut, a novel approach that transforms quantum circuits into weighted graphs and utilizes a community-based, bottom-up approach to cut circuits according to resource constraints, e.g., qubit counts, on each worker. FitCut also includes a scheduling algorithm that optimizes resource utilization across workers. Implemented with Qiskit and evaluated extensively, FitCut significantly outperforms the Qiskit Circuit Knitting Toolbox, reducing time costs by factors ranging from 3 to 2000 and improving resource utilization rates by up to 3.88 times on the worker side, achieving a system-wide improvement of 2.86 times.

Kan, Shuwen [Fordham University]↗

Digital-analog quantum computation

Digital quantum computing paradigm offers highly desirable features such as universality, scalability, and quantum error correction. However, physical resource requirements to implement useful error-corrected quantum algorithms are prohibitive in the current era of NISQ devices. As an alternative path to performing universal quantum computation, within the NISQ era limitations, we propose to merge digital single-qubit operations with analog multiqubit entangling blocks in an approach we call digital-analog quantum computing (DAQC). Along these lines, although the techniques may be extended to any resource, we propose to use unitaries generated by the ubiquitous Ising Hamiltonian for the analog entangling block and we prove its universal character. Here, we construct explicit DAQC protocols for efficient simulations of arbitrary inhomogeneous Ising, two-body, and M-body spin Hamiltonian dynamics by means of single-qubit gates and a fixed homogeneous Ising Hamiltonian. Additionally, we compare a sequential approach where the interactions are switched on and off (stepwise DAQC) with an always-on multiqubit interaction interspersed by fast single-qubit pulses (banged DAQC). Finally, we perform numerical tests comparing purely digital schemes with DAQC protocols, showing a remarkably better performance of the latter. The proposed DAQC approach combines the robustness of analog quantum computing with the flexibility of digital methods.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Field Proof-of-Concept of Aquifer Imaging Using 3-D Transient Hydraulic Tomography with Modular, Temporarily-Emplaced Equipment

Hydraulic tomography is a field scale aquifer characterization method capable of estimating 3-D heterogeneous parameter distributions, and is directly sensitive to hydraulic conductivity (K), thus providing a useful data source for improving flow and transport models. We present results from a proof-of-concept field and modeling study in which we apply 3-D transient hydraulic tomography (3DTHT) to the relatively high-K and moderately heterogeneous unconfined aquifer at the Boise Hydrogeophysical Research Site. Short-duration (20 min) partially penetrating pumping tests, for which observed responses do not reach steady state, are used as the aquifer stimulation. To collect field data, we utilize a system of temporarily emplaced packer equipment to isolate multiple discrete intervals in boreholes. To analyze the data, we utilize MODFLOW combined with geostatistical inversion code based on the quasilinear approach of Kitanidis (1995). This combination of practical software allows inversion of large datasets (>250 drawdown curves, and almost 1000 individual data points) and estimation of K at >100,000 locations; reasonable runtimes are obtained using a single multicore computer with 12 GB of RAM. The K heterogeneity results from 3DTHT are cross-validated against K characterization from a large set of partially penetrating slug tests, and found to be quite consistent. The use of portable, modular equipment for field implementation means that 3DTHT data collection can be performed (including mobilization/demobilization) within a matter of days. Likewise, use of a practical, efficient and scalable numerical modeling and inversion strategy means that computational effort is drastically reduced, such that 3-D aquifer property distributions can be estimated quickly.

Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory↗

Computer Vision Pipeline for Image Analysis for Freeze‐Fracture Electron Microscopy: Rosette Cellulose Synthase Complexes Case

In materials science, plant biology, agriculture, and environmental research, the automated analysis of high-magnification, complex microscopy images, such as those generated by freeze-fracture electron microscopy (FF-TEM), remains a critical challenge that limits the scalability of data interpretation. We present a deep learning computer vision pipeline for high-throughput detection and morphological characterization analysis of cellulose synthase complexes (CSCs, or rosettes) in FF-TEM images. The pipeline integrates preprocessing, detection, human-in-the-loop verification, and semantic segmentation to quantify features such as rosette diameter and inter-lobe spacing. The approach was trained and tested on a curated dataset of high-resolution FF-TEM micrographs of Physcomitrium patens, expanded via strategic tiling and augmentation to over 650 images. We compare YOLOv8 and YOLOv9 architectures and demonstrate that YOLOv9 achieves superior performance in both localization accuracy (mAP50-95 = 0.854) and inference speed. The resulting distributions revealed biological variability consistent with prior manual studies, validating the approach for high-throughput applications. Our results show that the pipeline achieves human-expert level accuracy while dramatically reducing analysis time, enabling scalable, reproducible structural characterization of intramembrane protein complexes. The pipeline is broadly applicable to other domains requiring precise interpretation of complex microscopy data and establishes a foundation for future artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted workflows in biological imaging.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Strategic Analysis of Complex Security Scenarios

