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At least 1,207 records · Page 67

Simulated evolution of fluorophores for light emitting diodes

Organic light emitting diodes based on fluorophores with a propensity for thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) are able to circumvent limitations imposed on device efficiency by spin statistics. Molecules with a propensity for TADF necessarily have two properties: a small gap between the lowest lying singlet and triplet excited states and a large transition dipole moment for fluorescence. In this work, we demonstrate the use of a genetic algorithm to search a region of chemical space for molecules with these properties. This algorithm is based on a flexible and intuitive representation of the molecule as a tree data structure, in which the nodes correspond to molecular fragments. Our implementation takes advantage of hybrid parallel graphics processing unit accelerated computer clusters to allow efficient sampling while retaining a reasonably accurate description of the electronic structure (in this case, CAM-B3LYP/6-31G{sup ∗∗}). In total, we have identified 3792 promising candidate fluorophores from a chemical space containing 1.26 × 10{sup 6} molecules. This required performing electronic structure calculations on only 7518 molecules, a small fraction of the full space. Several novel classes of molecules which show promise as fluorophores are presented.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Multichannel gas-uptake/evolution reactor for monitoring liquid-phase chemical reactions

The design of a headspace pressure-monitoring reactor for measuring the uptake/evolution of gas in gas–liquid chemical transformations is described. The reactor features a parallel setup with ten-reactor cells, each featuring a low working volume of 0.2–2 ml, a pressure capacity from 0 to 150 PSIa, and a high sensitivity pressure transducer. The reactor cells are composed of commercially available disposable thickwalled glassware and compact monolithic weld assemblies. The software interface controls the reactor temperature while monitoring pressure in each of the parallel reactor cells. Reactions are easy to set up and yield high-density gas uptake/evolution data. This instrument is especially well suited to acquire quantitative time-course data for reactions with small quantities of gas consumed or produced.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

How to estimate the 3D power spectrum of the Lyman-α forest

Here, we derive and numerically implement an algorithm for estimating the 3D power spectrum of the Lyman-α (Lyα) forest flux fluctuations. The algorithm exploits the unique geometry of Lyα forest data to efficiently measure the cross-spectrum between lines of sight as a function of parallel wavenumber, transverse separation and redshift. We start by approximating the global covariance matrix as block-diagonal, where only pixels from the same spectrum are correlated. We then compute the eigenvectors of the derivative of the signal covariance with respect to cross-spectrum parameters, and project the inverse-covariance-weighted spectra onto them. This acts much like a radial Fourier transform over redshift windows. The resulting cross-spectrum inference is then converted into our final product, an approximation of the likelihood for the 3D power spectrum expressed as second order Taylor expansion around a fiducial model. We demonstrate the accuracy and scalability of the algorithm and comment on possible extensions. Our algorithm will allow efficient analysis of the upcoming Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument dataset.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Impurity screening behavior of the high-field side scrape-off layer in near-double-null configurations: prospect for mitigating plasma–material interactions on RF actuators and first-wall components

The impurity screening response of the high-field side (HFS) scrape-off layer (SOL) to localized nitrogen injection is investigated on Alcator C-Mod for magnetic equilibria spanning lower-single-null, double-null and upper-single-null configurations under otherwise identical plasma conditions. L-mode, EDA H-mode and I-mode discharges are investigated. HFS impurity screening is found to depend on magnetic flux balance and the direction of B × $\nabla$B relative to the most active divertor. Impurity 'plume' emission patterns indicate that both parallel and perpendicular (E × B) flows in the SOL contribute to the 'flushing' of impurities towards the active divertor, thereby affecting the overall impurity screening behavior. Despite the fact that the HFS SOL is extremely narrow in near-double-null configurations, this SOL is able to screen locally injected nitrogen at least as effectively as the low-field side (LFS) SOL—up to a factor of 10 more effective, depending on specific plasma conditions and whether the magnetic geometry produces parallel flows that work with or against E × B flows. For situations in which the E × B drift of the impurity ions opposes parallel flow toward the primary divertor, HFS impurity screening is found to be least effective. When E × B drifts assist parallel flow toward the primary divertor, HFS impurity screening is found to be very effective. These data support the idea of placing RF actuators and close-fitting wall components on the HFS of the tokamak. Finally, with this configuration, near-double-null magnetic topologies may be used for active control of plasma parameters at the antenna/plasma interface for optimal RF coupling, mitigate the generation of local impurities from plasma–material interactions and, taking advantage of favorable plasma flows and good screening properties of the HFS SOL, further minimize the impact of wall-born impurity sources on the plasma core.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Improved renormalization group computation of likelihood functions for cosmological data sets

