Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “algorithmic structures”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 919 records · Page 51

Predicting orientation-dependent plastic susceptibility from static structure in amorphous solids via deep learning

It has been a long-standing materials science challenge to establish structure-property relations in amorphous solids. Here we introduce a rotationally non-invariant local structure representation that enables different predictions for different loading orientations, which is found essential for high-fidelity prediction of the propensity for stress-driven shear transformations. This novel structure representation, when combined with convolutional neural network (CNN), a powerful deep learning algorithm, leads to unprecedented accuracy for identifying atoms with high propensity for shear transformations (i.e., plastic susceptibility), solely from the static structure in both two- and three-dimensional model glasses. The data-driven models trained on samples at one composition and a given processing history are found transferrable to glass samples with different processing histories or at different compositions in the same alloy system. Our analysis of the new structure representation also provides valuable insight into key atomic packing features that influence the local mechanical response and its anisotropy in glasses.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

A Computational Framework to design 3D stiffness gradient acoustic metamaterials for impedance matching

Acoustic waves play a crucial role in various applications, including medical imaging, non-destructive testing, and sonar systems. One of the significant challenges in these applications is impedance matching, which is essential for minimizing reflections and maximizing the transfer of acoustic energy between different media. Acoustic metamaterials offer a promising solution to this challenge. In addition to impedance control, gradient stiffness can enhance structural efficiency and enable spatial control of wave propagation, making it a valuable feature in acoustic metamaterial design. In this pa- per, we present our developed computational method to design 3D stiffness gradient acoustic metamaterials for impedance matching. The key steps in our approach include generating initial designs using a periodic covariance function to provide unit cells that are both periodic on the boundaries and randomly formed inside the unit cell. Furthermore, we integrated manufacturing constraints into the design process, ensuring that the structures are interconnected for fabrication. We propose two computational optimization algorithms: GenUnit, based on a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), and MLMatch, which leverages differentiable machine learning. The two approaches are not separate contributions but complementary com- ponents of a unified framework. GenUnit requires no training data and directly interfaces with physics-based simulations, making it highly accurate but slower for large-scale exploration. In contrast, MLMatch is data-hungry during training but, once trained, enables near-instantaneous inference and broad design-space coverage. Together, they form a hybrid strategy: ML- Match rapidly explores the global design space, and GenUnit provides local refinement with high-fidelity accuracy. This balance between training cost, inference time, and precision is the motivation for including both methods in the same study. We applied this dual-algorithm framework to generate two metallic-based metamaterial designs that match the acoustic impedance of water while exhibiting a controlled gradient in stiffness (from stiff to soft). The stiffness gradient is particularly advantageous in applications where one side of the structure must interface with soft or sensitive surfaces, such as human tissue or delicate components. Here, this work paves the way for improved materials in various acoustic applications, particularly in ultrasound devices, by providing better impedance.

Metamaterial↗

Relaxation algorithms for matrix completion, with applications to seismic travel-time data interpolation

Travel time tomography is used to infer the underlying three-dimensional wavespeed structure of the Earth by fitting seismic travel time data collected at surface stations. Data interpolation and denoising techniques are important pre-processing steps that use prior knowledge about the data, including parsimony in the frequency and wavelet domains, low-rank structure of matricizations, and local smoothness. In this work, we show how local smoothness structure can be combined with low rank constraints using level-set optimization formulations, and develop a new relaxation algorithm that can efficiently solve these joint problems. In the seismology setting, we use the approach to interpolate missing stations and de-noise observed stations. The new approach is competitive with alternative algorithms, and offers new functionality to interpolate observed data using both smoothness and low rank structure in the presence of data fitting constraints.

constrained optimization↗

Wave forecast and its application to the optimal control of offshore floating wind turbine for load mitigation

Control algorithms play an important role in energy capture and load mitigation for offshore floating wind turbines (OFWTs). One of the advanced and effective control techniques is the feedforward or model predictive control approach, which requires the forecast of incoming environment conditions. For OFWTs, wave loading is one of the dominant sources to excite structural responses. This study is thus motivated to develop forecasting algorithms for wave elevations and wave excitation forces with the purpose of applying feedforward controllers on OFWTs. Two forecasting algorithms, the approximate Prony Method based on ESPRIT (Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques) and SVM (Support Vector Machine) regression, are developed and validated using wave records from tank tests. Utilizing the forecasted wave elevations and wave excitation forces, a feedforward LQR controller is designed to mitigate structural loads of an OFWT system.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Low-rank factorization of electron integral tensors and its application in electronic structure theory