Many advanced technical tools are available to prevent attacks on national infrastructure. Nevertheless, while traditional analyses of security problems have succeeded in producing good technical solutions, they have often ignored the human factor integral to these problems. Human attackers (who may be individuals or state-level attackers) expend substantial effort to breach security because they have the incentive for doing so. People involved in implementing security follow individual incentives, which need not align with global security concerns; consequently, desired security solutions are often implemented poorly, or not at all. This complex interplay between individual incentives and global (organizational and/or national) goals can be modeled and analyzed using game theoretic techniques. By analyzing not only what is possible, but also what is motivated, a holistic approach to security problems can be developed, informing policy and providing tools to policy makers. We study game theoretic models that unify several current incentive-based approaches to security, and develop simulation-based and mathematical optimization methods for analyzing such models that exploit the high-performance computing capabilities at Sandia. Our first model studies security in interdependent settings, offering a scalable local search heuristic to approximate optimal security decisions in general, and a linear programming approach, coupled with simulations of consequences, to optimally compute security in an important special case. Our second class of models addresses security patrolling problems when an adversary gets to observe the patrol location. We present a general framework, based on stochastic games, for computing optimal security policies in such settings, and present more scalable tools that apply in the important special cases. Our third contribution is a model of security that involves many defenders, but only models non-adaptive attackers (or natural disasters, inadvertent errors, etc). In this model, we demonstrate that the security decisions of many players result in global security configuration that is not very far from optimal, and is much more resilient to environment changes that an optimal solution. This positive effect dissipates, however, when the number of decision makers becomes too large.

Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy↗

Parallel scalability of Hartree–Fock calculations

Quantum chemistry is increasingly performed using large cluster computers consisting of multiple interconnected nodes. For a fixed molecular problem, the efficiency of a calculation usually decreases as more nodes are used, due to the cost of communication between the nodes. This paper empirically investigates the parallel scalability of Hartree–Fock calculations. The construction of the Fock matrix and the density matrix calculation are analyzed separately. For the former, we use a parallelization of Fock matrix construction based on a static partitioning of work followed by a work stealing phase. For the latter, we use density matrix purification from the linear scaling methods literature, but without using sparsity. When using large numbers of nodes for moderately sized problems, density matrix computations are network-bandwidth bound, making purification methods potentially faster than eigendecomposition methods.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

A robust hierarchical solver for ill-conditioned systems with applications to ice sheet modeling

A hierarchical solver is proposed for solving sparse ill-conditioned linear systems in parallel. The solver is based on a modification of the LoRaSp method, but employs a deferred-compression technique, which provably reduces the approximation error and significantly improves efficiency. Moreover, the deferred-compression technique introduces minimal overhead and does not affect parallelism. As a result, the new solver achieves linear computational complexity under mild assumptions and excellent parallel scalability. To demonstrate the performance of the new solver, we focus on applying it to solve sparse linear systems arising from ice sheet modeling. The strong anisotropic phenomena associated with the thin structure of ice sheets creates serious challenges for existing solvers. To address the anisotropy, we additionally developed a customized partitioning scheme for the solver, which captures the strong-coupling direction accurately. In general, the partitioning can be computed algebraically with existing software packages, and thus the new solver is generalizable for solving other sparse linear systems. Our results show that ice sheet problems of about 300 million degrees of freedom have been solved in just a few minutes using a thousand processors.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Data Storage for HEP Experiments in the Era of High-Performance Computing