Evaluation of likelihood functions for cosmological large scale structure data sets (including CMB, galaxy redshift surveys, etc.) naturally involves marginalization, i.e., integration, over an unknown underlying random signal field. Recently, I showed how a renormalization group method can be used to carry out this integration efficiently by first integrating out the smallest scale structure, i.e., localized structure on the scale of differences between nearby data cells, then combining adjacent cells in a coarse graining step, then repeating this process over and over until all scales have been integrated. Here I extend the formulation in several ways in order to reduce the prefactor on the method's linear scaling with data set size. The key improvement is showing how to integrate out the difference between specific adjacent cells before summing them in the coarse graining step, compared to the original formulation in which small-scale fluctuations were integrated more generally. I suggest some other improvements in details of the scheme, including showing how to perform the integration around a maximum likelihood estimate for the underlying random field. In the end, an accurate likelihood computation for a million-cell Gaussian test data set runs in two minutes on my laptop, with room for further optimization and straightforward parallelization.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Bayesian Spectral Moment Estimation and Uncertainty Quantification

We present a Bayesian spectral fitting method developed for spectroscopic data analysis, particularly (but not solely) in the context of fusion energy research. The presented techniques are particularly valuable to estimating moments and corresponding uncertainties whenever the spectra result from line-integrated measurements in nonuniform plasmas, for which the approximation of atomic line shapes being ideal Gaussians gives poor estimates. We decompose multiple, potentially overlapping spectral lines into a sum of Gauss-Hermite polynomials, whose properties allow efficient truncation and uncertainty quantification, often with only three free parameters per atomic emission line. Tests with both synthetic and experimental data demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness where more standard nonlinear fitting routines may experience difficulties. A parallelized version of our implementation is publicly released under an open source license.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Scalable Deep Learning via I/O Analysis and Optimization

Scalable deep neural network training has been gaining prominence because of the increasing importance of deep learning in a multitude of scientific and commercial domains. Consequently, a number of researchers have investigated techniques to optimize deep learning systems. Much of the prior work has focused on runtime and algorithmic enhancements to optimize the computation and communication. Despite these enhancements, however, deep learning systems still suffer from scalability limitations, particularly with respect to data I/O. This situation is especially true for training models where the computation can be effectively parallelized, leaving I/O as the major bottleneck. In fact, our analysis shows that I/O can take up to 90% of the total training time. Thus, in this article, we first analyze LMDB, the most widely used I/O subsystem of deep learning frameworks, to understand the causes of this I/O inefficiency. Based on our analysis, we propose LMDBIO—an optimized I/O plugin for scalable deep learning. LMDBIO includes six novel optimizations that together address the various shortcomings in existing I/O for deep learning. Lastly, our experimental results show that LMDBIO significantly outperforms LMDB in all cases and improves overall application performance by up to 65-fold on a 9,216-core system.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Final project report for DE-SC0010620: Scale-aware, improved hydrological and biogeochemical simulations of the Amazon under a changing climate

Shen was the PI for DOE project entitled Scale-Aware, Improved Hydrological and Biogeochemical Simulations of the Amazon Under a Changing Climate (contract DE-SC0010620; PI: Chaopeng Shen; co-PI, John Melack, William Riley, $976,000, 2013-2018). Under this project, the group has made substantial progress in (a) scientific advancement: (b) model and software engineering development; (c) aided parallel DoE project; (d) generating datasets; and (e) graduate and postdoc education that are useful global data fusion and model validation; and (f) participated and presented in several conferences. In summary, we have published 15 peer-reviewed papers (citations bolded below) and numerous conference presentations. One more paper is still under review. Our software progress has been shared with the wider community.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