In this letter, we introduce the reverse Cuthill-McKee (RCM) algorithm, which is often used for the bandwidth reduction of sparse tensors, to transform the two-electron integral tensors to their block diagonal forms. By further applying the pivoted Cholesky decomposition (CD) on each of the diagonal blocks, we are able to represent the high-dimensional two-electron integral tensors in terms of permutation matrices and low-rank Cholesky vectors. This representation facilitates the low-rank factorization of the high-dimensional tensor contractions that are usually encountered in post-Hartree-Fock calculations. In this letter, we discuss the second-order Møller-Plesset (MP2) method and linear coupled- cluster model with doubles (L-CCD) as two simple examples to demonstrate the efficiency of the RCM-CD technique in representing two-electron integrals in a compact form.

electronic structure theory↗

Complex Electronic Structure of Rare Earth Activators in Scintillators

To aid and further the understanding of the microscopic mechanisms behind the scintillator nonproportionality that leads to degradation of the attainable energy resolution, we have developed theoretical and experimental algorithms and procedures to determine the position of the 4f energy levels of rare earth dopants relative to the host band edge states.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Understanding the Hierarchy of Dense Subgraphs in Stationary and Temporally Varying Setting

Graphs are widely used to model relationships in a wide variety of domains such as sociology, bioinformatics, infrastructure, the WWW, to name a few. One of the key observations is that while real-world graphs are often globally sparse, they are locally dense. In other words, the average degree is often quite small (say at most 10 in a million vertex graph), but vertex neighborhoods are often dense. Finding dense subgraphs is a critical aspect of graph mining It has been used for finding communities and spam link farms in web graphs, graph visualization, real-time story identification, DNA motif detection in biological networks, finding correlated genes, epilepsy prediction, finding price value motifs in financial data, graph compression, distance query indexing, and increasing the throughput of social networking site servers. However, most standard formulations of this problem (like clique, quasi-clique, k-densest subgraph) are NP-hard. Furthermore, current dense subgraph finding algorithms usually optimize some objective, and only find a few such subgraphs without providing any structural relations, whereas the goal is rarely to find the "true optimum," but to identify many (if not all) dense substructures, understand their distribution in the graph, and ideally determine relationships among them. In this project, we first aim to devise algorithms and provide 3 implementations with nice visualizations to find the hierarchy between dense subgraphs, and then understand the structure of the hierarchy to gain more insight on the hidden patterns in real-world networks. Another important aspects in graph analysis is the temporal nature of networks. Networks evolve over time and in many applications data arrives at a high velocity, and thus it is important to design algorithms that can process data efficiently. We report three main results towards identifying dense structures in large evolving graphs. First, we will show how the hierarchical connectedness structure can be maintained efficiently, where connectedness is defined by increasing levels of connectivity strength. Next, we present dense structure can be identified in bipartite graphs without building projection graphs. And finally, we present a new method for peeling algorithms This new approach avoids sequential nature of peeling algorithms and is amenable to parallelization, which is crucial for processing high velocity data.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A space-time parallel algorithm with adaptive mesh refinement for computational fluid dynamics

This work describes a space-time parallel algorithm with space-time adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). AMR with subcycling is added to multigrid reduction-in-time (MGRIT) in order to provide solution efficient adaptive grids with a reduction in work performed on coarser grids. This algorithm is achieved by integrating two software libraries: XBraid (Parallel time integration with multigrid. https://computation.llnl.gov/projects/parallel-timeintegration-multigrid) and Chombo (Chombo software package for AMR applications—design document, 2014). The former is a parallel time integration library using multigrid and the latter is a massively parallel structured AMR library. Employing this adaptive space-time parallel algorithm is Chord (Comput Fluids 123:202–217, 2015), a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application code for solving compressible fluid dynamics problems. For the same solution accuracy, speedups are demonstrated from the use of space-time parallelization over the time-sequential integration on Couette flow and Stokes’ second problem. On a transient Couette flow case, at least a 1.5× speedup is achieved, and with a time periodic problem, a speedup of up to 13.7× over the time-sequential case is obtained. In both cases, the speedup is achieved by adding processors and exploring additional parallelization in time. The numerical experiments show the algorithm is promising for CFD applications that can take advantage of the time parallelism. Future work will focus on improving the parallel performance and providing more tests with complex fluid dynamics to demonstrate the full potential of the algorithm.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Algorithmic Improvements for Portable Event-Based Monte Carlo Transport Using the Nvidia Thrust Library

