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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

Stochastic Gradient-Based Distributed Bayesian Estimation in Cooperative Sensor Networks

Distributed Bayesian inference provides a full quantification of uncertainty offering numerous advantages over point estimates that autonomous sensor networks are able to exploit. However, fully-decentralized Bayesian inference often requires large communication overheads and low network latency, resources that are not typically available in practical applications. In this paper, we propose a decentralized Bayesian inference approach based on stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics, which produces full posterior distributions at each of the nodes with significantly lower communication overhead. We provide analytical results on convergence of the proposed distributed algorithm to the centralized posterior, under typical network constraints. Finally, we also provide extensive simulation results to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach.

42 ENGINEERING↗

A Survey of Distributed Optimization and Control Algorithms for Electric Power Systems

Historically, centrally computed algorithms have been the primary means of power system optimization and control. With increasing penetrations of distributed energy resources requiring optimization and control of power systems with many controllable devices, distributed algorithms have been the subject of significant research interest. Here, this paper surveys the literature of distributed algorithms with applications to optimization and control of power systems. In particular, this paper reviews distributed algorithms for offline solution of optimal power flow (OPF) problems as well as online algorithms for real-time solution of OPF, optimal frequency control, optimal voltage control, and optimal wide-area control problems.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Fast and Scalable Implementations of Influence Maximization Algorithms

The Influence Maximization problem has been extensively studied in the past decade because of its practical applications in finding the key influencers in social networks. Due to the hardness of the underlying problem, existing algorithms have tried to trade off practical efficiency with approximation guarantees. However, even such approximate solutions take several hours of compute time on modest sized real world inputs. On the other hand, there is a lack of effective parallel and distributed algorithms to solve this problem. In this paper, we present efficient parallel algorithms for multithreaded and distributed systems to solve the influence maximization with approximation guarantee. Our algorithms extend state-of-the-art sequential approach based on computing reverse reachability sets. We present a detailed experimental evaluation, and analyze their performance and their sensitivity to input parameters, using real world inputs. Our experimental results demonstrate significant speedup on parallel architectures. We further show a speedup of up to 586X relative to the state-of-the-art sequential baseline using 1024 nodes of a supercomputer at far greater accuracy and twice the seed set size. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in parallelizing the influence maximization operation at scale.

Minutoli, Marco↗

Distributed Detection of Malicious Attacks on Consensus Algorithms with Applications in Power Networks

Consensus-based distributed algorithms are well suited for coordination among agents in a cyber-physical system. These distributed schemes, however, suffer from their vulnerability to cyber attacks that are aimed at manipulating data and control ow. In this article, we present a novel distributed method for detecting the presence of such intrusions for a distributed multi-agent system following ratio consensus. We employ a Max-Min protocol to develop low cost, easy to implement detection strategies where each participating node detects the intrusion independently, eliminating the need for a trusted certifying agent in the network. The effectiveness of the detection method is demonstrated by numerical simulations on a 1000 node network to demonstrate the efficacy and simplicity of implementation.

27 ARPA - Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy↗

Building Large-Scale U.S. Synthetic Electric Distribution System Models

Rapid increases in distributed energy resources on distribution systems are prompting research efforts to improve and evaluate electric power distribution algorithms; however, there is a shortage of realistic, large-scale, U.S.-style test systems for the evaluation of such advanced algorithms. Some available tools to build large-scale test systems are of European style, and their application to studies focused on the United States might not be desirable given very different characteristics between the European and U.S. distribution designs. Motivated by this need, this paper develops detailed algorithms to build large-scale U.S. distribution systems and incorporates them in a new Reference Network Model, RNM-US. The approach starts with information from street maps and a catalog with electric equipment that includes power lines, transformers, voltage regulators, capacitors, and switching devices. The paper presents the algorithms through an illustrative case study of the different steps that comprise the process of building a synthetic distribution grid. Finally, the paper presents a medium- and a large-scale data set covering 10 million electrical nodes and 120,000 km of power lines, demonstrating the applicability of the proposed method to build very large-scale synthetic distribution systems.

27 ARPA - Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy↗

Distributed Energy Management for Networked Microgrids Using Online ADMM With Regret

We propose a distributed algorithm for online energy management in networked microgrids with a high penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs). A high penetration of DERs introduces high uncertainty of power generation to the microgrids. In general, the state-of-the-art forecasting for non-dispatchable DERs such as solar energy is not sufficiently accurate, which results in inaccurate energy scheduling. To address the high uncertainty issue in the networked microgrids, we propose an online energy management based on the online alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm with the past power generation information from the DERs. The online algorithm provides less conservative schedule than the robust optimization-based approach. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by various numerical examples.

alternating direction method of multipliers↗

Impacts of Distributed Speed Harmonization and Optimal Maneuver Planning on Multi-Lane Roads

A commonly proposed method for improving traffic flow on freeways is speed harmonization. The effectiveness of current speed harmonization approaches, such as variable speed limits, is extremely reliant on human driver compliance. Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) are expected to come to market within this decade, offering the opportunity to eliminate or reduce the reliance on human compliance. However, extending current roadside infrastructure-based approaches of assigning centrally computed harmonization speeds to individual vehicles is, costly. An alternative approach is to have individual vehicles estimate the traffic state on-board and make distributed decisions to achieve the harmonization goal autonomously. In this work, we present a distributed algorithm for estimating the current average speed of traffic. We couple this with a distributed 2D maneuver planning approach. Then, we study the impact on traffic efficiency in terms of energy consumption and travel time at varying CAV penetration rates.

