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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
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2011

Quantum Monte Carlo Endstation for Petascale Computing

The major achievements enabled by QMC Endstation grant include * Performance improvement on clusters of x86 multi-core systems, especially on Cray XT systems * New and improved methods for the wavefunction optimizations * New forms of trial wavefunctions * Implementation of the full application on NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA The scaling studies of QMCPACK on large-scale systems show excellent parallel efficiency up to 216K cores on Jaguarpf (Cray XT5). The GPU implementation shows speedups of 10-15x over the CPU implementation on older generation of x86. We have implemented hybrid OpenMP/MPI scheme in QMC to take advantage of multi-core shared memory processors of petascale systems. Our hybrid scheme has several advantages over the standard MPI-only scheme. * Memory optimized: large read-only data to store one-body orbitals and other shared properties to represent the trial wave function and many-body Hamiltonian can be shared among threads, which reduces the memory footprint of a large-scale problem. * Cache optimized: the data associated with an active Walker are in cache during the compute-intensive drift-diffusion process and the operations on an Walker are optimized for cache reuse. Thread-local objects are used to ensure the data affinity to a thread. * Load balanced: Walkers in an ensemble are evenly distributed among threads and MPI tasks. The two-level parallelism reduces the population imbalance among MPI tasks and reduces the number of point-to-point communications of large messages (serialized objects) for the Walker exchange. * Communication optimized: the communication overhead, especially for the collective operations necessary to determine ET and measure the properties of an ensemble, is significantly lowered by using less MPI tasks. The multiple forms of parallelism afforded by QMC algorithms make them ideal candidates for acceleration in the many-core paradigm. We presented the results of our effort to port the QMCPACK simulation code to the NVIDIA CUDA GPU platform. We restructured the CPU algorithms to express additional parallelism, minimize GPU-CPU communication, and efficiently utilize the GPU memory hierarchy. Using mixed precision on GT200 GPUs and MPI for intercommunication and load balancing, we observe typical full-application speedups of approximately 10x to 15x relative to quad-core Xeon CPUs alone, while reproducing the double-precision CPU results within statistical error. We developed an all-electron quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method for solids that does not rely on pseudopotentials, and used it to construct a primary ultra-high-pressure calibration based on the equation of state of cubic boron nitride. We computed the static contribution to the free energy with the QMC method and obtained the phonon contribution from density functional theory, yielding a high-accuracy calibration up to 900 GPa usable directly in experiment. We computed the anharmonic Raman frequency shift with QMC simulations as a function of pressure and temperature, allowing optical pressure calibration. In contrast to present experimental approaches, small systematic errors in the theoretical EOS do not increase with pressure, and no extrapolation is needed. This all-electron method is applicable to first-row solids, providing a new reference for ab initio calculations of solids and benchmarks for pseudopotential accuracy. We compared experimental and theoretical results on the momentum distribution and the quasiparticle renormalization factor in sodium. From an x-ray Compton-profile measurement of the valence-electron momentum density, we derived its discontinuity at the Fermi wavevector finding an accurate measure of the renormalization factor that we compared with quantum-Monte-Carlo and G0W0 calculations performed both on crystalline sodium and on the homogeneous electron gas. Our calculated results are in good agreement with the experiment. We have been studying the heat of formation for various Kubas complexes of molecular hydrogen on Ti(1,2)ethylene-nH2 using Diffusion Monte Carlo. This work has been started and is ongoing. We are studying systems involving 1 and 2 Ti bonding sites with up to 10 hydrogen molecules in numerous configurations. This work will establish a benchmark that will test the accuracy of density functional calculations and establish the feasibility of our methods for similar systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2026

