Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “Computer performance”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,315 records · Page 73

Beyond Magic Barrels: Digital manufacturing for crystallization, process development and optimization of explosive materials: Part II Resveratrol Exemplar

This SAND report summarizes work supported by an Engineering Sciences Research Foundation (ESRF) Lab Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project entitled “Beyond Magic Barrels: Digital manufacturing for crystallization, process development and optimization of explosive materials.” This SAND report is written in two parts with Part 1 discusses recrystallization of our explosive exemplar and Part 2 summarizing our work with recrystallization of resveratrol. We have studied resveratrol recrystallization with a multiscale approach combining experiments, modeling and simulation. At the single crystal scale, microscopy experiments illuminate crystal time-dependent growth rates using advanced image analysis. Bench scale experiments were carried out to look at growth of multiple particles in a small reactor creating thousands of particles and analyzing the results with microscopy and μCT. For the modeling we combine kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) models with subscale information from density functional theory (DFT) or molecular dynamics. This work is discussed in Part 1 and can also be found in a paper from the project discussing a coarse-grained kMC model specifically developed for resveratrol. For well-mixed systems, we have population balance equations (PBE) linked with species mass conservation forming a set of ordinary differential equations that can be solved quickly. For more complicated geometries, such as the vat crystallization used throughout the complex, a coupled computational fluid dynamic (CFD)/PBE method was developed to account for gradients in temperature and concentration and differences in crystallization rates throughout the domain. These simulations are more complex and require high performance computing. We present results for two cases: 5% seed fast cool with parameters fit to the well-mixed case and 5% seed slow cool using the same parameters. We show reasonable agreement with experiments though are particles are significantly larger than the experiments.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

A PIC Bootstrapping Strategy for Exascale CFD-DEM Simulation

The exascale computing era comes with the release of MFIX-Exa, a new code for studying gas-particle fluidization using CFD-DEM and PIC models on massively parallel, heterogeneous high-performance computing architectures. However, as compute resources continue to grow in scale and complexity, so too does the impetus to use them efficiently. Here, we propose a novel bootstrapping method to minimize neglected simulation time and cast the approach more broadly among a growing field of multi-fidelity methods.

Porcu, Roberto↗

The VTK-m User's Guide (V. 2.2)

High-performance computing relies on ever finer threading. Advances in processor technology include ever greater numbers of cores, hyperthreading, accelerators with integrated blocks of cores, and special vectorized instructions, all of which require more software parallelism to achieve peak performance. Traditional visualization solutions cannot support this extreme level of concurrency. Extreme scale systems require a new programming model and a fundamental change in how we design algorithms. To address these issues we created VTK-m: the visualization toolkit for multi-/many-core architectures. VTK-m supports a number of algorithms and the ability to design further algorithms through a top-down design with an emphasis on extreme parallelism. VTK-m also provides support for finding and building links across topologies, making it possible to perform operations that determine manifold surfaces, interpolate generated values, and find adjacencies. Although VTK-m provides a simplified high-level interface for programming, its template-based code removes the overhead of abstraction.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Toward Transparent Data Management in Multi-layer Storage Hierarchy for HPC Systems

Upcoming exascale high performance computing (HPC) systems are expected to comprise multi-tier storage hierarchy, and thus will necessitate innovative storage and I/O mechanisms. Traditional disk and block-based interfaces and file systems face severe challenges in utilizing capabilities of storage hierarchies due to the lack of hierarchy support and semantic interfaces. Object-based and semantically-rich data abstractions for scientific data management on large scale systems offer a sustainable solution to these challenges. Such data abstractions can also simplify users involvement in data movement. Here, we take the first steps of realizing such an object abstraction and explore storage mechanisms for these objects to enhance I/O performance, especially for scientific applications. We explore how an object-based interface can facilitate next generation scalable computing systems by presenting the mapping of data I/O from two real world HPC scientific use cases: a plasma physics simulation code (VPIC) and a cosmology simulation code (HACC). Our storage model stores data objects in different physical organizations to support data movement across layers of memory/storage hierarchy. Our implementation sclaes well to 16K parallel processes, and compared to the state of the art, such as MPI-IO and HDF5, our object-based data abstractions and data placement strategy in multi-level storage hierarchy achieves up to 7 X I/O performance improvement for scientific data.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The Viskores User's Guide (V.1.0)

