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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

Nuclear Materials Packaging, Transportation, and Systems Analysis Group Software Quality Assurance Plan: ANSYS Mechanical Finite Element Analysis Software Version 2023R1

ANSYS Inc. develops and markets engineering simulation software and services used in the aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, electronics, biomedical, energy, defense, and many other industries. ANSYS is dedicated to engineering simulation and is the world’s leading software provider. ANSYS was founded in 1970 and is headquartered in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. ANSYS provides an engineering analysis tool combining structural, thermal, computational fluid dynamics, acoustic, and electromagnetic simulation capabilities. ANSYS has two main programs, which use the same solvers: (1) Mechanical APDL (ANSYS Design Parametric Language), a Fortran-based coding platform, and (2) ANSYS Workbench, which uses a graphical user interface to aid in finite element analysis implementation. This plan covers both APDL and Workbench. The ANSYS computer program is a large-scale, multipurpose finite element program that can be used to solve several classes of engineering analyses. The analysis capabilities of ANSYS include the ability to solve static and dynamic structural analyses, steady-state and transient heat transfer problems, mode-frequency and buckling eigenvalue problems, static or time-varying magnetic analyses, and various types of field and coupled-field applications. The program contains many special features that allow nonlinearities or secondary effects such as plasticity, large strain, hyperelasticity, creep, swelling, large deflections, contact, stress stiffening, temperature dependency, material anisotropy, and radiation to be included in the solution. As ANSYS has been developed, other special capabilities such as substructuring, submodeling, random vibration, kinetostatics, kinetodynamics, free convection fluid analysis, acoustics, magnetics, piezoelectrics, coupled-field analysis, and design optimization have been added to the program. These capabilities contribute further to making ANSYS a multipurpose analysis tool for varied engineering disciplines. The ANSYS program has been in commercial use for over 50 years and has been used extensively in the aerospace, automotive, construction, electronic, energy services, manufacturing, nuclear, plastics, oil, and steel industries. Additionally, many consulting firms and hundreds of universities have used ANSYS for analysis, research, and educational purposes. ANSYS is recognized worldwide as one of the most widely used and capable programs of its type. Ansys design analysis software is the first created within a quality system with ISO 9001 certification, the internationally accepted quality standard. Product development, testing, maintenance and support processes also meet the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission's quality requirements, as they have for nearly four decades. The Quality Assurance Service Agreement is suitable for the customers working in the nuclear industry who need to meet specific federal regulations including 10CRF50 Appendix B and provisions of 10CFR21. ANSYS has retained its original International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001 accreditation certificate since1995-05-04, It’s current certificate is valid until 2027-05-29.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

Idiomatic Correctness-Checking via Julienne in Fortran 2023

This paper presents a unified approach to unit testing and runtime assertion checking using Fortran 2023. The paper describes the support for our approach in the Julienne framework. Julienne leverages recent Fortran standards to implement object-oriented design patterns, support testing parallel programs, and implement functional programming patterns in order to craft idioms inspired by natural-language expressions. The presented idioms employ novel operators to write expressions that evaluate to a test-diagnosis object encapsulating two components: (1) the test outcome or assertion outcome and (2) an automatically generated diagnostic string. Two other novel aspects of the approach include (1) the ability to enforce assertions inside pure procedures and (2) the ability to output rich diagnostic information inside pure procedures during error termination when assertions fail. The latter capability mitigates against a reason that Fortran programmers commonly cite for not writing pure procedures: difficulty obtaining useful program output inside pure procedures when debugging code. This paper demonstrates how the adoption of the proposed idioms leads naturally to a unifying theme across two otherwise disparate technologies: unit testing and runtime assertion checking. Finally, this paper describes the usage of the Julienne testing framework for writing unit tests and assertions in the Matcha high-performance computing application and the Fiats deep learning library.

