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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 865 records · Page 48

Physics-Informed Machine Learning-Aided System Space Discretization

Decision-making is the process of identifying and choosing alternatives based on an agreed-upon set of metrics and preferences established by the decision-maker. There are options to be considered during the decision-making process and each option offers a different trajectory and associated success profile in moving from a given system state to the desired system state. The decision-making process typically involves uncertainties associated with the current component and system states. In this sense, probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) can be an analytical method and tool for accomplishing the probabilistic aspect of the decision-making process. Dynamic PRA is an evolution of conventional PRA methodology in which driving forces on modeled plant elements and the element behaviors are explicitly modeled over time. In the recent past, risk assessment methodologies have evolved to address risk issues in a continuously evolving environment and a novel probabilistic dynamics framework in continuous time and state-space discretization forms has been proposed. While state-space discretization has shown its strength in both consequence and causal reasoning modes, several challenges, including the computational requirement and physically meaningful system state identification, exist. Conventional system space discretization has usually been done by either the equal width discretization method or a data-driven method. Those methods naturally possess challenges coming from the physical understanding of discretized system space (i.e., system state) and the trajectory moving from a given system state to another system state. The purpose of this paper is to present a physics-based and data-driven system state discretization method such that one can justify what the discretized system space implies and understand the state trajectory from the viewpoint of operational actions.

Kim, Junyung↗

Transforming Energy Through Computational Excellence: High-Performance Computing for Energy Innovation

The challenges associated with energy efficiency of manufacturing and advanced materials often cannot be addressed through experimentation alone, whether because of scale, complexity, or practicality. High-performance computing (HPC) enables fast tackling of these challenges in the manufacturing sector - vital to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and industry partners leverage HPC to apply advanced modeling, simulation, and data analysis to improve manufacturing efficiency, explore new materials for energy applications, and develop technologies to manage carbon across the life cycle. From improving additive manufacturing processes to increasing the energy efficiency of jet-engine components, advanced computing can help manage emissions produced by manufacturing in a wide variety of ways.

advanced materials↗

An automatic performance model-based scheduling tool for coupled climate system models

The prediction of the climate system is highly depended on the efficient integration of observations and simulations of the Earth. This is regarded as a canonical example of the cyber-physical system. The climate system model, the simulation engine in this cyber-physical system, is one of most challenging applications in scientific computing. It utilizes the multi-physics simulation that couples multiple components, conducts decadal to millennium simulations, and has long been an important application on supercomputers. However, current climate system models suffer from the inefficient task scheduling methods resulting in an intolerable simulation time. Take the Community Earth System Model (CESM), the most widely used climate system model, as an example, one major reason that CESM suffers from bad performances is the huge overhead to rationally distribute processes among the coupled heterogeneous components. According to the report of NCAR, every percent improvement in CESM performance frees up to the equivalent of $250,000 in computing resources in their scientific experiments. To address such challenge, our paper firstly constructs a lightweight and accurate performance model for effectively capturing and predicting the heterogeneous time-to-solution performance of end-to-end CESM components with a given simulation configuration. Then, based on the performance model, we further propose an efficient scheduling strategy based on rectangular packing method to determine the best process layout among different components, and the process numbers assigned to each component. Our evaluations show that we can achieve 58% average run time reductions on CESM comparing to the widely used sequential process layout for a scale of 144 to 480 cores on typical CPU clusters. And we can save 4 million CPU hours when we conduct one standard scientific experiment (a 2870-year simulation), which equals to save $40,089 with a charge of $0.01 per CPU hour. Meanwhile, 26% extra performance improvements could also be gained in our methods comparing to the heuristic branch and bound algorithm with the guidance of the known curve-fitting performance model.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Nonvolatile Electrochemical Random‐Access Memory under Short Circuit

Abstract Electrochemical random‐access memory (ECRAM) is a recently developed and highly promising analog resistive memory element for in‐memory computing. One longstanding challenge of ECRAM is attaining retention time beyond a few hours. This short retention has precluded ECRAM from being considered for inference classification in deep neural networks, which is likely the largest opportunity for in‐memory computing. In this work, an ECRAM cell with orders of magnitude longer retention than previously achieved is developed, and which is anticipated to exceed ten years at 85 °C. This study hypothesizes that the origin of this exceptional retention is phase separation, which enables the formation of multiple effectively equilibrium resistance states. This work highlights the promises and opportunities to use phase separation to yield ECRAM cells with exceptionally long, and potentially permanent, retention times.

