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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 1,207 records · Page 67

Modeling Astrophysical Explosions and Nucleosynthesis (Final Technical Report)

The goal of this project was to further our theoretical understanding of the extreme physics and heavy element nucleosynthesis occurring in stellar explosions, in particular supernovae and neutron star mergers. To study these systems, we further developed and applied numerical simulations (radiation hydrodynamical models and nuclear reaction networks) run on high performance computers. The numerical calculations and companion theoretical analysis helped to better define the sites of astrophysical nucleosynthesis, and make predictions of the associated observables (nucleosynthetic yields and electromagnetic signals) that can be used to anticipate and interpret experimental data. This project enhances the scientific value of the nuclear data obtained from current and future experimental facilities (e.g., rare isotope beams) by improving our understanding of the astrophysical context and specific physical conditions under which we expect such reactions to take place in Nature.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

How is statistical thinking useful for evaluating foundation models?

Good’s statement appears to be rather prescient – while humanity has marched on through to the 21st century, modern artificial intelligence (AI), driven by a menagerie of immense deep-neural-network architectures aided with parallel computation, seems positioned to change life as we know it. It would be an understatement to say that the world has been captivated by AI. Recent engineering feats, such as autonomous vehicles and generative AI, have gripped the public sphere, and AI is poised to disrupt a host of industries – including software, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, manufacturing, entertainment, and a slew of others; indeed, one is hard pressed to find any industry that does not claim to bear an impact from the so-called AI revolution.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Implementation of Detailed Polyethylene Pyrolysis Kinetics into CFD Simulations using Machine Learning

Municipal solid waste (MSW) and waste plastics have received significant attention due to the issues of waste generation and storage, as well as their potential as an energy resource. High-density polyethylene (HDPE) makes up a large portion of plastic waste and has been the subject of several conversion studies. However, the mechanisms associated with converting HDPE through pyrolysis and gasification are extensive and complex making them difficult to implement into high-fidelity computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations. For this project, a primary pyrolysis mechanism containing 42 unique species and 737 heterogeneous reactions was used to generate kinetic data over a range of operating conditions. A machine learning (ML) model was developed to replicate the results of the detailed pyrolysis mechanism while significantly increasing the computational efficiency. A deep operator network (DeepONet) architecture was adopted to train the model using time steps relevant to CFD simulations. The ML used physics-based loss functions to ensure mass conservation. The ML model has been deployed in simple MFiX CFD simulations, single particle, and an experimental drop tube reactor, and has shown promising performance compared to the original scheme.

Houston, Ross↗

Explosion Detection using Transfer Learning via YAMNet [Poster]

The acoustic data of explosions and noise collected on smartphones were fed to the YAMNet model to obtain the scores of each class. The data was split 60/20/20 for training, validation, and testing. A single-layered neural network was trained using the computed scores to predict if the data was an explosion or noise. The trained model was then combined with the YAMNet model. The combined model was tested with the ESC-50 dataset to investigate overall accuracy and class based false positive rates.

98 - NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL↗

High-Voltage DC MULTI-terminal SIMulation (HVDC MULTISIM): Technical Program Summary

Expansion of the power grid in the USA is essential to fulfilling the rising energy demand of the country. In particular, the transmission grid, a network of electrical energy corridors that enable the flow of large amounts of energy from the point of generation to the point of consumption, needs significant expansion to cater to this growth of electrification. The current infrastructure is also dated, and any new transmission corridor should be based on a vision of building a modern infrastructure that is futureproof. High voltage DC (HVDC) transmission technology falls in this category: it is the most economical way to build large transmission lines and relies on sophisticated electronics and flexible controls, rather than just passive components like switchgear and transformers. This project is aimed at establishing the technical and economic feasibility of a network of HVDC lines that are interconnected to form a multi-terminal DC network. HVDC transmission is not a new technology and United States has a number of such lines; however, these are point to point transmissions and do not form a DC grid. Modeling and analyzing DC grids is challenging since there are no established modeling tools and the traditional ways of modeling AC grids fall short of providing the fidelity required the fast dynamics of the DC grid. This project aims to build a software-in-the-loop simulator for a multi-terminal HVDC grid, called MULTISIM and, establish new control and protection algorithms to operate such a connected DC system. NLR, a key partner, established the core framework of the MULTISIM simulator and validated its functionality. The GE Vernova team, created a full-scale model of a four-terminal HVDC network using PSCAD (Power Systems Computer Aided Design) software and established the baseline performance of the system during normal and fault operation. The project was started on 10/12024 with a kick-off meeting held on 12/11/2024 and ran through two quarters till termination. All the tasks, milestones and deliverables during this period were met. Several interim reports detailing the various tasks were submitted. The following sections provide details on the completed tasks till the project pause and termination after Q2.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Confinement and Kink Entanglement Asymmetry on a Quantum Ising Chain