Rouson, Damian↗

Conceptualizing Coproduced Climate Research as Care: Practical Lessons Learned With Women Farmland‐Owners in the Central Midwest United States

ABSTRACT This article's team of interdisciplinary researchers and conservation educator‐practitioners learned with, and from, a group of women farmland‐owners regarding how to conceptualize coproduced climate research by putting “care” at the center—care for the soil, for relationships, for data. We outline the creation and evolution of a storytelling‐based conservation program that allowed our diverse group to discover how the language of care could integrate climate analysis, conservation, and relationship‐building to foster tangible solutions. As a result of the project, the women landowners took actions that supported social‐environmental resilience—from planting cover crops to fostering watershed/neighborhood relationships. Our diverse group of women landowners and researchers had very different experiences with conservation and often very different views on climate change itself, but, through storytelling and the language of care, we not only coproduced knowledge but also created relationships and action. This article outlines specific practices for how to inflect a coproduced process for climate resilience with practices that promote care and yield action projects.

Shenk, Linda [Department of English Iowa State Uni↗

A cross-platform execution engine for the quantum intermediate representation

Hybrid languages like the quantum intermediate representation (QIR) are essential for programming systems that mix quantum and conventional computing models, while execution of these programs is often deferred to a system-specific implementation. Here, we develop the QIR Execution Engine (QIR-EE) for parsing, interpreting, and executing QIR across multiple hardware platforms. QIR-EE uses LLVM to execute hybrid instructions specifying quantum programs and, by design, presents extension points that support customized runtime and hardware environments. We demonstrate an implementation that uses the XACC quantum hardware-accelerator library to dispatch prototypical quantum programs on different commercial quantum platforms and numerical simulators, and we validate execution of QIR-EE on IonQ, Quantinuum, and IBM hardware. Our results highlight the efficiency of hybrid executable architectures for handling mixed instructions, managing mixed data, and integrating with quantum computing frameworks to realize cross-platform execution.

LLVM↗

Large language model evaluation for high–performance computing software development

We apply AI-assisted large language model (LLM) capabilities of GPT-3 targeting high-performance computing (HPC) kernels for (i) code generation, and (ii) auto-parallelization of serial code in C ++, Fortran, Python and Julia. Our scope includes the following fundamental numerical kernels: AXPY, GEMV, GEMM, SpMV, Jacobi Stencil, and CG, and language/programming models: (1) C++ (e.g., OpenMP [including offload], OpenACC, Kokkos, SyCL, CUDA, and HIP), (2) Fortran (e.g., OpenMP [including offload] and OpenACC), (3) Python (e.g., numpy, Numba, cuPy, and pyCUDA), and (4) Julia (e.g., Threads, CUDA.jl, AMDGPU.jl, and KernelAbstractions.jl). Kernel implementations are generated using GitHub Copilot capabilities powered by the GPT-based OpenAI Codex available in Visual Studio Code given simple + + prompt variants. To quantify and compare the generated results, we propose a proficiency metric around the initial 10 suggestions given for each prompt. For auto-parallelization, we use ChatGPT interactively giving simple prompts as in a dialogue with another human including simple “prompt engineering” follow ups. Results suggest that correct outputs for C++ correlate with the adoption and maturity of programming models. For example, OpenMP and CUDA score really high, whereas HIP is still lacking. We found that prompts from either a targeted language such as Fortran or the more general-purpose Python can benefit from adding language keywords, while Julia prompts perform acceptably well for its Threads and CUDA.jl programming models. Finally, we expect to provide an initial quantifiable point of reference for code generation in each programming model using a state-of-the-art LLM. Overall, understanding the convergence of LLMs, AI, and HPC is crucial due to its rapidly evolving nature and how it is redefining human-computer interactions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Program Generators for Exascale and Beyond (Final Technical Report)

The major goals of this project were to devise programming models and supporting tools that simplify the construction of specialized high‐performance generators, leading to improvements over the state of the art along the various dimensions of portability, performance, and productivity. In particular, the project achieved these goals by focusing on domain‐specific languages (DSLs) as intermediate layers in a translation and optimization framework, on composability of program generators, on re‐targeting legacy code, and on fundamental methodologies such as stage polymorphism or "generic programming in time".

