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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 73 records · Page 4

Thread Batching for High-performance Energy-efficient GPU Memory Design

Massive multi-threading in GPU imposes tremendous pressure on memory subsystems. Due to rapid growth in thread-level parallelism of GPU and slowly improved peak memory bandwidth, memory becomes a bottleneck of GPU’s performance and energy efficiency. In this article, we propose an integrated architectural scheme to optimize the memory accesses and therefore boost the performance and energy efficiency of GPU. First, we propose a thread batch enabled memory partitioning (TEMP) to improve GPU memory access parallelism. In particular, TEMP groups multiple thread blocks that share the same set of pages into a thread batch and applies a page coloring mechanism to bound each stream multiprocessor (SM) to the dedicated memory banks. After that, TEMP dispatches the thread batch to an SM to ensure high-parallel memory-access streaming from the different thread blocks. Second, a thread batch-aware scheduling (TBAS) scheme is introduced to improve the GPU memory access locality and to reduce the contention on memory controllers and interconnection networks. Experimental results show that the integration of TEMP and TBAS can achieve up to 10.3% performance improvement and 11.3% DRAM energy reduction across diverse GPU applications. We also evaluate the performance interference of the mixed CPU+GPU workloads when they are run on a heterogeneous system that employs our proposed schemes. Our results show that a simple solution can effectively ensure the efficient execution of both GPU and CPU applications.

Computer Science↗

Trace-Driven Memory Access Pattern Recognition in Computational Kernels. In: WOSC '14 Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Optimizing Stencil Computations

Classifying memory access patterns is paramount to the selection of the right set of optimizations and determination of the parallelization strategy. Static analyses suffer from ambiguities present in source code, which modern compilation techniques, such as profile-guided optimization, alleviate by observing runtime behavior and feeding back into the compilation flow. This paper discusses a dynamic analysis technique for recognizing memory access patterns, with application to the stencils domain, and presents our design and C++ implementation using the memory-tracing tool Gleipnir. Finally, we evaluate and discuss the performance and matching capability of our classifiers in the context of the Polybench scientific benchmark suite, which includes both stencil and matrix computations.

Park, Eunjung↗

MPQC: Performance Analysis and Optimization

MPQC (Massively Parallel Quantum Chemistry) is a widely used computational quantum chemistry code. It is capable of performing a number of computations commonly occurring in quantum chemistry. In order to achieve better performance of MPQC, in this report we present a detailed performance analysis of this code. We then perform loop and memory access optimizations, and measure performance improvements by comparing the performance of the optimized code with that of the original MPQC code. We observe that the optimized MPQC code achieves a significant improvement in the performance through a better utilization of vector processing and memory hierarchies.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

NEAMS Milestone Report: M2MS–20OR030102 FW–CADIS PWR Ex-Core Analysis with Shift Through VERA

This report presents the work completed for the NEAMS milestone M2MS–20OR030102 titled "FW–CADIS PWR Ex-Core Analysis with Shift through VERA." The work completed for this milestone includes the implementation, integration, and optimization of memory and performance improvement methods in Shift for fully coupled ex-core calculations through Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA). Fully coupled in this context means the transfer of moderator boron concentration, pin-wise fission source, depleted compositions, temperatures, and moderator densities from MPACT (with COBRA-TF (CTF)) to Shift. The ability to run ex-core calculations with VERA has been enabled and used for several years by Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) partners. However, this implementation was limited and potentially computationally burdensome. This work has enabled the ability to run higher-fidelity ex-core calculations on moderate computing clusters by focusing on multithreading, domain decomposition, and Forward-Weighted CADIS (FW-CADIS) variance reduction. Tests performed on small cores, a small modular reactor (SMR), and CASL progression problems show very promising memory reduction and computational performance. Recommendations for settings when running fully coupled high-fidelity ex-core calculations with VERA are documented. Without these optimization methods, many processors on a compute node would be left unused for the entire ex-core calculation. Therefore, these methods enable the user to better use the resources available and reduce computation time.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Image processing tools for petabyte-scale light sheet microscopy data

Light sheet microscopy is a powerful technique for high-speed three-dimensional imaging of subcellular dynamics and large biological specimens. However, it often generates datasets ranging from hundreds of gigabytes to petabytes in size for a single experiment. Conventional computational tools process such images far slower than the time to acquire them and often fail outright due to memory limitations. To address these challenges, we present PetaKit5D, a scalable software solution for efficient petabyte-scale light sheet image processing. This software incorporates a suite of commonly used processing tools that are optimized for memory and performance. Notable advancements include rapid image readers and writers, fast and memory-efficient geometric transformations, high-performance Richardson–Lucy deconvolution and scalable Zarr-based stitching. These features outperform state-of-the-art methods by over one order of magnitude, enabling the processing of petabyte-scale image data at the full teravoxel rates of modern imaging cameras. The software opens new avenues for biological discoveries through large-scale imaging experiments.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Shape memory alloy engine for high efficiency low-temperature gradient thermal to electrical conversion

