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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 109 records · Page 6

Particle-Tracking Proton Computed Tomography—Data Acquisition, Preprocessing, and Preconditioning

Proton CT (pCT) is a promising new imaging technique that can reconstruct relative stopping power (RSP) more accurately than x-ray CT in each cubic millimeter voxel of the patient. This, in turn, will result in better proton range accuracy and, therefore, smaller planned tumor volumes (PTV). The hardware description and some reconstructed images have previously been reported. In a series of two contributions, we focus on presenting the software algorithms that convert pCT detector data to the final reconstructed pCT images for application in proton treatment planning. There were several options on how to accomplish this, and we will describe our solutions at each stage of the data processing chain. In the first paper of this series, we present the data acquisition with the pCT tracking and energy-range detectors and how the data are preprocessed, including the conversion to the well-formatted track information from tracking data and water-equivalent path length from the data of a calibrated multi-stage energy-range detector. These preprocessed data are then used for the initial image formation with an FDK cone-beam CT algorithm. The output of data acquisition, preprocessing, and FDK reconstruction is presented along with illustrative imaging results for two phantoms, including a pediatric head phantom. The second paper in this series will demonstrate the use of iterative solvers in conjunction with the superiorization methodology to further improve the images resulting from the upfront FDK image reconstruction and the implementation of these algorithms on a hybrid CPU/GPU computer cluster.

42 ENGINEERING↗

CSRI Summer Proceedings 2021

The Computer Science Research Institute (CSRI) brings university faculty and students to Sandia National Laboratories for focused collaborative research on Department of Energy (DOE) computer and computational science problems. The institute provides an opportunity for university researches to learn about problems in computer and computational science at DOE laboratories, and help transfer results of their research to programs at the labs. Some specific CSRI research interest areas are: scalable solvers, optimization, algebraic preconditioners, graph-based, discrete, and combinatorial algorithms, uncertainty estimation, validation and verification methods, mesh generation, dynamic load-balancing, virus and other malicious-code defense, visualization, scalable cluster computers, beyond Moore’s Law computing, exascale computing tools and application design, reduced order and multiscale modeling, parallel input/output, and theoretical computer science. The CSRI Summer Program is organized by CSRI and includes a weekly seminar series and the publication of a summer proceedings.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

CSRI Summer Proceedings 2021

The Computer Science Research Institute (CSRI) brings university faculty and students to Sandia National Laboratories for focused collaborative research on Department of Energy (DOE) computer and computational science problems. The institute provides an opportunity for university researches to learn about problems in computer and computational science at DOE laboratories, and help transfer results of their research to programs at the labs. Some specific CSRI research interest areas are: scalable solvers, optimization, algebraic preconditioners, graph-based, discrete, and combinatorial algorithms, uncertainty estimation, validation and verification methods, mesh generation, dynamic load-balancing, virus and other malicious-code defense, visualization, scalable cluster computers, beyond Moore’s Law computing, exascale computing tools and application design, reduced order and multiscale modeling, parallel input/output, and theoretical computer science. The CSRI Summer Program is organized by CSRI and includes a weekly seminar series and the publication of a summer proceedings.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Exploiting Kubernetes to Simplify the Deployment and Management of the Multi-purpose CMS Pilot Job Factory

GlideinWMS, a widely utilized workload management system in high-energy physics (HEP) research, serves as the backbone for efficient job provisioning across distributed computing resources. It is utilized by various experiments and organizations, including CMS, OSG, Dune, and FIFE, to create HTCondor pools as large as 600k cores. In particular, a shared factory service historically deployed at UCSD has been configured to interface with more than 500 routes to compute clusters. As part of our team’s initiative to modernize infrastructure and enhance scalability, we undertook the migration of the GlideinWMS factory service into the Kubernetes environment. Leveraging the flexibility and orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes, we successfully deployed the factory service within the OSG Tiger Kubernetes cluster. The major benefits Kubernetes gives us is it streamlines the management and monitoring of the factory infrastructure, and improves fault tolerance through its resilient deployment strategies. Through this case study, we aim to share insights, challenges, and best practices encountered during the migration process. Our experience underscores the benefits of embracing containerization and Kubernetes orchestration for HEP computing infrastructure, paving the way for scalability and resilience in distributed computing environments.