High-performance computing relies on ever finer threading. Advances in processor technology include ever greater numbers of cores, hyperthreading, accelerators with integrated blocks of cores, and special vectorized instructions, all of which require more software parallelism to achieve peak performance. Traditional visualization solutions cannot support this extreme level of concurrency. Extreme scale systems require a new programming model and a fundamental change in how we design algorithms. To address these issues we created Viskores: the visualization toolkit for multi-/many-core architectures. Viskores supports a number of algorithms and the ability to design further algorithms through a top-down design with an emphasis on extreme parallelism. Viskores also provides support for finding and building links across topologies, making it possible to perform operations that determine manifold surfaces, interpolate generated values, and find adjacencies. Although Viskores provides a simplified high-level interface for programming, its template-based code removes the overhead of abstraction.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The Viskores User's Guide, Release 1.1

High-performance computing relies on ever finer threading. Advances in processor technology include ever greater numbers of cores, hyperthreading, accelerators with integrated blocks of cores, and special vectorized instructions, all of which require more software parallelism to achieve peak performance. Traditional visualization solutions cannot support this extreme level of concurrency. Extreme scale systems require a new programming model and a fundamental change in how we design algorithms. To address these issues we created Viskores: the visualization toolkit for multi/many-core architectures. Viskores supports a number of algorithms and the ability to design further algorithms through a top-down design with an emphasis on extreme parallelism. Viskores also provides support for finding and building links across topologies, making it possible to perform operations that determine manifold surfaces, interpolate generated values, and find adjacencies. Although Viskores provides a simplified high-level interface for programming, its template-based code removes the overhead of abstraction.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

VTK-m User's Guide (V.1.6)

High-performance computing relies on ever finer threading. Advances in processor technology include ever greater numbers of cores, hyperthreading, accelerators with integrated blocks of cores, and special vectorized instructions, all of which require more software parallelism to achieve peak performance. Traditional visualization solutions cannot support this extreme level of concurrency. Extreme scale systems require a new programming model and a fundamental change in how we design algorithms. To address these issues we created VTK-m: the visualization toolkit for multi-/many-core architectures.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

HPC resources for CMS offline computing: An integration and scalability challenge for the Submission Infrastructure

The computing resource needs of LHC experiments are expected to continue growing significantly during the Run 3 and into the HL-LHC era. The landscape of available resources will also evolve, as High Performance Computing (HPC) and Cloud resources will provide a comparable, or even dominant, fraction of the total compute capacity. The future years present a challenge for the experiments’ resource provisioning models, both in terms of scalability and increasing complexity. The CMS Submission Infrastructure (SI) provisions computing resources for CMS workflows. This infrastructure is built on a set of federated HTCondor pools, currently aggregating 400k CPU cores distributed worldwide and supporting the simultaneous execution of over 200k computing tasks. Incorporating HPC resources into CMS computing represents firstly an integration challenge, as HPC centers are much more diverse compared to Grid sites. Secondly, evolving the present SI, dimensioned to harness the current CMS computing capacity, to reach the resource scales required for the HLLHC phase, while maintaining global flexibility and efficiency, will represent an additional challenge for the SI. To preventively address future potential scalability limits, the SI team regularly runs tests to explore the maximum reach of our infrastructure. In this note, the integration of HPC resources into CMS offline computing is summarized, the potential concerns for the SI derived from the increased scale of operations are described, and the most recent results of scalability test on the CMS SI are reported.

Pérez-Calero Yzquierdo, Antonio↗

Spy in the GPU-box: Covert and Side Channel Attacks on Multi-GPU System

The deep learning revolution has been enabled in large part by GPUs, and more recently accelerators, which make it possible to carry out computationally demanding training and inference in acceptable times. As the size of machine learning networks and workloads continues to increase, multi-GPU machines have emerged as an important platform offered on High Performance Computing and cloud data centers. Since these machines are shared among multiple users, it becomes increasingly important to protect applications against potential attacks. In this paper, we explore the vulnerability of Nvidia's DGX multi-GPU machines to covert and side channel attacks. These machines consist of a number of discrete GPUs that are interconnected through a combination of custom interconnect (NVLink) and PCIe connections. We reverse engineer the interconnected cache hierarchy and show that it is possible for an attacker on one GPU to cause contention on the L2 cache of another GPU. We use this observation to first develop a covert channel attack across two GPUs, achieving the best bandwidth of around 4 MB/s. We also develop a prime and probe attack on a remote GPU allowing an attacker to recover the cache access pattern of another workload. This access pattern can be used in any number of side channel attacks: we demonstrate a proof of concept attack that fingerprints the application running on the remote GPU, with high accuracy. We also develop a proof of concept attack to extract hyperparameters of a machine learning workload. Our work establishes for the first time the vulnerability of these machines to microarchitectural attacks and can guide future research to improve their security.