More than half of the energy generated worldwide is lost as unused thermal energy because of the lack of efficient methodology for harnessing the low-grade heat. In this paper, we demonstrate that shape-memory alloy can be an effective mechanism for recovering low-grade heat. Shape memory alloys exhibit thermally induced martensite to austenite phase transformation and super-elasticity (stress-induced martensitic transformation). Employing these two characteristics, we demonstrate a thermal engine for harnessing waste energy through all modes of heat transfer: convection, conduction, and radiation. In this work, we performed material and heat transfer analysis for achieving high frequency, sustainable and efficient operation of our engine. An optimized shape memory alloy engine generated 36 W per kilogram or 234 kW of electricity per cubic meter of active material. A continuous three-day operation of several SMA engines could generate 7.2 kWh of electricity when installed on a 500 m long hot pipe network. This generated power can potentially reduce the carbon footprint by 5.1 kg of CO 2 illustrating the promise of this technology for addressing climate change.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Efficient Aho-Corasick String Matching on Emerging Multicore Architectures

String matching algorithms are critical to several scientific fields. Beside text processing and databases, emerging applications such as DNA protein sequence analysis, data mining, information security software, antivirus, ma- chine learning, all exploit string matching algorithms [3]. All these applica- tions usually process large quantity of textual data, require high performance and/or predictable execution times. Among all the string matching algorithms, one of the most studied, especially for text processing and security applica- tions, is the Aho-Corasick algorithm. 1 2 Book title goes here Aho-Corasick is an exact, multi-pattern string matching algorithm which performs the search in a time linearly proportional to the length of the input text independently from pattern set size. However, depending on the imple- mentation, when the number of patterns increase, the memory occupation may raise drastically. In turn, this can lead to significant variability in the performance, due to the memory access times and the caching effects. This is a significant concern for many mission critical applications and modern high performance architectures. For example, security applications such as Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS), must be able to scan network traffic against very large dictionaries in real time. Modern Ethernet links reach up to 10 Gbps, and malicious threats are already well over 1 million, and expo- nentially growing [28]. When performing the search, a NIDS should not slow down the network, or let network packets pass unchecked. Nevertheless, on the current state-of-the-art cache based processors, there may be a large per- formance variability when dealing with big dictionaries and inputs that have different frequencies of matching patterns. In particular, when few patterns are matched and they are all in the cache, the procedure is fast. Instead, when they are not in the cache, often because many patterns are matched and the caches are continuously thrashed, they should be retrieved from the system memory and the procedure is slowed down by the increased latency. Efficient implementations of string matching algorithms have been the fo- cus of several works, targeting Field Programmable Gate Arrays [4, 25, 15, 5], highly multi-threaded solutions like the Cray XMT [34], multicore proces- sors [19] or heterogeneous processors like the Cell Broadband Engine [35, 22]. Recently, several researchers have also started to investigate the use Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) for string matching algorithms in security applica- tions [20, 10, 32, 33]. Most of these approaches mainly focus on reaching high peak performance, or try to optimize the memory occupation, rather than looking at performance stability. However, hardware solutions supports only small dictionary sizes due to lack of memory and are difficult to customize, while platforms such as the Cell/B.E. are very complex to program.

Tumeo, Antonino↗

Comparative Analysis of ANN and LSTM Prediction Accuracy and Cooling Energy Savings through AHU-DAT Control in an Office Building

This paper proposes the optimal algorithm for controlling the HVAC system in the target building. Previous studies have analyzed pre-selected algorithms without considering the unique data characteristics of the target building, such as location, climate conditions, and HVAC system type. To address this, we compare the accuracy of cooling load prediction using ANN and LSTM algorithms, widely used in building energy research, to determine the optimal algorithm for HVAC control in the target building. We develop a simulation model calibrated with actual data to ensure data reliability and compare the energy consumption of the existing HVAC control method and the two algorithms-based methods. Results show that the ANN algorithm, with a CV(RMSE) of 12.7%, has a higher prediction accuracy than the LSTM algorithm, CV(RMSE) of 17.3%, making it a more suitable algorithm for HVAC control. Furthermore, implementing the ANN-based approach results in a 3.2% cooling energy reduction from the optimal control of Air Handling Unit (AHU) Discharge Air Temperature (DAT) compared to the fixed DAT at 12.8 °C in a representative day. This study demonstrates that ML-based HVAC system control can effectively reduce cooling energy consumption in HVAC systems, providing an effective strategy for energy conservation and improved HVAC system efficiency.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