Dost, Jeffrey Michael [UC, San Diego (main)]↗

Optimization of tomographic reconstruction workflows on geographically distributed resources

New technological advancements in synchrotron light sources enable data acquisitions at unprecedented levels. This emergent trend affects not only the size of the generated data but also the need for larger computational resources. Although beamline scientists and users have access to local computational resources, these are typically limited and can result in extended execution times. Applications that are based on iterative processing as in tomographic reconstruction methods require high-performance compute clusters for timely analysis of data. Here, time-sensitive analysis and processing of Advanced Photon Source data on geographically distributed resources are focused on. Two main challenges are considered: (i) modeling of the performance of tomographic reconstruction workflows and (ii) transparent execution of these workflows on distributed resources. For the former, three main stages are considered: (i) data transfer between storage and computational resources, (i) wait/queue time of reconstruction jobs at compute resources, and (iii) computation of reconstruction tasks. These performance models allow evaluation and estimation of the execution time of any given iterative tomographic reconstruction workflow that runs on geographically distributed resources. For the latter challenge, a workflow management system is built, which can automate the execution of workflows and minimize the user interaction with the underlying infrastructure. The system utilizes Globus to perform secure and efficient data transfer operations. The proposed models and the workflow management system are evaluated by using three high-performance computing and two storage resources, all of which are geographically distributed. Workflows were created with different computational requirements using two compute-intensive tomographic reconstruction algorithms. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed models and system can be used for selecting the optimum resources, which in turn can provide up to 3.13× speedup (on experimented resources). Furthermore, the error rates of the models range between 2.1 and 23.3% (considering workflow execution times), where the accuracy of the model estimations increases with higher computational demands in reconstruction tasks.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Scalable Distributed Memory Community Detection Using Vite

Graph clustering, popularly known as community detection, is a fundamental graph operation used in several applications of relevance for network analysis and cybersecurity. Community detection is an operation of partitioning a network into an arbitrary number of “communities” such that each com munity represents a tightly-knit group of nodes with relatively sparser connections to the rest of the nodes in the network. The need to compute clustering on large-scale networks necessitates the development of efficient parallel algorithms capable of exploiting modern parallel architectures. However, due to their irregular and inherently sequential nature, many of the current algorithms for community detection are challenging to parallelize. In response to the 2018 Graph Challenge, we present Vite which is a distributed-memory parallel community detection method. Vite is a parallelization of the algorithmic template provided by a widely-used serial method (Louvain). Alongside, it uses several heuristics aimed at significantly improving parallelism and performance, while preserving output quality. Using the inputs from the 2018 Graph Challenge (static and streaming), we demonstrate superior performance and high quality solutions based on four parallelization heuristics.

community detection↗

Parallelization of a Proxy Transport App Using ComputeCPP and SYCL

This document details the attempts to parallelize a multi-group Monte Carlo proxy app using SYCL and the ComputeCPP Community Edition compiler. SYCL is a standard set by the Khronos Group and is described as a, “cross-platform abstraction layer that builds on the underlying concepts, portability and efficiency of OpenCL that enables code for heterogeneous processors to be written in a “single-source” style using completely standard C++.” ComputeCpp Community Edition (CE) is a heterogeneous parallel programming platform that provides a conformant implementation of the SYCL™ 1.2.1 Khronos specification. ComputeCPP provides a compiler and an SDK containing a build system to improve the usability of the compiler. The supported OpenCL 1.2 platforms for ComputeCpp are AMD® and Intel®, with experimental support for PTX which is used on Nvidia graphics cards as well as experimental support for ARM chips. All testing reported in this document was done on the Darwin computer cluster using an Nvidia GTX Titan X graphics card. Since ComputeCPP does not support using this card with OpenCL, ComputeCPP’s experimental PTX64 bit-code generation was used to generate device code.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Chapter 6: Modeling and Simulation of Wind-Farm Flows