Dutta, Sankha↗

Development of Advanced Solid Sorbents for Direct Air Capture (Final Report)

RTI International is partnering with Creare, and Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) successfully met all major technical objectives as outlined below: Identified one MOF adsorbent for DAC; Identified one amine-P-dendrimer adsorbent for DAC; Performed Computational fluid dynamics simulations of the MOF and amine-P-dendrimer adsorbents and validate them with experimental data; Selected one adsorbent for DAC; Demonstrated the scale-up of selected candidate and perform cost review; Performed a preliminary process design; Performed technology maturation plan and environmental health and safety risk assessment. After a thorough comparison between both adsorbents (MOFs and P-dendrimers) and based on their technical merits, the amine-based P-dendrimers sorbent was selected as the best performing adsorbent for DAC. In fact, the amine-based P-dendrimers have demonstrated superior performance over the MOF sorbents under relevant DAC conditions. The selected sorbent has been used in subsequent projects (DE-FE0032099 and DE-AR0001412) and has demonstrated similar superior performance with no loss of activity after long-term sorption-desorption testing (e.g., 100 cycles). This sorbent has demonstrated a very high and stable sorption performance, excellent kinetics, and fast regeneration at 80 °C, specifically at 75% relative humidity (RH). The incorporation of RTI’s high-performance, high-durability amine-based P-dendrimers sorbent and Creare’s hybrid additive manufacturing (H-AM) technology that will produce high performance, compact heat and mass exchange structures at low cost using methods, will lead to a contactor that is optimized for wind-driven operation. This contactor technology provides a technically viable pathway for reducing the cost of DAC to <$100/tonne of CO 2 .

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Single-Bubble Flow Boiling Phenomena - Interface Tracking Simulation

Boiling, as one of the most efficient heat transfer mechanisms, is widely used in various engineering systems. Better understanding and modeling of this process remains a major challenge in multiphase flow research. The distribution of vapor in boiling system affects the heat transfer rate and may cause unfavorable conditions, such as heater burn-out. A number of flow regimes have been observed experimentally. In general, there are three regimes under boiling conditions: nucleate boiling, transition boiling, and film boiling. The nucleate boiling regime is categorized into partial boiling regime and fully developed nucleate boiling, according to behavior of bubble dynamics and heat transfer characteristics. In the first region, as the wall temperature increases, the fraction of the wall surface subject to nucleate boiling increases until bubble formation occupies the entire heated surface. Heat transfer in this region is a complex mixture of single-phase forced convection and nucleate boiling. As bubble density increases, bubbles turn to coalesce and form insulating vapor patches, which impedes liquid flow back to the surface. The heat transfer rate under this condition reduces dramatically. This point is called Critical Heat Flux (CHF), which leads to boiling crisis. The behavior of boiling crisis is dependent on local fluid conditions due to bubble growth and departure. Experiments are the ultimate tool for boiling model development and verification, but they still lack some capabilities needed for better understanding of the local mechanism of this phenomena. It's difficult to capture many important details at the pressure/temperature conditions of interest using experimental techniques, such as full three dimensional measurements of velocity and temperature distribution and estimates of heat flux partitioning during the boiling process. The interface tracking simulation (ITS) is one of the promising approaches to describe heat transfer of boiling phenomena and their underlying mechanisms. The advances of high performance computing (HPC) in recent years made it possible to apply DNS to a wide variety of adiabatic flows. Some work has been done to implement evaporation / condensation models as well. Lee and Nydahl performed a numerical simulation of bubble growth and departure assuming that the bubble has the shape of a truncated sphere and a micro-layer exists during bubble growth. A 2-D cylindrical bubbles simulation has been done by Son with a simplified model to predict the heat flux in a thin liquid micro-layer. A direct simulation of 2D film boiling is conducted by Juric and Tryggvason. The film boiling, below critical pressure with a modified Level Set Method, is studied by Son and Dhir. Ose and Kunugi have developed a boiling and condensation model on subcooled boiling phenomena. Fuchs performed numerical simulations of bubble growth and departure considering wall conduction effects. Fully transient heat and fluid flow is modeled with a free surface of a rising bubble and a periodic calculation of the whole cycling of a growing, detaching, and rising bubble. Mukherjee and Kandikar have done a numerical simulation of an evaporating meniscus on a moving heated surface with level set method. The heat transfer associated with the advancing and receding contact angle has been studied. To develop the capability of physics-based boiling process, in the presented work the energy and momentum equations are coupled to simulate single-bubble growth scenarios. For a single bubble simulation in infinite liquid, the analytical solution exists and can be compared with the numerical results for verification purposes. The presented capabilities will be utilized in the large scale DNS of boiling flows in the future. The finite-element based code, PHASTA is used for the simulation. It is a parallel, hierarchic, higher-order accurate, adaptive, stabilized, transient analysis flow solver, which has been shown to be an effective tool for a wide range of single and two-phase flow problems. It has been shown to be highly scalable on top supercomputers ({approx}85% scaling on up to 3 million mesh partitions using a 92 billion element mesh . PHASTA has been shown to reliably predict the details of adiabatic bubbly flows as well as single-phase flows with heat transfer. To develop the capability of physics-based boiling process, in the presented work the energy and momentum equations are coupled to simulate a single-bubble growth scenario. For a single bubble growth in superheated water, the analytical solution exists and can be compared with the numerical results for verification purposes. The second-order accurate spatial and time discretization is used for the flow solver in the presented work. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