As particle physics experiments push their limits on both the energy and the intensity frontiers, the amount and complexity of the produced data are also expected to increase accordingly. With such large data volumes, next-generation efforts like the HL-LHC and DUNE will rely even more on both high-throughput (HTC) and high-performance (HPC) computing clusters. Full utilization of HPC resources requires scalable and efficient data-handling and I/O. For the last few decades, ROOT has been used by most HEP experiments to store data. However, other storage technologies like HDF5 may perform better in HPC environments. Initial explorations with HDF5 have begun using ATLAS, CMS and DUNE data; the DUNE experiment has also adopted HDF5 for its data-acquisition system. This paper presents the future outlook of the HEP computing and the role of HPC, and a summary of ongoing and future works to use HDF5 as a possible data storage technology for the HEP experiments to use in HPC environments.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Benchmark Testing on the IBM-Q Network

The goal of this project is to evaluate a proposed set of candidate benchmarks being developed by the Standards and Performance Metrics Technical Advisory Group (TAG) of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), of which LANL is a member. The QED-C Standards and Performance Metrics TAG has developed implementations of several benchmark codes with the hope and expectation that these codes will be helpful to QED-C members interested in investigating various quantum computer platforms. The benchmark set will be run on LANL’s access to the IBM-Q system with the intent to evaluate the set for scalability, correct execution, and coverage of the application space. The goal is for the QED-C Standards and Performance Metrics TAC to be able to produce a coherent, consistent, scalable set of benchmarks that will run on multiple quantum computing platforms and will be available to members of QED-C, including LANL.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Simple, Scalable Large Deformation Solid Mechanics Implementation in the MOOSE Framework

This article describes a large deformation solid mechanics solver implemented as part of the freely available and open source MOOSE finite element simulation framework. The article documents the choices made in developing the solid mechanics framework and describes novel formulations for the gradient operator and constitutive modeling framework made to simplify implementations of different coordinate systems, stabilized gradient operators, and different constitutive model inputs and outputs. In the process, the article describes a new formulation that casts objective integration of the Cauchy stress as a linear transformation of the small stress rate. Finally, the article presents key implementation details and examines the parallel efficiency of the solid mechanics solver implemented in MOOSE. The implementation retains a good weak scaling efficiency beyond 1,000 parallel processes. The article includes a discussion of the factors limiting the parallel efficiency of implicit, large deformation solid mechanics codes on current high-performance computers, with the main current limitation being the scalability of the algebraic multigrid methods used to solve the linearized equilibrium equations.

Applied computing → Computer-aided design↗

ChemComp: A Compilation Framework for Computing with Chemical Reaction Networks

The acceleration of scientific computation, data analytics, and artificial intelligence is driving a surge in computational requirements. Yet, state-of-the-art high-performance computing systems are approaching physical limitations that impede further significant improvements in energy efficiency. As we move towards post-exascale computing systems, innovative approaches are necessary to overcome this barrier in power consumption. Novel analog and hybrid digital-analog architectures hold promise for enhancing energy efficiency by several orders of magnitude. Biochemical computation stands out among the various solutions being explored due to its potential to enable new classes of devices with immense computational capabilities. These devices can capitalize on the inherent efficacy of biological cells in solving optimization problems and are scalable through increasing reaction system size or vessel capacity, potentially satisfying scientific computing's high-performance requirements. Nonetheless, several theoretical and practical limitations persist, including problem formulation and mapping to chemical reaction networks (CRNs) and implementation of actual CRN devices. In this paper, we propose a framework for biochemical computation using systems chemistry. We present the initial components of our approach: an abstract chemical reaction dialect implemented as a multi-level intermediate representation (MLIR) compiler extension and a pathway to represent mathematical problems with CRNs. To showcase the potential of this approach, we emulate a simplified chemical reservoir device. This work lays the groundwork for leveraging chemistry's computing potential in creating energy-efficient, high-performance computing systems tailored to contemporary computational needs.

artificial intelligence↗

Scalable FPGA Accelerator for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks with Stochastic Streaming