The subject of this chapter is the modeling and simulation of the flow through full wind farms, also known as wind plants, which are collections of many wind turbines within a region working together to supply power to the grid like any other type of power plant. This topic is interesting and exciting because of the increasing variety of and uses for wind plant flow modeling and simulation. For example, Figure 6.1 shows the computed flow field from a high-fidelity simulation of the Lillgrund offshore wind farm using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with large-eddy simulation (LES) turbulence modeling and actuator line rotor aerodynamics models. There are many ways to model this type of flow, ranging from very simple models of wind turbine wakes and their interactions that can run in a matter of seconds on a laptop to high-fidelity, turbulence -resolving LES of the atmospheric flow and wakes that require days of use of thousands of cores on a high-performance computing cluster. The uses of wind plant flow simulations are equally varied. Wind plant layout designers run hundreds or thousands of simulations over all possible wind directions and speeds using simple models to predict a future wind plant's annual energy production. Researchers use LESs of the wind plant to study phenomena such as wind turbine wake interactions with each other and with the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). As computational resources become more readily available, it is even becoming common for turbine manufacturers to use CFD of some form to model wind plants in complex terrain to help in the wind turbine siting and selection process. We are beginning to see the expensive, high-fidelity tools being used to create data and knowledge that improves or enables the creation of new cheaper, lower fidelity tools. We are also beginning to see the low- and high-fidelity tools used together to perform uncertainty quantification of energy estimates and optimization of wind plant layouts. As new computing technologies mature, such as graphics processing unit (GPU)-based computing, the future of full wind plant flow modeling is exciting.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Summer Proceedings 2019

The Computer Science Research Institute (CSRI) brings university faculty and students to Sandia for focused collaborative research on Department of Energy (DOE) computer and computational science problems. The institute provides an opportunity for university researchers to learn about problems in computer and computational science at DOE laboratories. Participants conduct leading-edge research, interact with scientists and engineers at the laboratories, and help transfer results of their research to programs at the labs. Some specific CSRI research interest areas are: scalable solvers, optimization, adaptivity and mesh refinement, graph-based, discrete, and combinatorial algorithms, uncertainty estimation, mesh generation, dynamic load-balancing, virus and other malicious-code defense, visualization, scalable cluster computers and heterogeneous computers, data-intensive computing, environments for scalable computing, parallel input/output, advanced architectures, and theoretical computer science. The CSRI Summer Program includes the organization of a weekly seminar series and the publication of this summer proceedings.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

CSRI Summer Proceedings 2020

The Computer Science Research Institute (CSRI) brings university faculty and students to Sandia for focused collaborative research on Department of Energy (DOE) computer and computational science problems. The institute provides an opportunity for university researchers to learn about problems in computer and computational science at DOE laboratories. Participants conduct leading-edge research, interact with scientists and engineers at the laboratories, and help transfer results of their research to programs at the labs. Some specific CSRI research interest areas are: scalable solvers, optimization, adaptivity and mesh refinement, graph-based, discrete, and combinatorial algorithms, uncertainty estimation, mesh generation, dynamic load-balancing, virus and other malicious-code defense, visualization, scalable cluster computers, data-intensive computing, environments for scalable computing, parallel input/output, advanced architectures, and theoretical computer science. The CSRI Summer Program is organized by CSRI and typically includes the organization of a weekly seminar series and the publication of a summer proceedings. In 2020, the CSRI summer program was executed completely virtually; all student interns worked from home, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Decentralized Failure-Tolerant Optimization of Electric Vehicle Charging