MFC 5.0: An exascale many-physics flow solver

Many problems of interest in engineering, medicine, and the fundamental sciences rely on high-fidelity flow simulation, making performant computational fluid dynamics solvers a mainstay of the open-source software community. Previous work MFC 3.0 was made a published, documented, and open-source solver via Bryngelson et al. Comp. Phys. Comm. (2021) with numerous physical features, numerical methods, and scalable infrastructure. MFC 5.0 is a significant update to MFC 3.0, featuring a broad set of well-established and novel physical models and numerical methods, as well as the introduction of GPU and APU (or superchip) acceleration. Here, we exhibit state-of-the-art performance and ideal scaling on the first two exascale supercomputers, OLCF Frontier and LLNL El Capitan. Combined with MFC’s single-accelerator performance, MFC achieves exascale computation in practice, and achieved the largest-to-date public CFD simulation at 200 trillion grid points as a 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalist. New physical features include the immersed boundary method, N-fluid phase change, Euler–Euler and Euler–Lagrange sub-grid bubble models, fluid-structure interaction, hypo- and hyper-elastic materials, chemically reacting flow, two-material surface tension, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), and more. Numerical techniques now represent the current state-of-the-art, including general relaxation characteristic boundary conditions, WENO variants, Strang splitting for stiff sub-grid flow features, and low Mach number treatments. Weak scaling to tens of thousands of GPUs on OLCF Summit and Frontier and LLNL El Capitan achieves efficiencies within 5% of ideal to over 90% of their respective system sizes. Strong scaling results for a 16-times increase in device count show parallel efficiencies over 90% on OLCF Frontier. MFC’s software stack has undergone further improvements, including continuous integration, which ensures code resilience and correctness through over 300 regression tests; metaprogramming, which reduces code length while maintaining performance portability; and code generation for computing chemical reactions

Computational fluid dynamics↗
DOE OSTI2021

Transient cycling of nitrogen, organic carbon and oxygen within the free-flowing Columbia River corridor: Linking exposure time dependent biogeochemical reactions to river stage fluctuations (Final project report)

The objective of this project was to develop next-generation techniques for representing the transformations of complex reaction networks like those impacting transient river-corridors, then apply them to develop upscaling tools. The project contributed significantly to the development of Lagrangian “mass transfer particle tracking” (MTPT) tools that are the first numerical framework that explicitly separates mixing and spreading processes; a crucial distinction for accurate representations of reaction rates across scales. The MTPT approach uses an operator splitting scheme where physical transport processes are simulated using classical random walk methods and each particle is treated as a “container” that carries with it any number of chemical species. Mixing between particles is simulated using a colocation-probability based mass transfer kernel and reactions are evaluated on each particle after mixing. The method is stable, accurate, and also allows the explicit modeling of residence time distributions of the individual containers of mass. The MTPT scheme allowed us to explore several research questions related to reactive transport in river corridors and complex reaction networks. We found that it is possible to quantify the exposure time distributions (ETDs) of reactants and that this does suggest some pathways to upscaling. However, comparable approximations can be obtained using simplified (reduced dimensionality) MTPT simulations in less time with similar uncertainty, so development of extensive ETD-based methods was not productive. The major findings are that i) the MTPT schemes are robust and highly accurate across a range of arbitrarily complex reactions, ii) the methods can be efficiently parallelized and the parallel performance characteristics of MTPT are predictable, and iii) the MTPT tools allow simultaneous tracking of residence time. The development of these research tools into efficient software packages continues. The methods are already available to the community because open-source, working examples have been included with all publications.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2019

