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At least 685 records · Page 38

Distributed computing feasibility in a non-dedicated homogeneous distributed system

The low cost and availability of clusters of workstations have lead researchers to re-explore distributed computing using independent workstations. This approach may provide better cost/performance than tightly coupled multiprocessors. In practice, this approach often utilizes wasted cycles to run parallel jobs. The feasibility of such a non-dedicated parallel processing environment assuming workstation processes have preemptive priority over parallel tasks is addressed. An analytical model is developed to predict parallel job response times. Our model provides insight into how significantly workstation owner interference degrades parallel program performance. A new term task ratio, which relates the parallel task demand to the mean service demand of nonparallel workstation processes, is introduced. It was proposed that task ratio is a useful metric for determining how large the demand of a parallel applications must be in order to make efficient use of a non-dedicated distributed system.

Leutenegger, Scott T.↗

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.

Esler, Kenneth P↗

ION ACCELERATION AT THE QUASI-PARALLEL BOW SHOCK: DECODING THE SIGNATURE OF INJECTION

Collisionless shocks are efficient particle accelerators. At Earth, ions with energies exceeding 100 keV are seen upstream of the bow shock when the magnetic geometry is quasi-parallel, and large-scale supernova remnant shocks can accelerate ions into cosmic-ray energies. This energization is attributed to diffusive shock acceleration; however, for this process to become active, the ions must first be sufficiently energized. How and where this initial acceleration takes place has been one of the key unresolved issues in shock acceleration theory. Using Cluster spacecraft observations, we study the signatures of ion reflection events in the turbulent transition layer upstream of the terrestrial bow shock, and with the support of a hybrid simulation of the shock, we show that these reflection signatures are characteristic of the first step in the ion injection process. These reflection events develop in particular in the region where the trailing edge of large-amplitude upstream waves intercept the local shock ramp and the upstream magnetic field changes from quasi-perpendicular to quasi-parallel. The dispersed ion velocity signature observed can be attributed to a rapid succession of ion reflections at this wave boundary. After the ions’ initial interaction with the shock, they flow upstream along the quasi-parallel magnetic field. Each subsequent wavefront in the upstream region will sweep the ions back toward the shock, where they gain energy with each transition between the upstream and the shock wave frames. Within three to five gyroperiods, some ions have gained enough parallel velocity to escape upstream, thus completing the injection process.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Exploring Memory Hierarchy to Improve Scientific Data Read Performance, In: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing

Improving read performance is one of the major challenges with speeding up scientific data analytic applications. Utilizing the memory hierarchy is one major line of researches to address the read performance bottleneck. Related methods usually combine solide-state-drives(SSDs) with dynamic random-access memory(DRAM) and/or parallel file system(PFS) to mitigate the speed and space gap between DRAM and PFS. However, these methods are unable to handle key performance issues plaguing SSDs, namely read contention that may cause up to 50% performance reduction. In this paper, we propose a framework that exploits the memory hierarchy resource to address the read contention issues involved with SSDs. The framework employs a general purpose online read algorithm that able to detect and utilize memory hierarchy resource to relieve the problem. To maintain a near optimal operating environment for SSDs, the framework is able to orchastrate data chunks across different memory layers to facilitate the read algorithm. Compared to existing tools, our framework achieves up to 50% read performance improvement when tested on datasets from real-world scientific simulations.

Computer Science↗

A biosynthetic gene cluster for three post-chorismate pathways in Arabidopsis

Chorismate is a branch-point metabolite in the biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids, vitamins, antibiotics and various other aromatic products in bacteria, fungi and plants. Although 13 chorismate-utilizing enzymes have been identified in bacteria, only 6 have been described in plants, where an estimated 30% of all photosynthetically fixed carbon passes through chorismate. Here, in this study, we describe a biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC) consisting of five core genes, including two reductases, two methyltransferases and one glucosyltransferase. Genetic and biochemical evidence shows that these five enzymes collectively give rise to three biosynthetic pathways, each originating from chorismate: two parallel pathways produce a class of non-aromatic, isomeric compounds abundant in the roots of Arabidopsis thaliana, whereas the third pathway produces methylated and glucosylated chorismate derivatives that subsequently react non-enzymatically with glutathione. Genome analysis revealed that variants of this BGC are present in some but not all species in the Brassicaceae family. Taken together, our study uncovered a BGC, containing three chorismate-utilizing enzymes, that controls three distinct post-chorismate pathways in A. thaliana. This work not only advances our understanding of carbon flow in this model plant but also highlights that the biochemical complexity encoded by plant BGCs is greater than previously appreciated.