We present a decentralized failure-tolerant algorithm for optimizing electric vehicle (EV) charging, using charging stations as computing agents. The algorithm is based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and it has the following features: (i) It handles capacity, peak demand, and ancillary services coupling constraints. (ii) It does not require a central agent collecting information and performing coordination (e.g. an aggregator), instead all agents exchange information and computations are carried out in a fully decentralized fashion. (iii) It can withstand the failure of any number of computing agents, as long as the remaining computing agents are in a connected communications network. We construct this algorithm by reformulating the optimal EV charging problem in a decomposable form, amenable to ADMM, and then developing efficient decentralized solution methods for the subproblems dealing with coupling constraints. We conduct numerical experiments on industry-scale synthetic EV charging datasets, with up to 1,152 charging stations, using a high performance computing cluster. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can solve the optimal EV charging problem fast enough to permit the integration of EV charging with real-time electricity markets, even in the presence of failures.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Predicting metabolic modules in incomplete bacterial genomes with MetaPathPredict

The reconstruction of complete microbial metabolic pathways using ‘omics data from environmental samples remains challenging. Computational pipelines for pathway reconstruction that utilize machine learning methods to predict the presence or absence of KEGG modules in incomplete genomes are lacking. Here, we present MetaPathPredict, a software tool that incorporates machine learning models to predict the presence of complete KEGG modules within bacterial genomic datasets. Using gene annotation data and information from the KEGG module database, MetaPathPredict employs deep learning models to predict the presence of KEGG modules in a genome. MetaPathPredict can be used as a command line tool or as a Python module, and both options are designed to be run locally or on a compute cluster. Benchmarks show that MetaPathPredict makes robust predictions of KEGG module presence within highly incomplete genomes.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Data Storage for HEP Experiments in the Era of High-Performance Computing

As particle physics experiments push their limits on both the energy and the intensity frontiers, the amount and complexity of the produced data are also expected to increase accordingly. With such large data volumes, next-generation efforts like the HL-LHC and DUNE will rely even more on both high-throughput (HTC) and high-performance (HPC) computing clusters. Full utilization of HPC resources requires scalable and efficient data-handling and I/O. For the last few decades, ROOT has been used by most HEP experiments to store data. However, other storage technologies like HDF5 may perform better in HPC environments. Initial explorations with HDF5 have begun using ATLAS, CMS and DUNE data; the DUNE experiment has also adopted HDF5 for its data-acquisition system. This paper presents the future outlook of the HEP computing and the role of HPC, and a summary of ongoing and future works to use HDF5 as a possible data storage technology for the HEP experiments to use in HPC environments.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Enabling Pulse-level Programming, Compilation, and Execution in XACC

Noisy gate-model quantum processing units (QPUs) are currently available from vendors over the cloud, and digital quantum programming approaches exist to run low-depth circuits on physical hardware. These digital representations are ultimately lowered to pulse-level instructions by vendor quantum control systems to affect unitary evolution representative of the submitted digital circuit. Vendors are beginning to open this pulse-level control system to the public via specified interfaces. Robust programming methodologies, software frameworks, and backend simulation technologies for this analog model of quantum computation will prove critical to advancing pulse-level control research and development. Prototypical use cases for this include error mitigation, optimal pulse control, and physics-inspired pulse construction. Here we present an extension to the XACC quantum-classical software framework that enables pulse-level programming for superconducting, gate-model quantum computers, and a novel, general, and extensible pulse-level simulation backend for XACC that scales on classical compute clusters via MPI. Our work enables custom backend Hamiltonian definitions and gate-level compilation to available pulses with a focus on performance and scalability. We end with a demonstration of this capability, and show how to use XACC for pertinent pulse-level programming tasks.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

An Extension of the Athena++ Code Framework for Radiation-magnetohydrodynamics in General Relativity Using a Finite-solid-angle Discretization