A generalized massively parallel ultra-high order FFT-based Maxwell solver

Dispersion-free ultra-high order FFT-based Maxwell solvers have recently proven to be paramount to a large range of applications, including the high-fidelity modeling of high-intensity laser–matter interactions with Particle-In-Cell (PIC) codes. To enable a massively parallel scaling of these solvers, a novel parallelization technique was recently proposed, which consists in splitting the simulation domain into several processor sub-domains, with guard regions appended at each sub-domain boundary. Maxwell's equations are advanced independently on each sub-domain using local shared-memory FFTs (instead of a single distributed global FFT). This implies small truncation errors at sub-domain boundaries, the amplitude of which depends on guard regions sizes and order of the Maxwell solver. For moderate guard region sizes, this ’local’ technique proved to be highly scalable on up to a million cores and notably enabled the 3D modeling of so-called plasma mirrors, for which 8 guard cells only were enough to prevent truncation error growth. Yet, for other applications, the required number of guard cells might be much higher, which would severely limit the parallel efficiency of this technique due to the large volume of guard cells to be exchanged between sub-domains. In this context, we propose a novel parallelization technique that ensures very good scaling of FFT-based solvers with an arbitrarily high number of guard cells. Our ’hybrid’ technique consists in performing distributed FFTs on local groups of processors with guard regions now appended to boundaries of each group of processors. It uses a dual domain decomposition method for the Maxwell solver and other parts of the PIC cycle to keep the simulation load-balanced. This ’hybrid’ technique was implemented in the open source exascale library PICSAR. Benchmarks show that for a large number of guard cells (>16), the ’hybrid’ technique offers up to ×3 speed-up and ×8 memory savings compared to the ’local’ one.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Near-continuum, hypersonic oxygen flow over a double cone simulated by direct simulation Monte Carlo informed from quantum chemistry

A large-scale, fully resolved direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) computation of a non-equilibrium, reactive flow of pure oxygen over a double cone is presented. Under the simulated near-continuum conditions, the computational demands are shown to be significant because of the wide range of length scales that must be resolved. Therefore, robust grid adaption capabilities and efficient parallelization of the Stochastic PArallel Rarefied-gas Time-accurate Analyzer (SPARTA) code that is utilized in this work are essential. The thermochemical and transport collision models were selected for efficiency and simplicity. First-principles data, obtained from the highly accurate direct molecular simulation method, were used to inform the collision models’ parameters. Importantly, because SPARTA implements molecular collision models using collision-specific energies, the resulting macroscopic relaxation rates were evaluated a posteriori via zero-dimensional heat bath simulations. The comparisons of surface properties, namely heat flux and pressure, show very close agreement with previous computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results. Differences with the measurements were found to be similar to the CFD simulations. The unresolved discrepancy with the measurements could be due to inconsistent free stream conditions with the actual experimental data or missing physical phenomena altogether, for example atomic and molecular oxygen electronically excited states, three-dimensional effects, or more complex gas–surface interactions. As shown in this work, the advantages of obtaining a DSMC particle solution for these flows reside in the method's ability to be directly informed from first principles and to seamlessly describe internal energy non-equilibrium for all modes. With the advent of exascale computing and beyond, particle methods will be an increasingly important tool to verify the validity of physical assumptions in reduced-order models via fully resolved, experimental-scale simulations, down to the level of molecular-level distributions.

Mechanics↗
DOE OSTI2018

Integrated Model, Batch and Domain Parallelism in Training Neural Networks

We propose a new integrated method of exploiting model, batch and domain parallelism for the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) on large distributed-memory computers using minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Our goal is to find an efficient parallelization strategy for a fixed batch size using $P$ processes. Our method is inspired by the communication-avoiding algorithms in numerical linear algebra. We see $P$ processes as logically divided into a $P_r \times P_c$ grid where the $P_r$ dimension is implicitly responsible for model/domain parallelism and the $P_c$ dimension is implicitly responsible for batch parallelism. In practice, the integrated matrix-based parallel algorithm encapsulates these types of parallelism automatically. We analyze the communication complexity and analytically demonstrate that the lowest communication costs are often achieved neither with pure model nor with pure data parallelism. We also show how the domain parallel approach can help in extending the theoretical scaling limit of the typical batch parallel method.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2010

A Parallel Implementation of Electron-Phonon Scattering in Nanoelectronic Devices up to 95k Cores

A quantum transport approach based on the Non-equilibrium Green's Function formalism and the tight-binding method has been developed to investigate the performances of atomistically resolved nanoelectronic devices in the presence of electron-phonon scattering. The model is integrated into a quad-level parallel environment (bias, momentum, energy, and spatial domain decomposition) that scales almost perfectly up to 220k cores in the ballistic limit of electron transport. In this case, the momentum and energy points form a quasi-embarrassingly parallel problem. The novelty in this paper is the inclusion of scattering self-energies that couple all the momenta and several energies together, requiring substantial inter-processor communication. An efficient parallel implementation of electron-phonon scattering is therefore proposed and applied to a realistically extended transistor structure. A good scaling of the simulation walltime up to 95,256 cores and a sustained performance of 142 TFlop/s are reported on the Cray-XT5 Jaguar.