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Full-Stack Exploration of Language-Based Parallelism in Fortran 2023

This poster explores native parallel features in Fortran 2023 through the lens of supporting applications with libraries, compilers, and parallel runtimes. The language revision informally named Fortran 2008 introduced parallelism in the form of Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) execution with two broad feature sets: (1) loop-level parallelism via do concurrent and (2) a Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) comprised of distributed “coarray” data structures. Fortran’s native parallelism has demonstrated high performance [1] and reduced the burden of inserting what sometimes amounts to more directives than code. Several compilers support both feature sets, typically by translating do concurrent into serial do loops annotated by parallel directives and by translating SPMD/PGAS features into direct calls to a communication library. Our research focuses primarily on two questions: (1) can the compiler’s parallel runtime library be developed in the language being compiled (Fortran) and (2) can we define an interface to the runtime that liberates compilers from being hardwired to one runtime and vice versa. We are answering these questions by developing the Parallel Runtime Interface for Fortran (PRIF) [2] and the Co-Array Fortran Framework of Efficient Interfaces to Network Environments (Caffeine) [3]. Caffeine is initially targeting adoption by LLVM Flang, a new open-source Fortran compiler developed by a broad community in industry, academia, and government labs. We are also exploring the use of these features in Inference-Engine, a deep learning library designed to facilitate neural network training and inference for high-performance computing applications written in modern Fortran.

Rasmussen, Katherine↗

Developing a Supply Chain Security Program

Amid growing concerns over foreign manufacturing for components and devices deployed in critical energy infrastructure, this research from the national labs will highlight best practices for developing and maintaining a supply chain security program. Tools for asset inventory, tips for developing and maintaining software- and hardware-bills-of-materials (SBOMs and HBOMs), recommended contractual language for vendor agreements, and identification of responsibilities will be shared. We discuss the one-time requirements to enable a successful supply chain security program and the best ways to operationalize this program for maximum impact, including development of robust practices for vulnerability tracking, patch management, and workarounds, with understanding of the reliability and uptime requirements for utilities. The recommendations shared are based on a cyber-informed engineering approach to identification of high-consequence impacts and the engineering controls related to supply chain management that can best mitigate these impacts. This approach allows for prioritization of resources. Additionally, we highlight relative up-front and ongoing costs associated with recommended controls. Viewers will leave with an understanding what a supply chain security program is, and what steps, prioritized for resource-constrained organizations, can build a robust program.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Business Case Analysis for Artificial Intelligence-Large Language Model Technology Integration

AI-assisted processes are expected to enhance operational efficiency and improve decision-making, supporting the long-term economic viability of nuclear power plants. However, detailed business analyses of AI-generated cost savings are rarely performed. Given the recent industry interest in Large Language Model (LLM), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program has conducted a comprehensive business case analysis of LLM Artificial Intelligence (AI) implementation in nuclear plant engineering workflows. The research employed three complementary business case approaches to evaluate impact of an LLM, using three representative engineering processes as use-cases: Boric Acid Corrosion (BAC) Evaluations, Maintenance Rule Evaluations, and 10 CFR 50.59 Screenings. Through detailed workload analyses and structured interviews, the study quantified significant efficiency improvements ranging from 11% to 59% across these processes. The research further considers how these efficiency gains could translate into tangible reliability improvements through enhanced engineering capacity. Analysis of historical plant trip data indicates that enabling engineers to focus on proactive reliability activities could provide substantial financial benefits through avoided outages, potentially generating greater value than the direct efficiency improvements alone. By documenting successful applications, implementation challenges, and strategic opportunities, this research provides nuclear utilities with a practical framework for evaluating the value of AI technology to support long-term operations through advanced digital technologies.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Automatically parallelizing batch inference on deep neural networks using Fiats and Fortran 2023 `do concurrent`

This paper introduces novel programming strategies that leverage features of the Fortran 2023 standard of the International Standards Organization (ISO) to automatically parallelize computations on deep neural networks. The paper focuses on the interplay of object-oriented, parallel, and functional programming paradigms in the Fiats deep learning library. We demonstrate how several infrequently used language features play a role in enabling efficient, parallel execution. Specifically, the ability to explicitly declare that a procedure is pure facilitates inference in the context of the language’s loop-parallelism construct `do concurrent`. Also, explicitly prohibiting the overriding of a parent type’s type-bound procedures eliminates the need for dynamic dispatch in performance-critical code. Finally, this paper uses batch inference calculations on a neural network surrogate for atmospheric aerosol dynamics to demonstrate that LLVM Flang compiler’s automatic parallelization of `do concurrent` achieves roughly the same performance and scalability as achieved by OpenMP compiler directives. We also demonstrate that double-precision inference costs 37–72% longer runtime than default-real precision with most values in the range 57-60%.