Peng, Meng [Ghent Univ. (Belgium); Flemish Institu↗

Gold-rich R 3 Au 7 Sn 3 : Establishing the interdependence between electronic features and physical properties

Two new polar intermetallic compounds Y 3 Au 7 Sn 3 (I) and Gd 3 Au 7 Sn 3 (II) have been synthesized and their structures have been determined by single crystal X-ray diffraction (P6 3/m ; Z = 2, a = 8.148(1)/8.185(3), and c = 9.394(2)/9.415(3) for I/II, respectively). They can formally be assigned to the Cu 10 Sn 3 type and consist of parallel slabs of Sn centered, edge-sharing trigonal Au 6 antiprisms connected through R 3 (R = Y, Gd) triangles. Additional Au atoms reside in the centres of trigonal Au 6 prisms forming Au@Au 6 clusters with Au–Au distances of 2.906–2.960 Å, while the R–R contacts in the R 3 groups are considerably larger than the sums of their metallic radii. These exclusive structural arrangements provide alluring systems to study the synergism between strongly correlated systems, particularly, those in the structure of (II), and extensive polar intermetallic contacts, which has been inspected by measurements of the magnetic properties, heat capacities and electrical conductivities of both compounds. Gd 3 Au 7 Sn 3 shows an antiferromagnetic ordering at 13 K, while Y 3 Au 7 Sn 3 is a Pauli paramagnet and a downward curvature in its electrical resistivity at about 1.9 K points to a superconducting transition. DFT-based band structure calculations on R 3 Au 7 Sn 3 (R = Y, Gd) account for the results of the conductivity measurements and different spin ordering models of (II) provide conclusive hints about its magnetic structure. As a result, chemical bonding analyses of both compounds indicate that the vast majority of bonding originates from the heteroatomic Au–Gd and Au–Sn interactions, while homoatomic Au–Au bonding is evident within the Au@Au 6 clusters.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Studying CPU and memory utilization of applications on Fujitsu A64FX and Nvidia Grace Superchip

ARM-based manycore CPU architectures are well-positioned to provide the rising memory throughput requirements of modern data intensive scientific applications in High Performance Computing (HPC). The Fujitsu A64FX CPU platform is based on the ARM v8.2A architecture, and is the processor of the flagship Japanese supercomputer - "Fugaku", which was previously ranked as the #1 supercomputer in the world according to the Top500 list. The Nvidia Grace superchip features 144 Neoverse V2 cores based on the ARMv9 architecture with 4x128b SVE2, providing exceptional computational power. The chip supports up to 480GB of memory, making it ideal for AI, machine learning, and scientific computing workloads. In this paper, we conduct a thorough performance exploration of a variety of parallel bandwidth-sensitive benchmarks and applications compiled with the native Fujitsu compiler on a Fugaku A64FX compute node and ARM (LLVM) Compiler on an NVIDIA Grace superchip compute node, engaging all the computational cores per cluster using OpenMP multithreading (assuming the cores can drive the available bandwidth). Our ultimate goals are to study the resource utilization of scientific applications and benchmarks on A64FX and Grace superchip, considering graph application scenarios ( GAP Benchmark suite) and eleven appli- cation proxies from the Rodinia heterogeneous benchmark suite (considering domains such as Data Mining, Bioinformatics, Fluid Dynamics, Pattern Recognition, etc.). Through exhaustive performance monitoring, we quantify the resource utilization of diverse OpenMP-based HPC applications on both the Fujitsu A64FX and the Nvidia Grace Superchip platforms.

benchmarking, Performance Analysis, High performan↗

A 23.2:1 ratio, 300-watt, 26 N-m output torque, planetary roller-gear robotic transmission: Design and evaluation

The design philosophy and measurements performed on a new roller-gear transmission prototype for a robotic manipulator are described. The design incorporates smooth rollers in a planetary configuration integrated with conventional toothed gears. The rollers were designed to handle low torque with low backlash and friction while the complementary gears support higher torques and prevent accumulated creep or slip of the rollers. The introduction of gears with finite numbers of teeth to function in parallel with the rollers imposes severe limits on available designs. Solutions for two-planet row designs are discussed. A two-planet row, four-planet design was conceived, fabricated, and tested. Detailed calculations of cluster geometry, gear stresses, and gear geometry are given. Measurement data reported here include transmission linearity, static and dynamic friction, inertia, backlash, stiffness, and forward and reverse efficiency. Initial test results are reported describing performance of the transmission in a servomechanism with torque feedback.