Luisier, Mathieu↗
DOE OSTI2013

Structured building model reduction toward parallel simulation

Building energy model reduction exchanges accuracy for improved simulation speed by reducing the number of dynamical equations. Parallel computing aims to improve simulation times without loss of accuracy but is poorly utilized by contemporary simulators and is inherently limited by inter-processor communication. This paper bridges these disparate techniques to implement efficient parallel building thermal simulation. We begin with a survey of three structured reduction approaches that compares their performance to a leading unstructured method. We then use structured model reduction to find thermal clusters in the building energy model and allocate processing resources. Experimental results demonstrate faster simulation and low error without any interprocessor communication.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2018

A distributed-memory approximation algorithm for maximum weight perfect bipartite matching

We design and implement an efficient parallel approximation algorithm for the problem of maximum weight perfect matching in bipartite graphs, i.e. the problem of finding a set of non-adjacent edges that covers all vertices and has maximum weight. This problem differs from the maximum weight matching problem, for which scalable approximation algorithms are known. It is primarily motivated by finding good pivots in scalable sparse direct solvers before factorization where sequential implementations of maximum weight perfect matching algorithms, such as those available in MC64, are widely used due to the lack of scalable alternatives. To overcome this limitation, we propose a fully parallel distributed memory algorithm that first generates a perfect matching and then searches for weightaugmenting cycles of length four in parallel and iteratively augments the matching with a vertex disjoint set of such cycles. For most practical problems the weights of the perfect matchings generated by our algorithm are very close to the optimum. An efficient implementation of the algorithm scales up to 256 nodes (17,408 cores) on a Cray XC40 supercomputer and can solve instances that are too large to be handled by a single node using the sequential algorithm.

Azad, Ariful↗
DOE OSTI2010

Synchronous parallel kinetic Monte Carlo Diffusion in Heterogeneous Systems

A new hybrid Molecular Dynamics-kinetic Monte Carlo algorithm has been developed in order to study the basic mechanisms taking place in diffusion in concentrated alloys under the action of chemical and stress fields. Parallel implementation of the k-MC part based on a recently developed synchronous algorithm [1. Compo Phys. 227 (2008) 3804-3823] resorting on the introduction of a set of null events aiming at synchronizing the time for the different subdomains, added to the parallel efficiency of MD, provides the computer power required to evaluate jump rates 'on the flight', incorporating in this way the actual driving force emerging from chemical potential gradients, and the actual environment-dependent jump rates. The time gain has been analyzed and the parallel performance reported. The algorithm is tested on simple diffusion problems to verify its accuracy.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2020

Generating Massive Scale-free Networks: Novel Parallel Algorithms using the Preferential Attachment Model

Recently, there has been substantial interest in the study of various random networks as mathematical models of complex systems. As real-life complex systems grow larger, the ability to generate progressively large random networks becomes all the more important. This motivates the need for efficient parallel algorithms for generating such networks. Naïve parallelization of sequential algorithms for generating random networks is inefficient due to inherent dependencies among the edges and the possibility of creating duplicate (parallel) edges. In this article, we present message passing interface-based distributed memory parallel algorithms for generating random scale-free networks using the preferential-attachment model. Our algorithms are experimentally verified to scale very well to a large number of processing elements (PEs), providing near-linear speedups. The algorithms have been exercised with regard to scale and speed to generate scale-free networks with one trillion edges in 6 minutes using 1,000 PEs.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2019

A memory-distributed quasi-Newton solver for nonlinear programming problems with a small number of general constraints