In this work, we explore the interplay of confinement, string breaking and entanglement asymmetry on a 1D quantum Ising chain. We consider the evolution of an initial domain wall and show that, surprisingly, while the introduction of confinement through a longitudinal field typically suppresses entanglement, it can also serve to increase it beyond a bound set for free particles. Our model can be tuned to conserve the number of domain walls, which gives an opportunity to explore entanglement asymmetry associated with link variables. We study two approaches to deal with the non-locality of the link variables, either directly or following a Kramers-Wannier transformation that maps bond variables (kinks) to site variables (spins). We develop a numerical procedure for computing the asymmetry using tensor network methods and use it to demonstrate the different types of entanglement and entanglement asymmetry.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Application and Evaluation of Surrogate Models for Radiation Source Search

Surrogate models are increasingly required for applications in which first-principles simulation models are prohibitively expensive to employ for uncertainty analysis, design, or control. They can also be used to approximate models whose discontinuous derivatives preclude the use of gradient-based optimization or data assimilation algorithms. We consider the problem of inferring the 2D location and intensity of a radiation source in an urban environment using a ray-tracing model based on Boltzmann transport theory. Whereas the code implementing this model is relatively efficient, extension to 3D Monte Carlo transport simulations precludes subsequent Bayesian inference to infer source locations, which typically requires thousands to millions of simulations. Additionally, the resulting likelihood exhibits discontinuous derivatives due to the presence of buildings. To address these issues, we discuss the construction of surrogate models for optimization, Bayesian inference, and uncertainty propagation. Specifically, we consider surrogate models based on Legendre polynomials, multivariate adaptive regression splines, radial basis functions, Gaussian processes, and neural networks. We detail strategies for computing training points and discuss the merits and deficits of each method.

Cook, Jared A.↗

A Hybrid Approach for Model Order Reduction of Barotropic Quasi-Geostrophic Turbulence

We put forth a robust reduced-order modeling approach for near real-time prediction of mesoscale flows. In our hybrid-modeling framework, we combine physics-based projection methods with neural network closures to account for truncated modes. We introduce a weighting parameter between the Galerkin projection and extreme learning machine models and explore its effectiveness, accuracy and generalizability. To illustrate the success of the proposed modeling paradigm, we predict both the mean flow pattern and the time series response of a single-layer quasi-geostrophic ocean model, which is a simplified prototype for wind-driven general circulation models. We demonstrate that our approach yields significant improvements over both the standard Galerkin projection and fully non-intrusive neural network methods with a negligible computational overhead.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Microphysics in the Gamma-Ray Burst Central Engine

We calculate the structure and evolution of a gamma-ray burst central engine where an accreting torus has formed around the newly born black hole. We study the general relativistic, MHD models and we self-consistently incorporate the nuclear equation of state. The latter accounts for the degeneracy of relativistic electrons, protons, and neutrons, and is used in the dynamical simulation, instead of a standard polytropic γ -law. The EOS provides the conditions for the nuclear pressure in the function of density and temperature, which evolve with time according to the conservative MHD scheme. We analyze the structure of the torus and outflowing winds, and compute the neutrino flux emitted through the nuclear reaction balance in the dense and hot matter. We also estimate the rate of transfer of the black-hole rotational energy to the bipolar jets. Finally, we elaborate on the nucleosynthesis of heavy elements in the accretion flow and the wind, through computations of the thermonuclear reaction network. We discuss the possible signatures of the radioactive element decay in the accretion flow. We suggest that further detailed modeling of the accretion flow in the GRB engine, together with its microphysics, may be a valuable tool to constrain the black-hole mass and spin. It can be complementary to the gravitational wave analysis if the waves are detected with an electromagnetic counterpart.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Wide neural networks with bottlenecks are deep Gaussian processes