Newman, Wyatt S.↗

A Melanoma Brain Metastasis CTC Signature and CTC:B-cell Clusters Associate with Secondary Liver Metastasis: A Melanoma Brain–Liver Metastasis Axis

Melanoma brain metastasis is linked to dismal prognosis and low overall survival and is detected in up to 80% of patients at autopsy. Circulating tumor cells (CTC) are the smallest functional units of cancer and precursors of fatal metastasis. We previously used an unbiased multilevel approach to discover a unique ribosomal protein large/small subunit (RPL/RPS) CTC gene signature associated with melanoma brain metastasis. In this study, we hypothesized that CTC-driven melanoma brain metastasis secondary metastasis (“metastasis of metastasis” per clinical scenarios) has targeted organ specificity for the liver. We injected parallel cohorts of immunodeficient and newly developed humanized NBSGW (huNBSGW) mice with cells from CTC-derived melanoma brain metastasis to identify secondary metastatic patterns. We found the presence of a melanoma brain–liver metastasis axis in huNBSGW mice. Furthermore, RNA sequencing analysis of tissues showed a significant upregulation of the RPL/RPS CTC gene signature linked to metastatic spread to the liver. Additional RNA sequencing of CTCs from huNBSGW blood revealed extensive CTC clustering with human B cells in these mice. CTC:B-cell clusters were also upregulated in the blood of patients with primary melanoma and maintained either in CTC-driven melanoma brain metastasis or melanoma brain metastasis CTC–derived cells promoting liver metastasis. CTC-generated tumor tissues were interrogated at single-cell gene and protein expression levels (10x Genomics Xenium and HALO spatial biology platforms, respectively). Collectively, our findings suggest that heterotypic CTC:B-cell interactions can be critical at multiple stages of metastasis.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Theoretical and Experimental Insight into the Mechanism for Spontaneous Vertical Growth of ReS 2 Nanosheets

We report that rhenium disulfide (ReS 2 ) differs fundamentally from other group-VI transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) due to its low structural symmetry, which results in its optical and electrical anisotropy. Although vertical growth is observed in some TMDs under special growth conditions, vertical growth in ReS 2 is very different in that it is highly spontaneous and substrate-independent. In this study, the mechanism that underpins the thermodynamically favorable vertical growth mode of ReS 2 is uncovered. It is found that the governing mechanism for ReS 2 growth involves two distinct stages. In the first stage, ReS 2 grows parallel to the growth substrate, consistent with conventional TMD growth. However, subsequent vertical growth is nucleated at points on the lattice where Re atoms are “pinched” together. At such sites, an additional Re atom binds with the cluster of pinched Re atoms, leaving an under-coordinated S atom protruding out of the ReS 2 plane. This under-coordinated S is “reactive” and binds to free Re and S atoms, initiating growth in a direction perpendicular to the ReS 2 surface. Lastly, the utility of such vertical ReS 2 arrays in applications where high surface-to-volume ratio and electric-field enhancement are essential, such as surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy, field emission, and solar-based disinfection of bacteria, is demonstrated.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Architecture, catalysis and regulation of methylthio-alkane reductase for bacterial sulfur acquisition from volatile organic compounds

Bacteria utilize methylthio-alkane reductase (MAR) to acquire sulfur from volatile organic sulfur compounds. Reductive cleavage of methylthio-ethanol and dimethylsulfide liberates methanethiol for methionine synthesis and concomitantly releases ethylene and methane, respectively. Here we show that the native MAR of Rhodospirillum rubrum is a two-component system composed of a MarH ATP-dependent reductase and a MarDK catalytic core, whose architecture parallels nitrogenase. MarS complexes with MarDK to downregulate MAR activity during cellular sulfate influx, based on chromatographic and activity analyses. MarDK possesses complex metallocofactors resembling, but not identical to, nitrogenase P- and iron-only M-clusters, designated as mar1 and mar2 clusters based on metal, spectroscopic and mutagenesis analyses. They exhibit electronic features similar to the iron-only nitrogenase under turnover and, remarkably, are matured by MarB or nitrogenase NifB, resulting in maturase-dependent activity profiles. Altogether, this suggests a broader scope of reactivity, mechanisms and regulation in microbial metabolism for the nitrogenase-like family of enzymes than previously considered.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