Kim, Diana S.↗

A Two-Stage Approach for PV Inverter Engagement in Power Factor Correction and Voltage Regulation

The rapid integration of distributed energy resources, like solar photovoltaics (PVs), can lead to overvolt-age challenges due to reverse power flow and a noticeable decrease in power factor at the substation interface. While existing literature extensively explores utilizing smart inverter capabilities for reactive power flexibility using a volt-var curve (VVC), obtaining time-varying operating points of such curves in real-time is challenging due to computational demands and communication requirements. Similarly, employing optimization-based approaches for reactive power control and active voltage regulation in large-scale distribution feeders is difficult due to the complexity of the problem and the challenges in effectively engaging customer-owned resources. This paper proposes a two-stage strategy to harness smart inverters for reactive power support. The first stage formulates short-term planning by optimally designing VVCs (on a daily or hourly basis) for large-scale solar PVs based on projected system needs and communicating optimal curves to smart inverters in advance. Subsequently, the second stage employs a transactive-based method to involve customer-owned PVs for reactive power support, effectively enhancing overall system performance and addressing real-time demands. In conclusion, the efficacy of this approach will be demonstrated using real-world distribution circuits provided by Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO) and Vermont Electric Cooperative (VEC).

Poudel, Shiva [Pacific Northwest National Laborato↗

Federated Learning for Efficient Condition Monitoring and Anomaly Detection in Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

Detecting and localizing anomalies in cyber-physical systems (CPS) has become increasingly challenging as systems grow in complexity, particularly due to varying sensor reliability and node failures in distributed environments. While federated learning (FL) offers a foundation for distributed model training, existing approaches lack mechanisms to handle these CPS-specific challenges. This paper presents an enhanced FL framework that introduces three key innovations: adaptive model aggregation based on sensor reliability, dynamic node selection for resource optimization, and Weibull-based checkpointing for fault tolerance. Our framework enables reliable condition monitoring while addressing the computational and reliability challenges of industrial CPS deployments. Experiments on NASA Bearing and Hydraulic System Datasets demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art FL methods, achieving 99.5% AUC-ROC in anomaly detection and maintaining accuracy under node failures. Statistical validation using Mann-Whitney (U) test confirms significant improvements (p < 0.05) in both detection accuracy and computational efficiency across diverse operational scenarios.1

Marfo, William [University of Texas at El Paso,Dep↗

An Integrated Approach to Scaling Task-Based Runtime Systems for Next Generation Engineering problems

The need to scale next-generation industrial engineering problems to the largest computational platforms presents unique challenges. Such problems may have complex coupled multi-physics models, as well as computationally and communication intensive algorithms not often seen in standard academic problems, while also needing high-demand I/O for analysis purposes. In such cases even codes with good existing scaling properties may need significant changes, addressed in a cross-cutting way to solve such problems at extreme scales. These challenges relate to system components that were not previously problematic on less complex problems and/or at smaller computational scales. This paper illustrates these challenges for Uintah, a highly scalable asynchronous many-task runtime system being applied to the modeling of a 1000 MWe ultra-supercritical coal boiler. In order to model this formidable, production engineering problem, not only was an integrated approach needed that built upon existing scalable components in areas such as complex stencil calculations and linear algebra, but the significant challenges of high demand I/O, complex task graphs, and infrastructure inefficiencies also had to be addressed. This integrated approach allowed this problem to run on 256K CPU cores on Mira, with good weak scaling to 512K CPU cores and similar strong scaling, except for radiation. The need for strong scaling of a new ray tracing-based radiation model required substantial Uintah infrastructure improvements before 119K CPU cores and 7.5K GPUs on Titan could be used, with scaling out to 256K CPU cores and 16K GPUs. The resulting code demonstrates not only excellent overall scalability but a significant improvement in overall performance for the full-scale, production boiler problem.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Adding Data Management Services to Parallel File Systems