We extend the general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) capabilities of Athena++ to incorporate radiation. The intensity field in each finite-volume cell is discretized in angle, with explicit transport in both space and angle properly accounting for the effects of gravity on null geodesics, and with matter and radiation coupled in a locally implicit fashion. Here we describe the numerical procedure in detail, verifying its correctness with a suite of tests. Motivated in particular by black hole accretion in the high-accretion-rate, thin-disk regime, we demonstrate the application of the method to this problem. With excellent scaling on flagship computing clusters, the port of the algorithm to the GPU-enabled AthenaK code now allows the simulation of many previously intractable radiation-GRMHD systems.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Managing genomic variant calling workflows with Swift/T

Bioinformatics research is frequently performed using complex workflows with multiple steps, fans, merges, and conditionals. This complexity makes management of the workflow difficult on a computer cluster, especially when running in parallel on large batches of data: hundreds or thousands of samples at a time. Scientific workflow management systems could help with that. Many are now being proposed, but is there yet the “best” workflow management system for bioinformatics? Such a system would need to satisfy numerous, sometimes conflicting requirements: from ease of use, to seamless deployment at peta- and exa-scale, and portability to the cloud. We evaluated Swift/T as a candidate for such role by implementing a primary genomic variant calling workflow in the Swift/T language, focusing on workflow management, performance and scalability issues that arise from production-grade big data genomic analyses. In the process we introduced novel features into the language, which are now part of its open repository. Additionally, we formalized a set of design criteria for quality, robust, maintainable workflows that must function at-scale in a production setting, such as a large genomic sequencing facility or a major hospital system. The use of Swift/T conveys two key advantages. (1) It operates transparently in multiple cluster scheduling environments (PBS Torque, SLURM, Cray aprun environment, etc.), thus a single workflow is trivially portable across numerous clusters. (2) The leaf functions of Swift/T permit developers to easily swap executables in and out of the workflow, which makes it easy to maintain and to request resources optimal for each stage of the pipeline. While Swift/T’s data-level parallelism eliminates the need to code parallel analysis of multiple samples, it does make debugging more difficult, as is common for implicitly parallel code. Nonetheless, the language gives users a powerful and portable way to scale up analyses in many computing architectures.

Science & Technology - Other Topics↗

Summary of VERA Core Simulator Performance Improvements

This report describes the performance improvements made to the VERA Core Simulator (VERA CS) during FY2016. At the beginning of the year, a timing study was performed to identify areas of the code where the run-times could be improved. This study identified six broad areas for improvement: • Cross section lookup and CMFD stabilization, • CTF parallel partitioning, • MOC methodology, • Subgroup methodology, • MOC parallel partitioning, and • CMFD Krylov solution techniques. The goal of this work was to reduce the VERA-CS run-times so a complete cycle depletion could be run with 1,000 cores overnight (i.e., the “1,000 core depletion” criterion). This goal was set by our industry partners so they could achieve reasonable turnaround on medium-sized computer clusters. The results presented in this report show a code speed-up by a factor of 5, which successfully satisfies the goal set by industry.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Molecular-Level Insights into Oxygen Reduction Catalysis by Graphite-Conjugated Active Sites

With a combination of experimental and computational investigations, we design a consistent mechanistic model for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) at molecularly well-defined graphite-conjugated catalyst ( GCC ) active sites featuring aryl-pyridinium moieties ( N+-GCC ). ORR catalysis at glassy carbon surfaces modified with N+-GCC fragments displays near-first-order dependence in O 2 partial pressure and near-zero-order dependence on electrolyte pH. Tafel analysis suggests an equilibrium one-electron transfer process followed by a rate-limiting chemical step at modest overpotentials that transitions to a rate-limiting electron transfer sequence at higher overpotentials. Finite-cluster computational modeling of the N+-GCC active site reveals preferential O 2 adsorption at electrophilic carbons alpha to the pyridinium moiety. Together, the experimental and computational data indicate that ORR proceeds via a proton-decoupled O 2 activation sequence involving either concerted or stepwise electron transfer and adsorption of O 2 , which is then followed by a series of electron/proton transfer steps to generate water and turn over the catalytic cycle. The introduced mechanistic model serves as a roadmap for the bottom-up synthesis of highly active N-doped carbon ORR catalysts.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