Goulet, Nathan↗

Distributed Augmentation, Hypersweeps, and Branch Decomposition of Contour Trees for Scientific Exploration

Contour trees describe the topology of level sets in scalar fields and are widely used in topological data analysis and visualization. A main challenge of utilizing contour trees for large-scale scientific data is their computation at scale using highperformance computing. To address this challenge, recent work has introduced distributed hierarchical contour trees for distributed computation and storage of contour trees. However, effective use of these distributed structures in analysis and visualization requires subsequent computation of geometric properties and branch decomposition to support contour extraction and exploration. In this work, we introduce distributed algorithms for augmentation, hypersweeps, and branch decomposition that enable parallel computation of geometric properties, and support the use of distributed contour trees as query structures for scientific exploration. Finally, we evaluate the parallel performance of these algorithms and apply them to identify and extract important contours for scientific visualization.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Distributed Optimal Dispatch of Distributed Energy Resources Over Lossy Communication Networks

In this paper, we consider the economic dispatch problem (EDP), where a cost function that is assumed to be strictly convex is assigned to each of distributed energy resources (DERs), over packet dropping networks. The goal of a standard EDP is to minimize the total generation cost while meeting total demand and satisfying individual generator output limit. We propose a distributed algorithm for solving the EDP over networks. The proposed algorithm is resilient against packet drops over communication links. Under the assumption that the underlying communication network is strongly connected with a positive probability and the packet drops are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), we show that the proposed algorithm is able to solve the EDP. Numerical simulation results are used to validate and illustrate the main results of the paper.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Arrangements for communicating data in a computing system using multiple processors

Systems and methods for reducing data movement in a computer system. The systems and methods use information or knowledge about the structure of an algorithm, operations to be executed at a receiving processing unit, variables or subsets or groups of variables in a distributed algorithm, or other forms of contextual information, for reducing the number of bits transmitted from at least one transmitting processing unit to at least one receiving processing unit or storage device.

Gonzalez, Juan Guillermo↗

Arrangements for communicating and processing data in a computing system

Systems and methods for reducing data movement in a computer system. The systems and methods use information or knowledge about the structure of an algorithm, operations to be executed at a receiving processing unit, variables or subsets or groups of variables in a distributed algorithm, or other forms of contextual information, for reducing the number of bits transmitted from at least one transmitting processing unit to at least one receiving processing unit or storage device.

Gonzalez, Juan Guillermo↗

Fast neural network training on a cluster of GPUs for action recognition with high accuracy

In this work, we propose algorithms and techniques to accelerate training of deep neural networks for action recognition on a cluster of GPUs. The convergence analysis of our algorithm shows it is possible to reduce communication cost and at the same time minimize the number of iterations needed for convergence. We customize the Adam optimizer for our distributed algorithm to improve efficiency. In addition, we employ transfer-learning to further reduce training time while improving validation accuracy. For the UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets, the validation accuracies achieved are 93.1% and 67.9% respectively. With an additional end-to-end trained temporal stream, the validation accuracies achieved for UCF101 and HMDB51 are 93.47% and 81.24% respectively. As far as we know, these are the highest accuracies achieved with the two-stream approach using ResNet that does not involve computationally expensive 3D convolutions or pretraining on much larger datasets.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Residential Demand Side Aggregation of Privacy-Conscious Consumers

The increasing adoption of smart meters has led to growing concerns regarding privacy risks stemming from the high resolution measurements. This has given rise to privacy protection techniques that physically alter the consumer's energy load profile, masking private information by using localised devices, e.g. batteries or flexible loads. Meanwhile, there has also been increasing interest in aggregating the distributed energy resources (DERs) of residential consumers to provide services to the grid. In this paper, we propose an online distributed algorithm to aggregate the DERs of privacy-conscious consumers to provide services to the grid, whilst preserving their privacy. Results show that the optimisation solution from the distributed method converges to one close to the optimum computed using an ideal centralised solution method, balancing between grid service provision, consumer preferences and privacy protection. More importantly, the distributed method preserves consumer privacy, and does not require high-bandwidth two-way communications infrastructure.