High performance computing environments are progressively moving towards many-core computing architectures. The Los Alamos National Laboratory Trinity machine, available in late 2016, will use both Intel Xeon Haswell processors and Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing many integrated core (MIC) coprocessors. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Sierra machine, available in 2018, will use an IBM PowerPC architecture along with Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). Applications that must work in this supercomputing environment must continue to adapt in order to take advantage of the diverse hardware architectures that are coming. A significant consideration is not only the performance of the application on a given platform but also the portability of the application to other platforms. The algorithmic improvements presented in this paper build upon recently-reported work on event-based Monte Carlo transport in the ALPSMC code that models particle transport in one-dimensional binary stochastic media. That paper discussed the lack of available vectorization in the traditional history-based algorithm used for Monte Carlo transport and presented a data parallel event-based algorithm implemented using the Nvidia Thrust library for portability. The performance of the data parallel event-based algorithm implemented using Thrust was compared to a native CUDA implementation. The conclusions from that work were that the Thrust library abstraction technique caused too significant a loss in performance but that the event-based method was a viable option that should be further investigated. In this paper, we describe algorithmic improvements to the data parallel event-based algorithm previously presented. We made further algorithmic optimizations to the event-based CUDA implementation, most notably: data structure changes, a new conditional particle removal scheme in the event-based process, and the use of multiple GPUs. In addition to improvements to the algorithm, we re-implemented the Thrust version from the now further optimized CUDA version, giving a greater chance for success at a performant abstraction. Finally, we revisited our previous assumptions about the inability of the history-based method to achieve performance on vector style architectures such as the MICs and GPUs, with surprising and promising results. (authors)

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

FunMC^2: A Filter for Uncertainty Visualization of Marching Cubes on Multi-Core Devices

Visualization is an important tool for scientists to extract understanding from complex scientific data. Scientists need to understand the uncertainty inherent in all scientific data in order to interpret the data correctly. Uncertainty visualization has been an active and growing area of research to address this challenge. Algorithms for uncertainty visualization can be expensive, and research efforts have been focused mainly on structured grid types. Further, support for uncertainty visualization in production tools is limited. In this paper, we adapt an algorithm for computing key metrics for visualizing uncertainty in Marching Cubes (MC) to multi-core devices and present the design, implementation, and evaluation for a Filter for uncertainty visualization of Marching Cubes on Multi-Core devices (FunMC2). FunMC2 accelerates the uncertainty visualization of MC significantly, and it is portable across multi-core CPUs and GPUs. Evaluation results show that FunMC2 based on OpenMP runs around 11× to 41× faster on multi-core CPUs than the corresponding serial version using one CPU core. FunMC2 based on a single GPU is around 5× to 9× faster than FunMC2 running by OpenMP. Moreover, FunMC2 is flexible enough to process ensemble data with both structured and unstructured mesh types. Furthermore, we demonstrate that FunMC2 can be seamlessly integrated as a plugin into ParaView, a production visualization tool for post-processing.

Wang, Jay↗

Efficient generation of grids and traversal graphs in compositional spaces towards exploration and path planning

Abstract Diverse disciplines across science and engineering deal with problems related to compositions, which exist in non-Euclidean simplex spaces, rendering many standard tools inaccurate or inefficient. This work explores such spaces conceptually in the context of materials discovery, quantifies their computational feasibility, and implements several essential methods specific to simplex spaces through a new high-performance open-source library . Most significantly, we derive and implement an algorithm for constructing a novel n-dimensional simplex graph data structure, containing all discretized compositions and possible neighbor-to-neighbor transitions. Critically, no distance or neighborhood calculations are performed, instead leveraging pure combinatorics and order in procedurally generated simplex grids, keeping the algorithm $${\mathcal{O}}(N)$$ O ( N ) , with minimal memory, enabling rapid construction of graphs with billions of transitions in seconds. Additionally, we demonstrate how such graph representations can be combined to homogeneously express complex path-planning problems, while facilitating efficient deployment of existing high-performance gradient descent, graph traversal, and other optimization algorithms.