The objective of this project, called DAMASC for “Data Management in Scientific Computing”, is to coalesce data management with parallel file system management to present a declarative interface to scientists for managing, querying, and analyzing extremely large data sets efficiently and predictably. Managing extremely large data sets is a key challenge of exascale computing. The overhead, energy, and cost of moving massive volumes of data demand designs where computation is close to storage. In current architectures, compute/analysis clusters access data in a physically separate parallel file system and largely leave it scientist to reduce data movement. Over the past decades the high-end computing community has adopted middleware with multiple layers of abstractions and specialized file formats such as NetCDF-4 and HDF5. These abstractions provide a limited set of high-level data processing functions, but have inherent functionality and performance limitations: middleware that provides access to the highly structured contents of scientific data files stored in the (unstructured) file systems can only optimize to the extent that file system interfaces permit; the highly structured formats of these files often impedes native file system performance optimizations. We are developing Damasc, an enhanced high-performance file system with native rich data management services. Damasc will enable efficient queries and updates over files stored in their native byte-stream format while retaining the inherent performance of file system data storage via declarative queries and updates over views of underlying files. Damasc has four key benefits for the development of data-intensive scientific code: (1) applications can use important data-management services, such as declarative queries, views, and provenance tracking, that are currently available only within database systems; (2) the use of these services becomes easier, as they are provided within a familiar file-based ecosystem; (3) common optimizations, e.g., indexing and caching, are readily supported across several file formats, avoiding effort duplication; and (4) performance improves significantly, as data processing is integrated more tightly with data storage. Our key contributions are: SciHadoop which explores changes to MapReduce assumption by taking advantage of semantics of structured data while preserving MapReduce’s failure and resource management; DataMods which extends common abstractions of parallel file systems so they become programmable such that they can be extended to natively support a variety of data models and can be hooked into emerging distributed runtimes such as Stanford’s Legion; and Miso which combines Hadoop and relational data warehousing to minimize time to insight, taking into account the overhead of ingesting data into data warehousing.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Regional-scale fault-to-structure earthquake simulations with the EQSIM framework: Workflow maturation and computational performance on GPU-accelerated exascale platforms

Continuous advancements in scientific and engineering understanding of earthquake phenomena, combined with the associated development of representative physics-based models, is providing a foundation for high-performance, fault-to-structure earthquake simulations. However, regional-scale applications of high-performance models have been challenged by the computational requirements at the resolutions required for engineering risk assessments. The EarthQuake SIMulation (EQSIM) framework, a software application development under the US Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project, is focused on overcoming the existing computational barriers and enabling routine regional-scale simulations at resolutions relevant to a breadth of engineered systems. This multidisciplinary software development—drawing upon expertise in geophysics, engineering, applied math and computer science—is preparing the advanced computational workflow necessary to fully exploit the DOE’s exaflop computer platforms coming online in the 2023 to 2024 timeframe. Achievement of the computational performance required for high-resolution regional models containing upward of hundreds of billions to trillions of model grid points requires numerical efficiency in every phase of a regional simulation. This includes run time start-up and regional model generation, effective distribution of the computational workload across thousands of computer nodes, efficient coupling of regional geophysics and local engineering models, and application-tailored highly efficient transfer, storage, and interrogation of very large volumes of simulation data. This article summarizes the most recent advancements and refinements incorporated in the workflow design for the EQSIM integrated fault-to-structure framework, which are based on extensive numerical testing across multiple graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated platforms, and demonstrates the computational performance achieved on the world’s first exaflop computer platform through representative regional-scale earthquake simulations for the San Francisco Bay Area in California, USA.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