SeekAView: An Intelligent Dimensionality Reduction Strategy for Navigating High-Dimensional Data Spaces

Dealing with the curse of dimensionality is a key challenge in high-dimensional data visualization. We present SeekAView to address three main gaps in the existing research literature. First, automated methods like dimensionality reduction or clustering suffer from a lack of transparency in letting analysts interact with their outputs in real-time to suit their exploration strategies. The results often suffer from a lack of interpretability, especially for domain experts not trained in statistics and machine learning. Second, exploratory visualization techniques like scatter plots or parallel coordinates suffer from a lack of visual scalability: it is difficult to present a coherent overview of interesting combinations of dimensions. Third, the existing techniques do not provide a flexible workflow that allows for multiple perspectives into the analysis process by automatically detecting and suggesting potentially interesting subspaces. In SeekAView we address these issues using suggestion based visual exploration of interesting patterns for building and refining multidimensional subspaces. Compared to the state-of-the-art in subspace search and visualization methods, we achieve higher transparency in showing not only the results of the algorithms, but also interesting dimensions calibrated against different metrics. We integrate a visually scalable design space with an iterative workflow guiding the analysts by choosing the starting points and letting them slice and dice through the data to find interesting subspaces and detect correlations, clusters, and outliers. We present two usage scenarios for demonstrating how SeekAView can be applied in real-world data analysis scenarios.

Krause, Josua↗

Accelerating Subsurface Transport Simulation on Heterogeneous Clusters

Reactive transport numerical models simulate chemical and microbiological reactions that occur along a flowpath. These models have to compute reactions for a large number of locations. They solve the set of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) that describes the reaction for each location through the Newton-Raphson technique. This technique involves computing a Jacobian matrix and a residual vector for each set of equation, and then solving iteratively the linearized system by performing Gaussian Elimination and LU decomposition until convergence. STOMP, a well known subsurface flow simulation tool, employs matrices with sizes in the order of 100x100 elements and, for numerical accuracy, LU factorization with full pivoting instead of the faster partial pivoting. Modern high performance computing systems are heterogeneous machines whose nodes integrate both CPUs and GPUs, exposing unprecedented amounts of parallelism. To exploit all their computational power, applications must use both the types of processing elements. For the case of subsurface flow simulation, this mainly requires implementing efficient batched LU-based solvers and identifying efficient solutions for enabling load balancing among the different processors of the system. In this paper we discuss two approaches that allows scaling STOMP's performance on heterogeneous clusters. We initially identify the challenges in implementing batched LU-based solvers for small matrices on GPUs, and propose an implementation that fulfills STOMP's requirements. We compare this implementation to other existing solutions. Then, we combine the batched GPU solver with an OpenMP-based CPU solver, and present an adaptive load balancer that dynamically distributes the linear systems to solve between the two components inside a node. We show how these approaches, integrated into the full application, provide speed ups from 6 to 7 times on large problems, executed on up to 16 nodes of a cluster with two AMD Opteron 6272 and a Tesla M2090 per node.

GPU↗

THE ROCKSTAR PHASE-SPACE TEMPORAL HALO FINDER AND THE VELOCITY OFFSETS OF CLUSTER CORES

We present a new algorithm for identifying dark matter halos, substructure, and tidal features. The approach is based on adaptive hierarchical refinement of friends-of-friends groups in six phase-space dimensions and one time dimension, which allows for robust (grid-independent, shape-independent, and noise-resilient) tracking of substructure; as such, it is named ROCKSTAR (Robust Overdensity Calculation using K-Space Topologically Adaptive Refinement). Our method is massively parallel (up to 10{sup 5} CPUs) and runs on the largest current simulations (>10{sup 10} particles) with high efficiency (10 CPU hours and 60 gigabytes of memory required per billion particles analyzed). A previous paper has shown ROCKSTAR to have excellent recovery of halo properties; we expand on these comparisons with more tests and higher-resolution simulations. We show a significant improvement in substructure recovery compared to several other halo finders and discuss the theoretical and practical limits of simulations in this regard. Finally, we present results that demonstrate conclusively that dark matter halo cores are not at rest relative to the halo bulk or substructure average velocities and have coherent velocity offsets across a wide range of halo masses and redshifts. For massive clusters, these offsets can be up to 350 km s{sup -1} at z = 0 and even higher at high redshifts. Our implementation is publicly available at http://code.google.com/p/rockstar.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Proteomic analysis of hair shafts from monozygotic twins: Expression profiles and genetically variant peptides