Krajewski, Adam M. (ORCID:0000000222660099)↗

SU-C-207B-02: Maximal Noise Reduction Filter with Anatomical Structures Preservation

Purpose: All medical images contain noise, which can result in an undesirable appearance and can reduce the visibility of anatomical details. There are varieties of techniques utilized to reduce noise such as increasing the image acquisition time and using post-processing noise reduction algorithms. However, these techniques are increasing the imaging time and cost or reducing tissue contrast and effective spatial resolution which are useful diagnosis information. The three main focuses in this study are: 1) to develop a novel approach that can adaptively and maximally reduce noise while preserving valuable details of anatomical structures, 2) to evaluate the effectiveness of available noise reduction algorithms in comparison to the proposed algorithm, and 3) to demonstrate that the proposed noise reduction approach can be used clinically. Methods: To achieve a maximal noise reduction without destroying the anatomical details, the proposed approach automatically estimated the local image noise strength levels and detected the anatomical structures, i.e. tissue boundaries. Such information was used to adaptively adjust strength of the noise reduction filter. The proposed algorithm was tested on 34 repeating swine head datasets and 54 patients MRI and CT images. The performance was quantitatively evaluated by image quality metrics and manually validated for clinical usages by two radiation oncologists and one radiologist. Results: Qualitative measurements on repeated swine head images demonstrated that the proposed algorithm efficiently removed noise while preserving the structures and tissues boundaries. In comparisons, the proposed algorithm obtained competitive noise reduction performance and outperformed other filters in preserving anatomical structures. Assessments from the manual validation indicate that the proposed noise reduction algorithm is quite adequate for some clinical usages. Conclusion: According to both clinical evaluation (human expert ranking) and qualitative assessment, the proposed approach has superior noise reduction and anatomical structures preservation capabilities over existing noise removal methods. Senior Author Dr. Deshan Yang received research funding form ViewRay and Varian.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

PSelInv—A Distributed Memory Parallel Algorithm for Selected Inversion: The Symmetric Case

We describe an efficient parallel implementation of the selected inversion algorithm for distributed memory computer systems, which we call PSelInv. The PSelInv method computes selected elements of a general sparse matrix Athat can be decomposed as A= LU, where L is lower triangular and U is upper triangular. The implementation described in this article focuses on the case of sparse symmetric matrices. It contains an interface that is compatible with the distributed memory parallel sparse direct factorization SuperLU-DIST. Yet, the underlying data structure and design of PSelInv allows it to be easily combined with other factorization routines, such as PARDISO. We discuss general parallelization strategies such as data and task distribution schemes. Specifically, we describe how to exploit the concurrency exposed by the elimination tree associated with the LU factorization of A. We demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of PSelInv by presenting several numerical experiments. In particular, we show that PSelInv can run efficiently on more than 4,000 cores for a modestly sized matrix. We also show how PSelInv can be used to accelerate large-scale electronic structure calculations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

TU-F-18A-06: Dual Energy CT Using One Full Scan and a Second Scan with Very Few Projections

Purpose: The conventional dual energy CT (DECT) requires two full CT scans at different energy levels, resulting in dose increase as well as imaging errors from patient motion between the two scans. To shorten the scan time of DECT and thus overcome these drawbacks, we propose a new DECT algorithm using one full scan and a second scan with very few projections by preserving structural information. Methods: We first reconstruct a CT image on the full scan using a standard filtered-backprojection (FBP) algorithm. We then use a compressed sensing (CS) based iterative algorithm on the second scan for reconstruction from very few projections. The edges extracted from the first scan are used as weights in the Objectives: function of the CS-based reconstruction to substantially improve the image quality of CT reconstruction. The basis material images are then obtained by an iterative image-domain decomposition method and an electron density map is finally calculated. The proposed method is evaluated on phantoms. Results: On the Catphan 600 phantom, the CT reconstruction mean error using the proposed method on 20 and 5 projections are 4.76% and 5.02%, respectively. Compared with conventional iterative reconstruction, the proposed edge weighting preserves object structures and achieves a better spatial resolution. With basis materials of Iodine and Teflon, our method on 20 projections obtains similar quality of decomposed material images compared with FBP on a full scan and the mean error of electron density in the selected regions of interest is 0.29%. Conclusion: We propose an effective method for reducing projections and therefore scan time in DECT. We show that a full scan plus a 20-projection scan are sufficient to provide DECT images and electron density with similar quality compared with two full scans. Our future work includes more phantom studies to validate the performance of our method.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Posiform planting: generating QUBO instances for benchmarking

We are interested in benchmarking both quantum annealing and classical algorithms for minimizing quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems. Such problems are NP-hard in general, implying that the exact minima of randomly generated instances are hard to find and thus typically unknown. While brute forcing smaller instances is possible, such instances are typically not interesting due to being too easy for both quantum and classical algorithms. In this contribution, we propose a novel method, called posiform planting , for generating random QUBO instances of arbitrary size with known optimal solutions, and use those instances to benchmark the sampling quality of four D-Wave quantum annealers utilizing different interconnection structures (Chimera, Pegasus, and Zephyr hardware graphs) and the simulated annealing algorithm. Posiform planting differs from many existing methods in two key ways. It ensures the uniqueness of the planted optimal solution, thus avoiding groundstate degeneracy, and it enables the generation of QUBOs that are tailored to a given hardware connectivity structure, provided that the connectivity is not too sparse. Posiform planted QUBOs are a type of 2-SAT boolean satisfiability combinatorial optimization problems. Our experiments demonstrate the capability of the D-Wave quantum annealers to sample the optimal planted solution of combinatorial optimization problems with up to 5, 627 qubits.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