Rouson, Damian↗

A multi-language auto differentiation package (mAD) v1.0

This is a multi-language auto differentiation package. It includes multiple language versions of the package. It can be included/used as a module/class in users' application program to enable differentiability of the program. It is simple, transparent, extensible, efficient compared with the other AD package such as Enzyme or Pytorch.

Qiang, Ji [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (↗

Synergizing human expertise and AI efficiency with language model for microscopy operation and automated experiment design

With the advent of large language models (LLMs), in both the open source and proprietary domains, attention is turning to how to exploit such artificial intelligence (AI) systems in assisting complex scientific tasks, such as material synthesis, characterization, analysis and discovery. Here, we explore the utility of LLMs, particularly ChatGPT4, in combination with application program interfaces (APIs) in tasks of experimental design, programming workflows, and data analysis in scanning probe microscopy, using both in-house developed APIs and APIs given by a commercial vendor for instrument control. We find that the LLM can be especially useful in converting ideations of experimental workflows to executable code on microscope APIs. Beyond code generation, we find that the GPT4 is capable of analyzing microscopy images in a generic sense. At the same time, we find that GPT4 suffers from an inability to extend beyond basic analyses for more in-depth technical experimental design. We argue that an LLM specifically fine-tuned for individual scientific domains can potentially be a better language interface for converting scientific ideations from human experts to executable workflows. Such a synergy between human expertise and LLM efficiency in experimentation can open new doors for accelerating scientific research, enabling effective experimental protocols sharing in the scientific community.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Enhancing ChatPORT with CUDA-to-SYCL Kernel Translation Capability

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in general code translation. However, code translation involving parallel programming models remains largely unexplored. This work enhances the capabilities of code LLMs in CUDA-to-SYCL kernel translation with parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The resultant fine-tuned LLM, called ChatPORT, is an effort to provide high-fidelity translations from one programming model to another. We describe the preparation of datasets from heterogeneous computing benchmarks for model fine-tuning and testing, the parameter-efficient fine-tuning of 19 open-source code models ranging in size from 0.5 to 34 billion parameters and evaluate the correctness rates of the SYCL kernels by the fine-tuned models. The experimental results show that most code models fail to translate CUDA codes to SYCL correctly. However, fine-tuning these models using a small set of CUDA and SYCL kernels can enhance the capabilities of these models in kernel translation. Depending on the sizes of the models, the correctness rate ranges from 19.9% to 81.7% for a test dataset of 62 CUDA kernels.

Jin, Zheming [ORNL] (ORCID:000000027197780X)↗

Activation Domain Hunter (ADhunter) v2.0

ADhunter is a software program that enables accurate identification and quantification of transcriptional activation domains. Unlike previous software, ADhunter uses protein representations from a pre-trained protein language model, model ensembling, and a training dataset from a diverse sampling of protein sequence space for state-of-the-art performance. These advantages enable improved perception of transcriptional activation domains across sequence space that can be used for mapping natural genetic circuits and engineering synthetic genetic circuits. In particular, ADhunter enables fine-tuned control of gene expression through synthetic transcription factors that can be used for complex control of cellular programs.