SBIR Phase I Final Report, TACO: Distributed and Heterogeneous Sparse Compiler

Tensor algebra is a powerful tool for computing, but writing optimized codes that operate on sparse tensors can be very complex. This project enables a Tensor Algebra Compiler (TACO) that simplifies this task from man-years to man-days and extends TACO to support complex and large distributed systems. This report details the hypotheses, approaches used, and findings in this project.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Large Scale MD to Predict Epitope Regions in HIV Env [Slides]

Highly dense carbohydrates located on the surface of the HIV Env protein play a key role in immune evasion. Such evolutionary adaptation hampers any attempt to obtain a full mechanistic understanding of the role played by the glycans in protecting the virus against an effective immune response. Moreover, and due to their chemical variability, an accurate molecular understanding of the so called “glycan shield” is still limited by the lack of effective resolution of state-of-the-art experimental technics. Here, we have used extensive computational modelling in order to fill this gap, addressing the presence of a large glycan variability as observed experimentally. Based on an automated pipeline, we were able to assemble, set-up and simulate via Molecular dynamics hundreds of different glycosylated Env variants at nearly atomic resolution, recapitulating the glycosylation distributions observed experimentally. Results from these simulations were subjected to machine learning and very accurate prediction of simulation derived glycan shielding areas of each glycan as a function of static sequence features. Such predictive models of per-glycan shielding, incorporating both glycan dynamics and heterogeneity, were used to develop a novel sequence-based glycan shield mapping strategy. Parallel to these studies, we also developed an accurate machine learning approach to predict glycan heterogeneity data using sequence features and found good prediction accuracy.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Arsenic Exposure Causes Global Changes in the Metalloproteome of Escherichia coli

Arsenic is a toxic metalloid with differential biological effects, depending on speciation and concentration. Trivalent arsenic (arsenite, AsIII) is more toxic at lower concentrations than the pentavalent form (arsenate, AsV). In E. coli, the proteins encoded by the arsRBC operon are the major arsenic detoxification mechanism. Our previous transcriptional analyses indicate broad changes in metal uptake and regulation upon arsenic exposure. Currently, it is not known how arsenic exposure impacts the cellular distribution of other metals. This study examines the metalloproteome of E. coli strains with and without the arsRBC operon in response to sublethal doses of AsIII and AsV. Size exclusion chromatography coupled with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (SEC-ICPMS) was used to investigate the distribution of five metals (56Fe, 24Mg, 66Zn, 75As, and 63Cu) in proteins and protein complexes under native conditions. Parallel analysis by SEC-UV-Vis spectroscopy monitored the presence of protein cofactors. Together, these data reveal global changes in the metalloproteome, proteome, protein cofactors, and soluble intracellular metal pools in response to arsenic stress in E. coli. This work brings to light one outcome of metal exposure and suggests that metal toxicity on the cellular level arises from direct and indirect effects.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Impurity screening behavior of the high-field side scrape-off layer in near-double-null configurations: prospect for mitigating plasma-material interactions on RF actuators and first-wall components

The impurity screening response of the high-field side (HFS) scrape-off layer (SOL) to localized nitrogen injection is investigated on Alcator C-Mod for magnetic equilibria spanning lower-single null, double-null and upper single null configurations under otherwise identical plasma conditions. L-mode, EDA H-mode and I-mode discharges are investigated. HFS impurity screening is found to depend on magnetic flux balance and the direction of B×?B relative to the most active divertor. Impurity ‘plume’ emission patterns indicate that both parallel and perpendicular (E×B) flows in the SOL contribute to the ‘flushing’ of impurities towards the active divertor, thereby affecting the overall impurity screening behavior. Despite the fact that the HFS scrape-off layer is extremely narrow in near-double-null configurations, this SOL is able to screen locally injected nitrogen at least as effectively as the low-field side (LFS) SOL – up to a factor of 10 more effective, depending on specific plasma conditions and whether the magnetic geometry produces parallel flows that work with or against E×B flows. For situations in which the E×B drift of the impurity ions opposes parallel flow toward the primary divertor, HFS impurity screening is found to be least effective. When E×B drifts assist parallel flow toward the primary divertor, HFS impurity screening is found to be very effective. These data support the idea of placing RF actuators and close-fitting wall components on the high-field side of the tokamak. With this configuration, near-double-null magnetic topologies may be used for active control of plasma parameters at the antenna/plasma interface for optimal RF coupling, mitigate the generation of local impurities from plasma-material interactions and, taking advantage of favorable plasma flows and good screening properties of the HFS SOL, further minimize the impact of wall-born impurity sources on the plasma core.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