CHSalign: A Web Server That Builds upon Junction-Explorer and RNAJAG for Pairwise Alignment of RNA Secondary Structures with Coaxial Helical Stacking

RNA junctions are important structural elements of RNA molecules. They are formed when three or more helices come together in three-dimensional space. Recent studies have focused on the annotation and prediction of coaxial helical stacking (CHS) motifs within junctions. Here we exploit such predictions to develop an efficient alignment tool to handle RNA secondary structures with CHS motifs. Specifically, we build upon our Junction-Explorer software for predicting coaxial stacking and RNAJAG for modelling junction topologies as tree graphs to incorporate constrained tree matching and dynamic programming algorithms into a new method, called CHSalign, for aligning the secondary structures of RNA molecules containing CHS motifs. Thus, CHSalign is intended to be an efficient alignment tool for RNAs containing similar junctions. Experimental results based on thousands of alignments demonstrate that CHSalign can align two RNA secondary structures containing CHS motifs more accurately than other RNA secondary structure alignment tools. CHSalign yields a high score when aligning two RNA secondary structures with similar CHS motifs or helical arrangement patterns, and a low score otherwise. This new method has been implemented in a web server, and the program is also made freely available, at http://bioinformatics.njit.edu/CHSalign/.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Timely Reporting of Heavy Hitters Using External Memory

Given an input stream S of size N, a Φ-heavy hitter is an item that occurs at least ΦN times in S. The problem of finding heavy-hitters is extensively studied in the database literature. In this work, we study a real-time heavy-hitters variant in which an element must be reported shortly after we see its T = Φ N-th occurrence (and hence it becomes a heavy hitter). We call this the Timely Event Detection (TED) Problem. The TED problem models the needs of many real-world monitoring systems, which demand accurate (i.e., no false negatives) and timely reporting of all events from large, high-speed streams with a low reporting threshold (high sensitivity). Like the classic heavy-hitters problem, solving the TED problem without false-positives requires large space (Ω (N) words). Thus in-RAM heavy-hitters algorithms typically sacrifice accuracy (i.e., allow false positives), sensitivity, or timeliness (i.e., use multiple passes). We show how to adapt heavy-hitters algorithms to external memory to solve the TED problem on large high-speed streams while guaranteeing accuracy, sensitivity, and timeliness. Our data structures are limited only by I/O-bandwidth (not latency) and support a tunable tradeoff between reporting delay and I/O overhead. With a small bounded reporting delay, our algorithms incur only a logarithmic I/O overhead. We implement and validate our data structures empirically using the Firehose streaming benchmark. Multi-threaded versions of our structures can scale to process 11M observations per second before becoming CPU bound. In comparison, a naive adaptation of the standard heavy-hitters algorithm to external memory would be limited by the storage device’s random I/O throughput, i.e., ≈100K observations per second.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Materials Fingerprinting Classification

Significant progress in many classes of materials could be made with the availability of experimentally-derived large datasets composed of atomic identities and three-dimensional coordinates. Methods for visualizing the local atomic structure, such as atom probe tomography (APT), which routinely generate datasets comprised of millions of atoms, are an important step in realizing this goal. However, state-of-the-art APT instruments generate noisy and sparse datasets that provide information about elemental type, but obscure atomic structures, thus limiting their subsequent value for materials discovery. The application of a materials fingerprinting process, a machine learning algorithm coupled with topological data analysis, provides an avenue by which here-to-fore unprecedented structural information can be extracted from an APT dataset. As a proof of concept, the material fingerprint is applied to high-entropy alloy APT datasets containing body-centered cubic (BCC) and face-centered cubic (FCC) crystal structures. A local atomic configuration centered on an arbitrary atom is assigned a topological descriptor, with which it can be characterized as a BCC or FCC lattice with near perfect accuracy, despite the inherent noise in the dataset. Finally, this successful identification of a fingerprint is a crucial first step in the development of algorithms which can extract more nuanced information, such as chemical ordering, from existing datasets of complex materials.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