We approach the problem of parallelizing state-of-the-art nonlinear programming optimization algorithms.Specifically, we focus on parallelizing quasi-Newton interior-point methods that use limited-memory secant Hessian approximations. Such interior-point methods are known to have better convergence properties and to be more effective on large-scale problems than gradient-based and derivative-free optimization algorithms. We target nonlinear and potentially nonconvex optimization problems with an arbitrary number of bound constraints and a small number of general equality and inequality constraints on the optimization variables. These problems occur for example in the form of optimal control, optimal design, and inverse problems governed by ordinary or partial differential equations, whenever they are expressed in a “reduced-space” optimization approach. We introduce and analyze the time and space complexity of a decomposition method for solving the quasi-Newton linear systems that leverages the fact that the quasi-Newton Hessian matrix has a small number of dense blocks that border a low-rank update of a diagonal matrix. This enables an efficient parallelization on memory-distributed computers of the iterations of the optimization algorithm, a state-of-the-art filter line-search interior-point algorithm by Wächter et. al. We illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method by solving structural topology optimization problems on up to 4608 cores on a parallel machine.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2011

Interlocked optimization and fast gradient algorithm for a seismic inverse problem

Highlights: {yields} A 2D extension of the 1D nonlinear inversion of well-seismic data is given. {yields} Appropriate regularization yields a well-determined large scale inverse problem. {yields} An interlocked optimization loop acts as an efficient preconditioner. {yields} The adjoint state method is used to compute the misfit function gradient. {yields} Domain decomposition method yields an efficient parallel implementation. - Abstract: We give a nonlinear inverse method for seismic data recorded in a well from sources at several offsets from the borehole in a 2D acoustic framework. Given the velocity field, approximate values of the impedance are recovered. This is a 2D extension of the 1D inversion of vertical seismic profiles . The inverse problem generates a large scale undetermined ill-conditioned problem. Appropriate regularization terms render the problem well-determined. An interlocked optimization algorithm yields an efficient preconditioning. A gradient algorithm based on the adjoint state method and domain decomposition gives a fast parallel numerical method. For a realistic test case, convergence is attained in an acceptable time with 128 processors.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2015

A scalable, matrix-free multigrid preconditioner for finite element discretizations of heterogeneous Stokes flow

In this paper we describe a computational methodology that is specifically designed for studying three-dimensional geodynamic processes governed by heterogeneous visco-plastic Stokes flow. The method employs a hybrid spatial discretization consisting of a View the MathML sourceQ2-P1disc mixed finite element formulation for the Stokes problem, coupled to a material-point formulation which is used for representing material state and history-dependent variables. The applicability and practicality of this methodology is realized through the development of an efficient, scalable and robust variable viscosity Stokes preconditioner. In this work, these objectives are achieved through exploiting matrix-free operators and a geometric multigrid preconditioner employing hybrid coarse level operators, Chebyshev smoothers and hybrid Krylov coarse level solvers. The robustness and parallel efficiency of this strategy is demonstrated using an idealized geodynamic model. Lastly, we apply the new methodology to study geodynamic models of continental rifting and break-up in order to understand the diverse range of passive continental margins we observe on Earth today

Geodynamics↗
DOE OSTI2018

Alternating Anderson–Richardson method: An efficient alternative to preconditioned Krylov methods for large, sparse linear systems

Here, we present the Alternating Anderson–Richardson (AAR) method: an efficient and scalable alternative to preconditioned Krylov solvers for the solution of large, sparse linear systems on high performance computing platforms. Specifically, we generalize the recently proposed Alternating Anderson–Jacobi (AAJ) method (Pratapa et al., 2016) to include preconditioning, discuss efficient parallel implementation, and provide serial MATLAB and parallel C/C++ implementations. In serial applications to nonsymmetric systems, we find that AAR is comparably robust to GMRES, using the same preconditioning, while often outperforming it in time to solution; and find AAR to be more robust than Bi-CGSTAB for the problems considered. In parallel applications to the Helmholtz and Poisson equations, we find that AAR shows superior strong and weak scaling to GMRES, Bi-CGSTAB, and Conjugate Gradient (CG) methods, using the same preconditioning, with consistently shorter times to solution at larger processor counts. Finally, in massively parallel applications to the Poisson equation, on up to 110,592 processors, we find that AAR shows superior strong and weak scaling to CG, with shorter minimum time to solution. We thus find that AAR offers a robust and efficient alternative to current state-of-the-art solvers, with increasing advantages as the number of processors grows.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