Waldburger, Lucas [Lawrence Berkeley National Labo↗

JACC.shared: Leveraging HPC Metaprogramming and Performance Portability for Computations That Use Shared Memory GPUs

In this work, we present JACC.shared, a new feature of Julia for ACCelerators (JACC), which is the performanceportable and metaprogramming model of the just-in-time and LLVM-based Julia language. This new feature allows JACC applications to leverage the high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities of high-bandwidth, on-chip GPU memory. Historically, exploiting high-bandwidth, shared-memory GPUs has not been a priority for high-level programming solutions. JACC.shared covers that gap for the first time, thereby providing a highlevel, portable, and easy-to-use solution for programmers to exploit this memory and supporting all current major accelerator architectures. Well-known HPC and AI workloads, such as multi/hyperspectral imaging and AI convolutions, have been used to evaluate JACC.shared on two exascale GPU architectures hosted by some of the most powerful US Department of Energy supercomputers: Perlmutter (NVIDIA A100) and Frontier (AMD MI250X). The performance evaluation reports speedup of up to 3.5× by adding only one line of code to the base codes, thus providing important accelerators in a simple, portable, and transparent way and elevating the programming productivity and performance-portability capabilities for Julia/JACC HPC, AI, and scientific applications.

Valero Lara, Pedro [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000214794310)↗

tether

Tether is a python module for benchmarking and assessing large language model (LLMs) performance at generic scientific tasks. The code generates benchmarks, uses the benchmark to prompt LLMs through automatic programming interfaces (APIs), and then logs the number of prompts an LLM correctly answers and presents the results as a completed benchmark.

Kaiser, Bryan [Los Alamos National Laboratory]↗

Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Strategy for Los Alamos National Laboratory

In the 1984 martial arts drama film, The Karate Kid, a young Daniel LaRusso is unexpectedly placed in an adversarial environment unable to eYectively adapt to a series of new threats and limitations. Fortunately for the main character, once placed under the tutelage of a Mr. Miyagi, he finds resiliency not through the adoption of new tools, but a re-focused set of fundamentals. Much in the same way that Daniel learns waxing on and buYing oY car wax by hand has rewards for Karate, LANL is choosing the harder path of self-hosting Large Language Models (LLMs) for enterprise use instead of only relying on buying access to a hosted AI service like Azure’s OpenAI Application Programming Interface (API). We also are not willing to wait for software-as-a-service (SAAS) AI services to meet us where we need to be from a FedRAMP accreditation standpoint. Our operations regularly depend on access at CUI, UCNI, ITAR and other FIPS-199 moderate-impact data levels and hosting our own services gives us the right security and compliance posture to be useful across the broad range of our work at LANL. With the rise in threats to critical infrastructure, cloud service providers (CSPs), and supply chain attacks from both state and non-state actors, we are not placing the bet that SAAS hosted AI services will be available when we need them. Should a major event occur, we do not want our staY and operations left without a pathway for us to fix the problem and resume the use of AI tools.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Agentic AI vs ML-Based Autotuning: A Comparative Study for Loop Reordering Optimization

High Performance Computing (HPC) applications rely heavily on code optimizations to achieve good performance on modern CPU and GPU architectures. Traditional Machine Learning auto-tuning approaches have demonstrated success in exploring high-dimensional spaces, but they often require expensive compile-run evaluations and lack adaptability for large HPC applications. The recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agentic AI systems raise intriguing questions about the potential of these approaches to address specific optimization methodologies. This work aims to answer an essential question for the HPC community: “How Agentic AI Systems Compare to Traditional ML Autotuning Techniques?” To address this question, we present a comparative analysis between a traditional ML-based optimization approach and an Agentic AI system, evaluating their respective capabilities and limitations for loop-level optimization. In addition, we introduced a new Agentic AI system named LoopGen-AI using three different Large Language Models: GPT-4.1, Claude 4.0, and Gemini 2.5. A key finding is that LoopGen-AI achieves competitive per-formance with only a few program runs, the reasoning logs from the agents revealed that their decisions rely heavily on the combination of semantic understanding of the target kernel with dynamic feedback from the environment, highlighting a promising new dimension in performance tuning. In contrast, ML-based autotuners focus on statistical exploration, and require orders of magnitude more runs to reach peak performance. Additionally, our analysis shows that prompt engineering, particularly using Persona + Context Manager patterns, significantly impacts the effectiveness of Agentic AI. Our results indicate that while Agentic AI systems are not yet a complete replacement for ML-based autotuners, it can effectively complement traditional methods.

Rosas, Miguel Romero↗