A Scalable Graph Analytics Framework for Programming with Big Data in R (pbdR)

Many disciplines such as biology, economics, engineering, physics, and the social sciences represent their data as graphs to capture patterns, trends, and associations. There are are many commercially available graph libraries in different programming languages to analyze these complex graphs. But there is no distributed graph library package in R - the popular statistical programming language to analyze graphs that bigger than a single machine's memory. Many domain experts prefer R over the numerous other alternatives. Towards this, we present a distributed graph analytics framework for R called programming with big graph using R (pBGR.) Our proposed framework leverages the Programming with Big Data in R (pbdR) ecosystem that provides scalable R packages for distributed computing in data science. We present an early prototype implementation of this framework using the distributed-memory parallel graph library CombBLAS and evaluate the framework's performance on leadership class computing platforms. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable of performing large-scale parallel graph mining through the easyto-use R language. This enhanced graph processing capability coupled with other statistical tools already available in R, should be valuable to many domain experts.

Hasan, S M Shamimul↗

Native Architecture of Wheat Straw Cell Walls: A Unified Model from X-ray Scattering and Solid-State NMR

Plant secondary cell walls constitute the dominant reservoir of renewable biomass, comprising tightly packed cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin at the nanoscale. Recent advances in solid-state NMR spectroscopy and the availability of small-angle X-ray scattering for biomass characterization have led to an accumulation of experimental data on cell wall organization, yet no explicit structure model has simultaneously satisfied both Xray and NMR observations. Using wheat straw as a model system, we propose a structural framework consistent with current knowledge of cellulose biosynthesis, X-ray scattering data, and one- and two-dimensional 13 C solid-state NMR spectra. In this model, 18-chain elementary fibrils align in parallel and populate the cross-section at random. Arabinose-substituted xylan shows no conformational dependence for cellulose-binding in wheat, and only a minor fraction of 2-fold xylan appears in close proximity to cellulose, unlike in Arabidopsis, where xylan is more tightly attached to the cellulose surface. While NMR data cannot unambiguously resolve the internal arrangement of the 18 glucan chains, X-ray scattering profiles uniquely constrain the fibril size and exclude the possibility of tight bundling in the intact walls. The specific interaction between the matrix polymers and the cellulose elementary fibrils must be reconsidered in light of the small interfibril spaces, which bring the matrix components into spatial proximity with cellulose even in the absence of attractive interactions. These findings provide fundamental molecular-level insight into cellulose fibril architecture and matrix−polymer interactions, resolving longstanding discrepancies between spectroscopic and scattering data and advancing our understanding of biopolymer assembly into structurally and functionally versatile lignocellulosic biomaterials.