A GPU accelerated mixed-precision Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics framework with cell-based relative coordinates

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is essential for modeling complex large-deformation problems across various applications, requiring significant computational power. A major portion of SPH computation time is dedicated to the Nearest Neighboring Particle Search (NNPS) process. While advanced NNPS algorithms have been developed to enhance SPH efficiency, the potential efficiency gains from modern computation hardware remain underexplored. Here, this study investigates the impact of GPU parallel architecture, low-precision computing on GPUs, and GPU memory management on NNPS efficiency. Our approach employs a GPU-accelerated mixed-precision SPH framework, utilizing low precision float-point 16 (FP16) for NNPS while maintaining high precision for other components. To ensure FP16 accuracy in NNPS, we introduce a Relative Coordinated-based Link List (RCLL) algorithm, storing FP16 relative coordinates of particles within background cells. Our testing results show three significant speedup rounds for CPU-based NNPS algorithms. The first comes from parallel GPU computations, with up to a 1000x efficiency gain. The second is achieved through low-precision GPU computing, where the proposed FP16-based RCLL algorithm offers a 1.5x efficiency improvement over the FP64-based approach on GPUs. By optimizing GPU memory bandwidth utilization, the efficiency of the FP16 RCLL algorithm can be further boosted by 2.7x, as demonstrated in an example with 1 million particles. Our code is released at https://github.com/pnnl/lpNNPS4SPH.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

HAM: Hotspot-Aware Manager for Improving Communications with 3D-Stacked Memory

merging High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads, such as graph analytics, machine learning, and big data science, are data-intensive. Data-intensive workloads usually present fine-grained memory accesses with limited or no data locality, and thus incur frequent cache misses and low utilization of memory bandwidth. 3D-stacked memory devices such as Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) can provide significantly higher bandwidth than conventional memory modules. However, the traditional interfaces and optimization methods for JEDEC DDR devices do not allow to fully exploit the potential performance of 3D-stacked memory with the massive amount of irregular memory accesses of data-intensive applications. In this paper, we propose a novel Hotspot-Aware Manager (HAM) infrastructure for 3D-stacked memory devices capable of optimizing memory access streams via request aggregation, hotspot detection, and in-memory prefetching. %and an associated hotspot-aware page policy. We present the HAM design and implementation, and simulate it on a system using RISC-V embedded cores with attached HMC devices. We extensively evaluate HAM with over 12 benchmarks and applications representing diverse irregular memory access patterns. The results show that, on average, HAM reduces redundant requests by 37.51\% and increases the prefetch buffer hit rate by 4.2 times, compared to a baseline streaming prefetcher. On the selected benchmark set, HAM provides performance gains of 21.81\% in average (up to 34.28\%) and power savings of 35.07\% over a standard 3D-stacked memory.

Wang, Xi↗

Automated Hybrid Variance Reduction on Advanced Architectures in the Shift Monte Carlo Code

Monte Carlo transport methods are the most accurate schemes for solving problems with complex energy and spatial features, but they come with a high computational cost. Although hybrid methods have enabled the use of Monte Carlo transport for a large class of problems, they still require significant computing resources. Modern multicore CPUs with large numbers of compute cores and graphical processing units (GPUs) provide opportunities to optimize the memory and run-time costs of hybrid Monte Carlo methods. This paper documents the development and analysis of three Monte Carlo transport algorithms that support hybrid transport using the consistent adjoint-driven importance sampling (CADIS) and forward-weighted CADIS methods in the Shift Monte Carlo code: history-based transport using static and dynamic threading on multicore CPUs and event-based transport enabling weight window tracking on GPUs. The results are shown for two challenging hybrid problems on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. The results show that all three methods yield good performance and enable solutions of difficult fixed-source transport problems in less than 2 min on 20 nodes of Frontier. Dynamic threading was observed to give up to 20% better scaling behavior than static threading. Moreover, the AMD Instinct 250X GPU was found to give 9 to 11 times greater throughput per graphics compute die than the best CPU performance. In conclusion, additional opportunities for optimization of hybrid transport on GPUs are discussed.

Denovo↗

Machine Learning-Enabled Image Classification for Automated Electron Microscopy

Abstract Traditionally, materials discovery has been driven more by evidence and intuition than by systematic design. However, the advent of “big data” and an exponential increase in computational power have reshaped the landscape. Today, we use simulations, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to predict materials characteristics, which dramatically accelerates the discovery of novel materials. For instance, combinatorial megalibraries, where millions of distinct nanoparticles are created on a single chip, have spurred the need for automated characterization tools. This paper presents an ML model specifically developed to perform real-time binary classification of grayscale high-angle annular dark-field images of nanoparticles sourced from these megalibraries. Given the high costs associated with downstream processing errors, a primary requirement for our model was to minimize false positives while maintaining efficacy on unseen images. We elaborate on the computational challenges and our solutions, including managing memory constraints, optimizing training time, and utilizing Neural Architecture Search tools. The final model outperformed our expectations, achieving over 95% precision and a weighted F-score of more than 90% on our test data set. This paper discusses the development, challenges, and successful outcomes of this significant advancement in the application of AI and ML to materials discovery.