A Review on Machine Learning for Neutrino Experiments

Neutrino experiments study the least understood of the Standard Model particles by observing their direct interactions with matter or searching for ultra-rare signals. The study of neutrinos typically requires overcoming large backgrounds, elusive signals, and small statistics. The introduction of state-of-the-art machine learning tools to solve analysis tasks has made major impacts to these challenges in neutrino experiments across the board. Machine learning algorithms have become an integral tool of neutrino physics, and their development is of great importance to the capabilities of next generation experiments. An understanding of the roadblocks, both human and computational, and the challenges that still exist in the application of these techniques is critical to their proper and beneficial utilization for physics applications. This review presents the current status of machine learning applications for neutrino physics in terms of the challenges and opportunities that are at the intersection between these two fields.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Optimizing Communication in 2D Grid-Based MPI Applications at Exascale

The new reality of exascale computing faces many challenges in achieving optimal performance on large numbers of nodes. A key challenge is the efficient utilization of the message-passing interface (MPI), a critical component for process communication. This paper explores communication optimization strategies to harness the GPU-accelerated architectures of these supercomputers. We focus on MPI applications where processors form a two-dimensional process grid, a common arrangement in applications involving dense matrix operations. This configuration offers a unique opportunity to implement innovative strategies to improve performance and maintain effective load distribution. We study two applications— Dist-FW (Apsp:all-pair-shortest-path) and HPL-MxP (LU factorization with Mixed precision)—on two accelerated systems: Summit (IBM Power and NVIDIA V100) and Frontier (AMD EPYC and MI250X). These supercomputers are operated by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) and are currently ranked #1 and #5 on the Top500 list. We show how to scale up both applications to exascale levels and tackle the MPI challenges related to implementation, synchronization, and performance. We also compare the performance of several communication strategies at an unprecedented scale. Accurately predicting application performance becomes crucial for cost reduction as the computational scale grows. To address this, we suggest a hyperbolic model as a better alternative to the traditional one-sided asymptotic model for predicting future application performance at such large scales.

Lu, Hao↗

Challenges and Accomplishments of Viscous Incompressible Flow Computations in Aerospace and Beyond

Recent progress in incompressible Navier-Stokes solution methods will be presented. Discussions are focused on the methods designed for complex geometry applications in three dimensions, and thus are limited to primitive variable formulation. Both steady- and unsteady-solution algorithms and their salient features are discussed. A summary of our recent progress in flow solver development is given followed by numerical studies of a few example problems of our current interest. Solvers discussed here are based on structured-grid approach using finite-difference or finite-volume frame work. This short course will be delivered in three one-our lectures. The material in the course are collected from the work performed by the Incompressible Navier-Stokes group at NASA Ames Research Center over the past several years, and can be found in our publications widely disseminated in the US and abroad. This short course is sponsored by AGARD Consultant and Exchange Program under Support Project P-110.

Kwak, Dochan↗

Physics-informed machine learning with differentiable programming for heterogeneous underground reservoir pressure management

Abstract Avoiding over-pressurization in subsurface reservoirs is critical for applications like CO $$_2$$ 2 sequestration and wastewater injection. Managing the pressures by controlling injection/extraction are challenging because of complex heterogeneity in the subsurface. The heterogeneity typically requires high-fidelity physics-based models to make predictions on CO $$_2$$ 2 fate. Furthermore, characterizing the heterogeneity accurately is fraught with parametric uncertainty. Accounting for both, heterogeneity and uncertainty, makes this a computationally-intensive problem challenging for current reservoir simulators. To tackle this, we use differentiable programming with a full-physics model and machine learning to determine the fluid extraction rates that prevent over-pressurization at critical reservoir locations. We use DPFEHM framework, which has trustworthy physics based on the standard two-point flux finite volume discretization and is also automatically differentiable like machine learning models. Our physics-informed machine learning framework uses convolutional neural networks to learn an appropriate extraction rate based on the permeability field. We also perform a hyperparameter search to improve the model’s accuracy. Training and testing scenarios are executed to evaluate the feasibility of using physics-informed machine learning to manage reservoir pressures. We constructed and tested a sufficiently accurate simulator that is 400 000 times faster than the underlying physics-based simulator, allowing for near real-time analysis and robust uncertainty quantification.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