There has recently been much work on the "wide limit" of neural networks, where Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) are shown to converge to a Gaussian process (GP) as all hidden layers are sent to infinite width. However, these results do not apply to architectures that require one or more of the hidden layers to remain narrow. In this paper, we consider the wide limit of BNNs where some hidden layers, called "bottlenecks", are held at finite width. The result is a composition of GPs that we term a "bottleneck neural network Gaussian process" (bottleneck NNGP). Although intuitive, the subtlety of the proof is in showing that the wide limit of a composition of networks is in fact the composition of the limiting GPs. We also analyze theoretically a single-bottleneck NNGP, finding that the bottleneck induces dependence between the outputs of a multi-output network that persists through extreme post-bottleneck depths, and prevents the kernel of the network from losing discriminative power at extreme post-bottleneck depths.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Solving inverse problems in stochastic models using deep neural networks and adversarial training

Inverse problems associated with stochastic models constitute a significant portion of scientific and engineering applications. In such cases the unknown quantities are distributions. The applicability of traditional methods is limited because of their demanding assumptions or prohibitive computational consumption; for example, maximum likelihood methods require closed-form density functions, and Markov Chain Monte Carlo needs a large number of simulations. We propose a new method that estimates the unknown distribution by matching the statistical properties between observed and simulated random processes. We leverage the expressive power of neural networks to approximate the unknown distribution and use a discriminative neural network for computing the statistical discrepancies between the observed and simulated random processes. Here we demonstrated numerically that the proposed methods can estimate both the model parameters and learn complicated unknown distributions.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Encoding integers and rationals on neuromorphic computers using virtual neuron

Abstract Neuromorphic computers emulate the human brain while being extremely power efficient for computing tasks. In fact, they are poised to be critical for energy-efficient computing in the future. Neuromorphic computers are primarily used in spiking neural network–based machine learning applications. However, they are known to be Turing-complete, and in theory can perform all general-purpose computation. One of the biggest bottlenecks in realizing general-purpose computations on neuromorphic computers today is the inability to efficiently encode data on the neuromorphic computers. To fully realize the potential of neuromorphic computers for energy-efficient general-purpose computing, efficient mechanisms must be devised for encoding numbers. Current encoding mechanisms (e.g., binning, rate-based encoding, and time-based encoding) have limited applicability and are not suited for general-purpose computation. In this paper, we present the virtual neuron abstraction as a mechanism for encoding and adding integers and rational numbers by using spiking neural network primitives. We evaluate the performance of the virtual neuron on physical and simulated neuromorphic hardware. We estimate that the virtual neuron could perform an addition operation using just 23 nJ of energy on average with a mixed-signal, memristor-based neuromorphic processor. We also demonstrate the utility of the virtual neuron by using it in some of the μ -recursive functions, which are the building blocks of general-purpose computation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Analysis and mitigation of parasitic resistance effects for analog in-memory neural network acceleration

To support the increasing demands for efficient deep neural network processing, accelerators based on analog in-memory computation of matrix multiplication have recently gained significant attention for reducing the energy of neural network inference. However, analog processing within memory arrays must contend with the issue of parasitic voltage drops across the metal interconnects, which distort the results of the computation and limit the array size. This work analyzes how parasitic resistance affects the end-to-end inference accuracy of state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks, and comprehensively studies how various design decisions at the device, circuit, architecture, and algorithm levels affect the system's sensitivity to parasitic resistance effects. Here, a set of guidelines are provided for how to design analog accelerator hardware that is intrinsically robust to parasitic resistance, without any explicit compensation or re-training of the network parameters.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Equation-free and variable free modeling for complex/multiscale systems. Coarse-grained computation in science and engineering using fine-grained models

The work explored the linking of modern developing machine learning techniques (manifold learning and in particular diffusion maps) with traditional PDE modeling/discretization/scientific computation techniques via the equation-free methodology developed by the PI. The result (in addition to several PhD degrees, two of them by CSGF Fellows) was a sequence of strong developments - in part on the algorithmic side, linking data mining with scientific computing, and in part on applications, ranging from PDE discretizations to molecular dynamics and complex network dynamics.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Variable-Width Datapath for On-Chip Network Static Power Reduction