DNTTD (Distributed Non-Negative Tensor Train Decomposition)

The era of exascale computing opens new venues for innovations and discoveries in many scientific, engineering, and commercial fields. However, with the exa flops also come the extra-large high-dimensional data generated by high performance computing. High-dimensional data is presented as multidimensional arrays, aka tensors. The presence of latent (not directly observable) structures in the tensor allows a unique representation and compression of the data by classical tensor factorization techniques. However, the classical tensor methods are not always stable or they can be exponential in their memory requirements, which makes them not suitable for high-dimensional tensors. Tensor train (TT) is a state-of-the-art tensor network introduced for factorization of high-dimensional tensors. TT transforms the initial high-dimensional tensor in a network of three-dimensional tensors that requires only a linear storage. Many real-world data, such as, density, temperature, population, probability, etc., are non-negative and for an easy interpretation, the algorithms preserving non-negativity are preferred. Here, we introduce a distributed non-negative tensor-train and demonstrate its scalability and the compression on synthetic and real world big datasets.

Bhattarai, Manish↗

Two Weeks In The Life of Skybridge

This report documents a new large public data set for researchers studying the behavior of large commodity high-performance computing systems. Such large data sets are typically confined within institutions and access to them is limited to institutional partners. We provide it to promote HPC research more widely. The data set provides a two week time series of performance data collected once per minute using the Lightweight Distributed Metric Service from the system Skybridge at Sandia National Laboratories and the corresponding job-level accounting information. General system log information is not provided.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

GASNet-EX: A High-Performance, Portable Communication Library for Exascale

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) models, typified by such languages as Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Co-Array Fortran, expose one-sided communication as a key building block for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Architectural trends in supercomputing make such programming models increasingly attractive, and newer, more sophisticated models such as UPC++, Legion and Chapel that rely upon similar communication paradigms are gaining popularity. GASNet-EX is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models in future exascale machines. The library is an evolution of the popular GASNet communication system, building upon over 15 years of lessons learned. We describe and evaluate several features and enhancements that have been introduced to address the needs of modern client systems. Microbenchmark results demonstrate the RMA performance of GASNet-EX is competitive with several MPI-3 implementations on current HPC systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Shortest path network interdiction with asymmetric uncertainty

Abstract This paper considers an extension of the shortest path network interdiction problem that incorporates robustness to account for parameter uncertainty. The shortest path interdiction problem is a game of two players with conflicting agendas and capabilities: an evader, who traverses the arcs of a network from a source node to a sink node using a path of shortest length, and an interdictor, who maximizes the length of the evader's shortest path by interdicting arcs on the network. It is usually assumed that the parameters defining the network are known exactly by both players. We consider the situation where the evader assumes the nominal parameter values while the interdictor uses robust optimization techniques to account for parameter uncertainty or sensor degradation. We formulate this problem as a nonlinear mixed‐integer semi‐infinite bilevel program and show that it can be converted into a mixed‐integer linear program with a second order cone constraint. We use random geometric networks and transportation networks to perform computational studies and demonstrate the unique decision strategies that our variant produces. Solving the shortest path interdiction problem with asymmetric uncertainty protects the interdictor from investing in a strategy that hinges on key interdictions performing as promised. It also provides an alternate strategy that mitigates the risk of these worst‐case possibilities.