Forensic association of hair shaft evidence with individuals is currently assessed by comparing mitochondrial DNA haplotypes of reference and casework samples, primarily for exclusionary purposes. Present work tests and validates more recent proteomic approaches to extract quantitative transcriptional and genetic information from hair samples of monozygotic twin pairs, which would be predicted to partition away from unrelated individuals if the datasets contain identifying information. Protein expression profiles and polymorphic, genetically variant hair peptides were generated from ten pairs of monozygotic twins. Profiling using the protein tryptic digests revealed that samples from identical twins had typically an order of magnitude fewer protein expression differences than unrelated individuals. The data did not indicate that the degree of difference within twin pairs increased with age. In parallel, data from the digests were used to detect genetically variant peptides that result from common nonsynonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms in genes expressed in the hair follicle. Compilation of the variants permitted sorting of the samples by hierarchical clustering, permitting accurate matching of twin pairs. The results demonstrate that genetic differences are detectable by proteomic methods and provide a framework for developing quantitative statistical estimates of personal identification that increase the value of hair shaft evidence.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Psi4: an open-source ab initio electronic structure program

The Psi4 program is a new approach to modern quantum chemistry, encompassing Hartree–Fock and density-functional theory to configuration interaction and coupled cluster. The program is written entirely in C++ and relies on a new infrastructure that has been designed to permit high-efficiency computations of both standard and emerging electronic structure methods on conventional and high-performance parallel computer architectures. Psi4 offers flexible user input built on the Python scripting language that enables both new and experienced users to make full use of the program's capabilities, and even to implement new functionality with moderate effort. To maximize its impact and usefulness, Psi4 is available through an open-source license to the entire scientific community. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Chemistry↗

NESSi : The N on- E quilibrium S ystems S imulation package

The nonequilibrium dynamics of correlated many-particle systems is of interest in connection with pump–probe experiments on molecular systems and solids, as well as theoretical investigations of transport properties and relaxation processes. Nonequilibrium Green’s functions are a powerful tool to study interaction effects in quantum many-particle systems out of equilibrium, and to extract physically relevant information for the interpretation of experiments. Here, we present the open-source software package NESSi (The Non-Equilibrium Systems Simulation package) which allows to perform many-body dynamics simulations based on Green’s functions on the L-shaped Kadanoff–Baym contour. NESSi contains the library libcntr which implements tools for basic operations on these nonequilibrium Green’s functions, for constructing Feynman diagrams, and for the solution of integral and integro-differential equations involving contour Green’s functions. The library employs a discretization of the Kadanoff–Baym contour into time points and a high-order implementation of integration routines. The total integrated error scales up to $\mathcal{O}(N^{-7})$, which is important since the numerical effort increases at least cubically with the simulation time. A distributed-memory parallelization over reciprocal space allows large-scale simulations of lattice systems. We provide a collection of example programs ranging from dynamics in simple two-level systems to problems relevant in contemporary condensed matter physics, including Hubbard clusters and Hubbard or Holstein lattice models. The libcntr library is the basis of a follow-up software package for nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory calculations based on strong-coupling perturbative impurity solvers.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

High-performance dynamic quantum clustering on graphics processors

Clustering methods in machine learning may benefit from borrowing metaphors from physics. Dynamic quantum clustering associates a Gaussian wave packet with the multidimensional data points and regards them as eigenfunctions of the Schroedinger equation. The clustering structure emerges by letting the system evolve and the visual nature of the algorithm has been shown to be useful in a range of applications. Furthermore, the method only uses matrix operations, which readily lend themselves to parallelization. In this paper, we develop an implementation on graphics hardware and investigate how this approach can accelerate the computations. We achieve a speedup of up to two magnitudes over a multicore CPU implementation, which proves that quantum-like methods and acceleration by graphics processing units have a great relevance to machine learning.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