DeepHyper: A Python Package for Massively Parallel Hyperparameter Optimization in Machine Learning

Machine learning models are increasingly applied across scientific disciplines, yet their effectiveness often hinges on heuristic decisions—such as data transformations, training strategies, and model architectures—that are not learned by the models themselves. Automating the selection of these heuristics and analyzing their sensitivity is crucial for building robust and efficient learning workflows. DeepHyper addresses this challenge by democratizing hyperparameter optimization, providing accessible tools to streamline and enhance machine learning workflows from a laptop to the largest supercomputer in the world. Building on top of hyperparameter optimization, it unlocks new capabilities around ensembles of models for improved accuracy and uncertainty quantification. All of these organized around efficient parallel computing.

ensemble↗
DOE OSTI2022

Parthenon—a performance portable block-structured adaptive mesh refinement framework

On the path to exascale the landscape of computer device architectures and corresponding programming models has become much more diverse. While various low-level performance portable programming models are available, support at the application level lacks behind. To address this issue, we present the performance portable block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) framework Parthenon, derived from the well-tested and widely used Athena++ astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics code, but generalized to serve as the foundation for a variety of downstream multi-physics codes. Parthenon adopts the Kokkos programming model, and provides various levels of abstractions from multidimensional variables, to packages defining and separating components, to launching of parallel compute kernels. Parthenon allocates all data in device memory to reduce data movement, supports the logical packing of variables and mesh blocks to reduce kernel launch overhead, and employs one-sided, asynchronous MPI calls to reduce communication overhead in multi-node simulations. Using a hydrodynamics miniapp, we demonstrate weak and strong scaling on various architectures including AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, Intel and AMD x86 CPUs, IBM Power9 CPUs, as well as Fujitsu A64FX CPUs. At the largest scale on Frontier (the first TOP500 exascale machine), the miniapp reaches a total of 1.7 × 10 13 zone-cycles/s on 9216 nodes (73,728 logical GPUs) at [Formula: see text] weak scaling parallel efficiency (starting from a single node). In combination with being an open, collaborative project, this makes Parthenon an ideal framework to target exascale simulations in which the downstream developers can focus on their specific application rather than on the complexity of handling massively-parallel, device-accelerated AMR.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

HDF5 in the exascale era: Delivering efficient and scalable parallel I/O for exascale applications

Accurately modeling real-world systems requires scientific applications at exascale to generate massive amounts of data and manage data storage efficiently. However, parallel input and output (I/O) faces challenges due to new application workflows and the state-of-the-art memory, interconnect, and storage architectures considered in exascale designs. The storage hierarchy has expanded with node-local persistent memory, solid-state storage, and traditional disk and tape-based storage, thus requiring efficiency at each layer and much more efficient data movement among these layers. This paper discusses how the ExaHDF5 project improved the I/O performance and data management for exascale architectures by enhancing HDF5, a widely used parallel I/O library. The team developed an Asynchronous I/O Virtual Object Layer (VOL) connector that allowed overlapping I/O with computation. They also created a Cache VOL to complement asynchronous I/O by incorporating fast storage layers, such as burst buffer and node-local storage, into the parallel I/O workflow through caching and staging data. Additionally, the team enabled data aggregation and I/O at the node level by using a Subfiling Virtual File Driver (VFD). To demonstrate superior I/O performance with HDF5 at exascale, the ExaHDF5 team collaborated with several exascale applications. In this paper, we show I/O performance improvements for three applications: Cabana (a particle-based simulation library), EQSIM (a regional earthquake simulation software), and E3SM (a climate system modeling library).

Asynchronous I/Ol↗