Punla‐Green, She'ifa Z.↗

Computational Homogenization of Polycrystals

This paper reviews the current state of the art in the simulation of the mechanical behavior of polycrystalline materials by means of computational homogenization. The key ingredients of this modeling strategy are presented in detail starting with the parameters needed to describe polycrystalline microstructures and the digital representation of such microstructures in a suitable format to perform computational homogenization. The different crystal plasticity frameworks that can describe the physical mechanisms of deformation in single crystals (dislocation slip and twinning) at the microscopic level are presented next. This is followed by the description of computational homogenization methods based on mean-field approximations by means of the viscoplastic self-consistent approach, or on the full-field simulation of the mechanical response of a representative polycrystalline volume element by means of the finite element method or the fast Fourier transform-based method. Multiscale frameworks based on the combination of mean-field homogenization and the finite element method are presented next to model the plastic deformation of polycrystalline specimens of arbitrary geometry under complex mechanical loading. Examples of application to predict the strength, fatigue life, damage, and texture evolution under different conditions are presented to illustrate the capabilities of the different models. Lastly, current challenges and future research directions in this field are summarized.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Machine Learning-Based Extreme Data Reduction for Prompt Supernova Pointing at DUNE

One of the goals of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is to use the massive underground liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) detectors at its far site for multimessenger astronomy (MMA), in the detection of neutrinos from core-collapse supernovae (SNe). Its current baseline trigger strategy detects activity in the detector that is consistent with supernova (SN) neutrinos and saves the raw data for further offline analysis but provides no prompt pointing information crucial for optical follow-ups by other observatories. This approach is based on the assumption that prompt pointing determination using raw data is computationally prohibitive. In this article, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept based on applying extreme data reduction on the buffered SN data in the DUNE data acquisition (DAQ) system’s front-end computers using a machine learning (ML) workflow. This reduces the data by ~5 orders of magnitude, allowing a full track reconstruction to be carried out quickly on a single server. The total time to perform the ML-based data reduction and the full track reconstruction is less than the time to transfer the SN data back to Fermilab or a high-performance computing (HPC) center. This shows that prompt processing of raw SN data is possible and, in fact, trivial once the data have been reduced to reject radiological backgrounds, paving the way to a high-quality SN pointing trigger that is based on fully reconstructed data instead of trigger primitives (TPs).

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

SciDAC GSEP: Gyrokinetic Simulation of Energetic Particle Turbulence and Transport

Energetic particle (EP) confinement is a key physics issue for burning plasma experiment ITER, the crucial next step in the quest for clean and abundant energy, since ignition relies on self-heating by energetic fusion products (α-particles). Due to the strong coupling of EP with burning thermal plasmas, plasma confinement property in the ignition regime is one of the most uncertain factors when extrapolating from existing fusion devices to the ITER tokamak. EP population in current tokamaks are mostly produced by auxiliary heating such as neutral beam injection (NBI) and radio frequency (RF) heating. Remarkable progress in developing comprehensive EP simulation codes and understanding basic EP physics has been made by two concurrent SciDAC EP projects GSEP funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fusion Energy Science (OFES), which have successfully established gyrokinetic turbulence simulation as a necessary paradigm shift for studying the EP confinement in burning plasmas. Verification and validation have rapidly advanced through close collaborations between simulation, theory, and experiment. Furthermore, productive collaborations with computational scientists have enabled EP simulation codes to effectively utilize current petascale computers and emerging exascale computers. We review here key physics progress in the GSEP projects regarding verification and validation of gyrokinetic simulations, nonlinear EP physics, EP coupling with thermal plasmas, and reduced EP transport models. Advances in high performance computing through collaborations with computational scientists that enable these large scale electromagnetic simulations are also highlighted. These results have been widely disseminated in numerous peer-reviewed publications including many Phys. Rev. Lett. papers and many invited presentations at prominent fusion conferences such as the biennial International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Fusion Energy Conference and the annual meeting of the American Physics Society, Division of Plasma Physics (APS-DPP).

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