Carbohydrates↗

Distributed non-negative matrix factorization with determination of the number of latent features

The holistic analysis and understanding of the latent (that is, not directly observable) variables and patterns buried in large datasets is crucial for data-driven science, decision making and emergency response. Such exploratory analyses require devising unsupervised learning methods for data mining and extraction of the latent features, and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is one of the prominent such methods. NMF is based on compute-intense non-convex constrained minimization, which, for large datasets requires fast and distributed algorithms. However, current parallel implementations of NMF fail to estimate the number of latent features. In practice, identifying these features is both difficult and significant for pattern recognition and latent feature analysis, especially for large dense matrices. Here, we introduce a distributed NMF algorithm coupled with distributed custom clustering followed by a stability analysis on dense data, which we call DnMFk, to determine the number of latent variables. The results on synthetic data and the classical Swimmer data set demonstrate the accuracy of model determination while scaling nearly linearly across multiple processors for large data. Further, we employ DnMFk to determine the number of hidden features from a terabyte matrix.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

AMRZone: A Runtime AMR Data Sharing Framework For Scientific Applications

Frameworks that facilitate runtime data sharing across multiple applications are of great importance for scientific data analytics. Although existing frameworks work well over uniform mesh data, they can not effectively handle adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) data. Among the challenges to construct an AMR-capable framework include: (1) designing an architecture that facilitates online AMR data management; (2) achieving a load-balanced AMR data distribution for the data staging space at runtime; and (3) building an effective online index to support the unique spatial data retrieval requirements for AMR data. Towards addressing these challenges to support runtime AMR data sharing across scientific applications, we present the AMRZone framework. Experiments over real-world AMR datasets demonstrate AMRZone's effectiveness at achieving a balanced workload distribution, reading/writing large-scale datasets with thousands of parallel processes, and satisfying queries with spatial constraints. Moreover, AMRZone's performance and scalability are even comparable with existing state-of-the-art work when tested over uniform mesh data with up to 16384 cores; in the best case, our framework achieves a 46% performance improvement.

Zhang, Wenzhao↗

SU-E-T-36: A GPU-Accelerated Monte-Carlo Dose Calculation Platform and Its Application Toward Validating a ViewRay Beam Model

Purpose: To build a fast, accurate and easily-deployable research platform for Monte-Carlo dose calculations. We port the dose calculation engine PENELOPE to C++, and accelerate calculations using GPU acceleration. Simulations of a Co-60 beam model provided by ViewRay demonstrate the capabilities of the platform. Methods: We built software that incorporates a beam model interface, CT-phantom model, GPU-accelerated PENELOPE engine, and GUI front-end. We rewrote the PENELOPE kernel in C++ (from Fortran) and accelerated the code on a GPU. We seamlessly integrated a Co-60 beam model (obtained from ViewRay) into our platform. Simulations of various field sizes and SSDs using a homogeneous water phantom generated PDDs, dose profiles, and output factors that were compared to experiment data. Results: With GPU acceleration using a dated graphics card (Nvidia Tesla C2050), a highly accurate simulation – including 100*100*100 grid, 3×3×3 mm3 voxels, <1% uncertainty, and 4.2×4.2 cm2 field size – runs 24 times faster (20 minutes versus 8 hours) than when parallelizing on 8 threads across a new CPU (Intel i7-4770). Simulated PDDs, profiles and output ratios for the commercial system agree well with experiment data measured using radiographic film or ionization chamber. Based on our analysis, this beam model is precise enough for general applications. Conclusions: Using a beam model for a Co-60 system provided by ViewRay, we evaluate a dose calculation platform that we developed. Comparison to measurements demonstrates the promise of our software for use as a research platform for dose calculations, with applications including quality assurance and treatment plan verification.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Rapid Calculation of Max-Min Fair Rates for Multi-Commodity Flows in Fat-Tree Networks

Max-min fairness is often used in the performance modeling of interconnection networks. Existing methods to compute max-min fair rates for multi-commodity flows have high complexity and are computationally infeasible for large networks. In this paper, we show that by considering topological features, this problem can be solved efficiently for the fat-tree topology that is widely used in data centers and high performance compute clusters. Several efficient new algorithms are developed for this problem, including a parallel algorithm that can take advantage of multi-core and shared-memory architectures. Using these algorithms, we demonstrate that it is possible to find the max-min fair rate allocation for multi-commodity flows in fat-tree networks that support tens of thousands of nodes. We evaluate the run-time performance of the proposed algorithms and show improvement in orders of magnitude over the previously best known method. Finally, we further demonstrate a new application of max-min fair rate allocation that is only computationally feasible using our new algorithms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