ancillary services↗

Novel Geometric Operations for Linear Programming

This report summarizes the work performed under the project "Linear Programming in Strongly Polynomial Time." Linear programming (LP) is a classic combinatorial optimization problem heavily used directly and as an enabling subroutine in integer programming (IP). Specifically IP is the same as LP except that some solution variables must take integer values (e.g. to represent yes/no decisions). Together LP and IP have many applications in resource allocation including general logistics, and infrastructure design and vulnerability analysis. The project was motivated by the PI's recent success developing methods to efficiently sample Voronoi vertices (essentially finding nearest neighbors in high-dimensional point sets) in arbitrary dimension. His method seems applicable to exploring the high-dimensional convex feasible space of an LP problem. Although the project did not provably find a strongly-polynomial algorithm, it explored multiple algorithm classes. The new medial simplex algorithms may still lead to solvers with improved provable complexity. We describe medial simplex algorithms and some relevant structural/complexity results. We also designed a novel parallel LP algorithm based on our geometric insights and implemented it in the Spoke-LP code. A major part of the computational step is many independent vector dot products. Our parallel algorithm distributes the problem constraints across processors. Current commercial and high-quality free LP solvers require all problem details to fit onto a single processor or multicore. Our new algorithm might enable the solution of problems too large for any current LP solvers. We describe our new algorithm, give preliminary proof-of-concept experiments, and describe a new generator for arbitrarily large LP instances.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Streaming Matching and Edge Cover in Practice

Graph algorithms with polynomial space and time requirements often become infeasible for massive graphs with billions of edges or more. State-of-the-art approaches therefore employ approximate serial, parallel, and distributed algorithms to tackle these challenges. However, such approaches require storing the entire graph in memory and thus need access to costly computing resources such as clusters and supercomputers. In this paper, we present practical streaming approaches for solving massive graph problems using limited memory for two prototypical graph problems: maximum weighted matching and minimum weighted edge cover. For matching, we conduct a thorough computational study on two of the semi-streaming algorithms including a recent breakthrough result that achieves a $1/(2+\varepsilon)$-approximation of the weight while using $O( n \log W /\epsilon)$ memory (here $n$ is the number of vertices and $W$ is the maximum edge weight), designed by Paz and Schwartzman [SODA, 2017]. Empirically, we show that the semi-streaming algorithms produce matchings whose weight is close to the best $1/2$-approximate offline algorithm while requiring less time and an order-of-magnitude less memory. For minimum weighted edge cover, we develop three novel semi-streaming algorithms. Two of these algorithms require a single pass through the input graph, require $O(n \log n)$ memory, and provide a 2-approximation guarantee on the objective. We also leverage a relationship between approximate maximum weighted matching and approximate minimum weighted edge cover to develop a two-pass $3/2+\epsilon$-approximate algorithm with the memory requirement of Paz and Schwartzman's semi-streaming matching algorithm. These streaming approaches are compared against the state-of-the-art 3/2-approximate offline algorithm. The semi-streaming matching and the novel edge cover algorithms proposed in this paper can process graphs with several billions of edges in under 30 minutes using 6 GB of memory, which is at least an order of magnitude improvement from the offline (non-streaming) algorithms. For the largest graph, the best alternative offline parallel approximation algorithm (GPA+ROMA) could not finish in three hours even while employing hundreds of processors and 1 TB of memory. We also demonstrate an application of the semi-streaming algorithm by computing a matching using linearly bounded memory on item intersection graphs derived from three machine learning datasets, whereas the existing offline algorithms could not complete on one of these datasets since their memory requirements exceeded 1TB.

Ferdous, S M.↗

Enabling DER Participation in Frequency Regulation Markets

Distributed energy resources (DERs) are playing an increasing role in ancillary services for the bulk grid, particularly in frequency regulation. In this article, we propose a framework for collections of DERs, combined to form microgrids and controlled by aggregators, to participate in frequency regulation markets. Our approach covers both the identification of bids for the market clearing stage and the mechanisms for the real-time allocation of the regulation signal. The proposed framework is hierarchical, consisting of a top layer and a bottom layer. The top layer consists of the aggregators communicating in a distributed fashion to optimally disaggregate the regulation signal requested by the system operator. The bottom layer consists of the DERs inside each microgrid whose power levels are adjusted so that the tie line power matches the output of the corresponding aggregator in the top layer. The coordination at the top layer requires the knowledge of cost functions, ramp rates, and capacity bounds of the aggregators. We develop meaningful abstractions for these quantities respecting the power flow constraints and taking into account the load uncertainties and propose a provably correct distributed algorithm for optimal disaggregation of regulation signals among the microgrids.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Cabana

Physics simulations that use particles in their algorithms are ubiquitous on modern high performance computers. Cabana is a C++ library for developing particle-based simulations on heterogeneous high performance computing platforms. Cabana provides general data structures and algorithms for common particle operations in a way that is both performant and portable on HPC systems. This includes particle data structure allocatable and configurable on GPU and CPU architectures, and threaded and distributed algorithms for sorting particles, halo exchanges, neighbor list generation, and other basic particle operations.

Slattery, StuartR↗