With the tight power budgets in modern large-scale chips and the unpredictability of application traffic, on-chip network designers are faced with the dilemma of designing for worst- case bandwidth demands and incurring high static power overheads, or designing for an average traffic pattern and risk degrading performance. This paper proposes adaptive bandwidth networks (ABNs) which divide channels and switches into lanes such that the network provides just the bandwidth necessary in each hop. ABNs also activate input virtual channels (VCs) individually and take advantage of drowsy SRAM cells to eliminate false VC activations. In addition, ABNs readily apply to silicon defect tolerance with just the extra cost for detecting faults. For application traffic, ABNs reduce total power consumption by an average of 45percent with comparable performance compared to single-lane power-gated networks, and 33percent compared to multi-network designs.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A survey of techniques for optimizing transformer inference

Recent years have seen a phenomenal rise in the performance and applications of transformer neural networks. The family of transformer networks, including Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT), Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) and Vision Transformer (ViT), have shown their effectiveness across Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) domains. Transformer-based networks such as ChatGPT have impacted the lives of common men. However, the quest for high predictive performance has led to an exponential increase in transformers' memory and compute footprint. Researchers have proposed techniques to optimize transformer inference at all levels of abstraction. Further, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of techniques for optimizing the inference phase of transformer networks. We survey techniques such as knowledge distillation, pruning, quantization, neural architecture search and lightweight network design at the algorithmic level. We further review hardware-level optimization techniques and the design of novel hardware accelerators for transformers. We summarize the quantitative results on the number of parameters/FLOPs and the accuracy of several models/techniques to showcase the tradeoff exercised by them. We also outline future directions in this rapidly evolving field of research. We believe that this survey will educate both novice and seasoned researchers and also spark a plethora of research efforts in this field.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Data Movement Dominates: Advanced Memory Technology to Address the Real Exascale Power Problem

Energy is the fundamental barrier to Exascale supercomputing and is dominated by the cost of moving data from one point to another, not computation. Similarly, performance is dominated by data movement, not computation. The solution to this problem requires three critical technologies: 3D integration, optical chip-to-chip communication, and a new communication model. The central goal of the Sandia led "Data Movement Dominates" project aimed to develop memory systems and new architectures based on these technologies that have the potential to lower the cost of local memory accesses by orders of magnitude and provide substantially more bandwidth. Only through these transformational advances can future systems reach the goals of Exascale computing with a manageable power budgets. The Sandia led team included co-PIs from Columbia University, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and the University of Maryland. The Columbia effort of Data Movement Dominates focused on developing a physically accurate simulation environment and experimental verification for optically-connected memory (OCM) systems that can enable continued performance scaling through high-bandwidth capacity, energy-efficient bit-rate transparency, and time-of-flight latency. With OCM, memory device parallelism and total capacity can scale to match future high-performance computing requirements without sacrificing data-movement efficiency. When we consider systems with integrated photonics, links to memory can be seamlessly integrated with the interconnection network-in a sense, memory becomes a primary aspect of the interconnection network. At the core of the Columbia effort, toward expanding our understanding of OCM enabled computing we have created an integrated modeling and simulation environment that uniquely integrates the physical behavior of the optical layer. The PhoenxSim suite of design and software tools developed under this effort has enabled the co-design of and performance evaluation photonics-enabled OCM architectures on Exascale computing systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

ISAP-MATLAB Package for Sensitivity Analysis of High-Dimensional Stochastic Chemical Networks

Stochastic simulation and modeling play an important role to elucidate the fundamental mechanisms in complex biochemical networks. The parametric sensitivity analysis of reaction networks becomes a powerful mathematical and computational tool, yielding information regarding the robustness and the identifiability of model parameters. However, due to overwhelming computational cost, parametric sensitivity analysis is a extremely challenging problem for stochastic models with a high-dimensional parameter space and for which existing approaches are very slow. Here we present an information-theoretic sensitivity analysis in path-space (ISAP) MATLAB package that simulates stochastic processes with various algorithms and most importantly implements a gradient-free approach to quantify the parameter sensitivities of stochastic chemical reaction network dynamics using the pathwise Fisher information matrix (PFIM; Pantazis, Katsoulakis, and Vlachos 2013). The sparse, block-diagonal structure of the PFIM makes its computational complexity scale linearly with the number of model parameters. As a result of the gradientfree and the sparse nature of the PFIM, it is highly suitable for the sensitivity analysis of stochastic reaction networks with a very large number of model parameters, which are typical in the modeling and simulation of complex biochemical phenomena. Finally, the PFIM provides a fast sensitivity screening method (Arampatzis, Katsoulakis, and Pantazis 2015) which allows it to be combined with any existing sensitivity analysis software.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