Materials Science↗

An efficient MPI/OpenMP parallelization of the Hartree–Fock–Roothaan method for the first generation of Intel® Xeon Phi™ processor architecture

The Hartree-Fock (HF) method in the quantum chemistry package GAMESS represents one of the most irregular algorithms in computation today. Major steps in the calculation are the irregular computation of electron repulsion integrals (ERIs) and the building of the Fock matrix. These are the central components of the main Self Consistent Field (SCF) loop, the key hotspot in Electronic Structure (ES) codes. By threading the MPI ranks in the official release of the GAMESS code, we not only speed up the main SCF loop (4x to 6x for large systems), but also achieve a significant (>2x) reduction in the overall memory footprint. These improvements are a direct consequence of memory access optimizations within the MPI ranks. We benchmark our implementation against the official release of the GAMESS code on the Intel R Xeon PhiTM supercomputer. Here, scaling numbers are reported on up to 7,680 cores on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A physics informed bayesian optimization approach for material design: application to NiTi shape memory alloys

Abstract The design of materials and identification of optimal processing parameters constitute a complex and challenging task, necessitating efficient utilization of available data. Bayesian Optimization (BO) has gained popularity in materials design due to its ability to work with minimal data. However, many BO-based frameworks predominantly rely on statistical information, in the form of input-output data, and assume black-box objective functions. In practice, designers often possess knowledge of the underlying physical laws governing a material system, rendering the objective function not entirely black-box, as some information is partially observable. In this study, we propose a physics-informed BO approach that integrates physics-infused kernels to effectively leverage both statistical and physical information in the decision-making process. We demonstrate that this method significantly improves decision-making efficiency and enables more data-efficient BO. The applicability of this approach is showcased through the design of NiTi shape memory alloys, where the optimal processing parameters are identified to maximize the transformation temperature.

Chemistry↗

Optimal control of large quantum systems: assessing memory and runtime performance of GRAPE

Abstract Gradient Ascent Pulse Engineering (GRAPE) is a popular technique in quantum optimal control, and can be combined with automatic differentiation (AD) to facilitate on-the-fly evaluation of cost-function gradients. We illustrate that the convenience of AD comes at a significant memory cost due to the cumulative storage of a large number of states and propagators. For quantum systems of increasing Hilbert space size, this imposes a significant bottleneck. We revisit the strategy of hard-coding gradients in a scheme that fully avoids propagator storage and significantly reduces memory requirements. Separately, we present improvements to numerical state propagation to enhance runtime performance. We benchmark runtime and memory usage and compare this approach to AD-based implementations, with a focus on pushing towards larger Hilbert space sizes. The results confirm that the AD-free approach facilitates the application of optimal control for large quantum systems which would otherwise be difficult to tackle.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Fast Mesh-to-Mesh Remaps Using Hash Algorithms

Here, we explore the potential uses of hash-based algorithms in the remap operation, mapping one computational mesh onto another. We implement and test optimizations designed to reduce memory operations and compare these optimizations in order to evaluate the performance impact across different meshes. In particular, we created a new remap method that creates a structured hierarchy of hashes. Tests were run on 2D meshes on up to 14 levels of mesh refinement and hundreds of millions of cells to measure the algorithms' relative speeds under differing circumstances. We show that our methods perform two orders of magnitude better than the standard kD-tree algorithm and that on different meshes different hash methods can be optimal. We explore these algorithms on serial CPUs, GPUs using OpenCL, and multi-core CPUs using OpenMP.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Complementary first and second derivative methods for ansatz optimization in variational Monte Carlo

We present a comparison between a number of recently introduced low-memory wave function optimization methods for variational Monte Carlo in which we find that first and second derivative methods possess strongly complementary relative advantages. While we find that low-memory variants of the linear method are vastly more efficient at bringing wave functions with disparate types of nonlinear parameters to the vicinity of the energy minimum, accelerated descent approaches are then able to locate the precise minimum with less bias and lower statistical uncertainty. By constructing a simple hybrid approach that combines these methodologies, we show that all of these advantages can be had at once when simultaneously optimizing large determinant expansions, molecular orbital shapes, traditional Jastrow correlation factors, and more nonlinear many-electron Jastrow factors.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