Here, FPGA-based heterogeneous computing platform, due to its extreme logic reconfigurability, emerges to be a strong contender as computing fabric in modern AI. As a result, various FPGA-based accelerators for deep CNN—the key driver of modern AI—have been proposed due to their advantages of high performance, reconfigurability, and fast development round, etc. In general, the consensus among researchers is that, although FPGA-based accelerator can achieve much higher energy efficiency, its raw computing performance lags behind when compared with GPUs with similar logic density. In this paper, we develop an alternative methodology to efficiently implement CNNs with FPGAs that outperform GPUs in terms of both power consumption and performance. Our key idea is to design a scalable hardware architecture and circuit design for large-scale CNNs that leverages a stochastic-based computing principle. Specifically, there are three major performance advantages. First, all key components of our deep learning CNN are designed and implemented to compute stochastically, thus achieving excellent computing performance and energy efficiency. Second, because our proposed CNN architecture enables a stream-mode computing, all of its stages can process even the partial results from preceding stages, therefore not incurring unnecessary latency due to data dependency. Finally, our FPGA-based deep CNN also provides a superior hardware scalability when compared with conventional FPGA implementations by reducing the bandwidth requirement between layers. The results show that our proposed CNN architecture significantly outperforms all previous FPGA-based deep CNN implementation approaches. It achieves 1.58x more GOPS, 6.42x more GOPS/Slice, and 10.92x more GOPS/W when compared with state-of-the-art CNN architecture. The top-5 accuracy of stochastic VGG-16 CNN is 86.77 percent with 18.91 fps frame rate.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Learning Constrained Parametric Differentiable Predictive Control Policies With Guarantees

We present differentiable predictive control (DPC), a method for offline learning of constrained neural control policies for nonlinear dynamical systems with performance guarantees. We show that the sensitivities of the parametric optimal control problem can be used to obtain direct policy gradients. Specifically, we employ automatic differentiation (AD) to efficiently compute the sensitivities of the model predictive control (MPC) objective function and constraints penalties. To guarantee safety upon deployment, we derive probabilistic guarantees on closed-loop stability and constraint satisfaction based on indicator functions and Hoeffding’s inequality. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed method can learn neural control policies for various parametric optimal control tasks. In particular, we show that the proposed DPC method can stabilize systems with unstable dynamics, track time-varying references, and satisfy nonlinear state and input constraints. Our DPC method has practical time savings compared to alternative approaches for fast and memory-efficient controller design. Specifically, DPC does not depend on a supervisory controller as opposed to approximate MPC based on imitation learning. We demonstrate that, without losing performance, DPC is scalable with greatly reduced demands on memory and computation compared to implicit and explicit MPC while being more sample efficient than model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Quantum computing approach for building surface sunlit in urban-scale energy modeling

Solar shadow calculations are needed in building energy modeling and performance simulation of PV systems installed on roofs or facades of buildings. We present a quantum computing approach for calculation of building surface sunlit fractions by recasting solar visibility as a binary optimization problem solved by quantum annealing. Each triangulated surface centroid is encoded as a binary qubit indicating sunlit or shaded status. Geometric visibility constraints are derived from the Möller-Trumbore intersection algorithm and converted into a constrained quadratic binary model compatible with contemporary quantum annealers. The coefficients were embedded to D-Wave quantum computer. To demonstrate feasibility, we conducted a case study in San Francisco for a target building with 52 triangles and roughly 2700 nearby triangles within 50 m evaluated at representative winter and summer solar positions. The results demonstrated that quantum annealing can reliably calculate and distinguish sunlit from shaded surfaces. Quantum samples achieved average accuracy exceeding 92.4 %, with the aggregate surface-level agreement approaching 99.9 %. The outputs of quantum computers agreed closely with classical algorithms, indicating practical feasibility and promising scalability. Finally, the hourly sunlit fractions of building surfaces can be obtained for urban energy modelling. This is the first study to apply quantum computing to the solar shadow and building surface sunlit calculation. It introduces a new paradigm that differs fundamentally from traditional approaches.

Deng, Zhipeng↗

Aspects of Solvers for Large-Scale Coupled Problems in Porous Media

This report summarizes solution strategies for discrete systems occurring in the simulation of processes in the subsurface. The focus is on scalable solvers for large and coupled systems. The goal of this work is to enable researchers to select suitable algorithms and parameter settings to efficiently solve their problems. The work provides an overview of existing methods, highlighting their features, potential, and also frequent pitfalls. Numerical examples are provided for single phase flow, density driven flow and poroelasticity.Aspects of multiphase flow are discussed briefly; a detailed discussion of reactive transport is beyond the scope of the article. Future trends are discussed.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