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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 1,351 records · Page 75

Validation of Fitness for Duty Standards Using Pre- and Post-Flight Capsule Egress and Suited Functional Performance Tasks in Simulated Reduced Gravity (Pilot Egress Fitness)

As NASA prepares for exploration missions, it will be critical to understand and build upon known crew capabilities. Specifically, we need to know the functional capacities of crew at different stages of a mission and characterize these profiles so that the appropriate vehicle requirements and mission concepts of operations (ConOps) can be developed. One of the most complex phases of any missions is when there is a transition between gravity environments. For instance, both physiological adaptation to microgravity and subsequent re-entry into a gravity environment result in reduced functional capacity, even with rigorous adherence to inflight countermeasures. Quantification of the astronauts’ post-landing functional performance is necessary to design ConOps for exploration missions. Specifically, these two high-risk tasks may have to be performed soon after gravity transitions: •Unassisted capsule egress task after return to Earth •Planetary extravehicular activity (EVA) soon after landing on Mars or the Moon This study has been broken down into two phases. A pilot phase to assess the overall feasibility and demonstrate the capability to do these tasks shortly after landing and the full Egress Fitness study, which will be part of the CIPHER complement. This study uses a functional task approach to characterize performance of these high-risk tasks in long-duration ISS crewmembers before flight and shortly after return to Earth. Prior to any testing, each astronaut subject completes a suit fit check to ensure adequate sizing and mobility to be able to complete the EVA tasks. Pilot Egress Fitness pre-flight and post-flight testing includes an Earth based emergency egress out of a functional capsule mockup, and a short Mars gravity EVA simulation including suit donning, hatch egress, ladder descent, task board cable operations, baggage transfer over sand/rocky regolith, alignment with a rear entry port, and suit egress. Pre-flight testing can occur almost anytime pre-flight, but post-flight scheduling is much more critical with the capsule egress test occurring 1-4 hours after landing and the planetary EVA approximately 18-36 hours after landing. Data collected for both tasks includes task completion time, photo, and video. The EVA portion also includes collection of metabolic and heart rate. Pilot Egress Fitness study has completed baseline pre-flight testing on 3 astronaut subjects. Post-flight testing of the first two subjects will be completed in November 2021 and the final subject around March 2022. Results and lessons learned from this pilot study will inform the full Egress Fitness study, which will incorporate additional pre-flight sessions, longer EVA tasks, and post-flight testing on R+1, 4, and 7 to characterize the timeframe of recovery

J R Norcross↗

Exploring the use of novel programming models in land surface models

A wide range of programming models are currently under rapid development to meet the needs of application developers looking to work on more complex machines. These models fill a variety of roles. Some look to abstract supercomputer architecture, including both processors and memory, to present a strategy for portable performance across a wide range of machines. Others look to expose concurrency by explicitly constructing task-driven dependency graphs that allow a scheduler to find parallelism. Here we explore the implications for application codes of adopting two such programming models, Kokkos and Legion, one from each class of models. We specifically focus on the software design implications on refactoring existing applications, rather than the performance and performance tuning of these models. We identify a strategy for refactoring the Energy Exascale Earth System Model's Land Surface Model, an extremely complex code for climate applications, and prototype a series of mini-apps that explore the adoption of Kokkos and Legion. In doing this, we identify commonalities across the models, leading to a series of conclusions about application software design and refactoring for the adoption of novel programming models.

Coon, Ethan↗

Derivation of the Most Influential Medical Conditions for An Extended Duration Artemis Mission

BACKGROUND: The risk of loss of mission due to medical conditions may be influenced by loss of crew life (LOCL), need for evacuation (RTDC; return to definitive care), and crew task time lost. Predicting what medical conditions are most likely to lead to crew morbidity and mortality may influence medical system design, clinical capability prioritization, and research strategies. NASA’s Informing Mission Planning via Analysis of Complex Tradespaces tool (IMPACT) applies Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) methodology to assess these risks. OVERVIEW: A team of subject matter experts (SME) from a variety of medical disciplines developed a consensus-based process to determine 120 of the most clinically relevant medical conditions for long-duration exploration missions (LDEMs) . This IMPACT Condition List (ICL) expanded upon previous work done for Integrated Medical Model (IMM). For each condition a best-case and worst-case definition were derived. These definitions were used to identify probability of occurrence, proportion of cases that are best case vs. worst case, clinical phase duration, and risk of outcomes (task time loss [TTL], RTDC, and LOCL) for both treated and untreated states. These data were sources from existing spaceflight databases (e.g. Longitudinal Survey of Astronaut Health), relevant models (e.g. the ISS fire model), and/or terrestrial literature. Each condition was then tied to diagnostic and therapeutic resources and capabilities. IMPACT was then run for the LDLOLS DRM (see Abstract #2 for this panel). DISCUSSION: This abstract will present the process for generating the IMPACT condition list, the relevant data for each clinical condition, and present results for the ten most influential conditions impacting LOCL, RTDC, and TTL for a representative extended duration Artemis mission.

A Nelson↗

Thermal Management for FPGA Nodes in HPC Systems

The integration of FPGAs into large-scale computing systems is gaining attention. In these systems, real-time data handling for networking, tasks for scientific computing, and machine learning can be executed with customized datapaths on reconfigurable fabric within heterogeneous compute nodes. At the same time, thermal management, particularly battling the cooling cost and guaranteeing the reliability, is a continuing concern. The introduction of new heterogeneous components into HPC nodes only adds further complexities to thermal modeling and management. The thermal behavior of multi-FPGA systems deployed within large compute clusters is less explored. Here, we first show that the thermal behaviors of different FPGAs of the same generation can vary due to their physical locations in a rack and process variation, even though they are running the same tasks. We present a machine learning–based model to capture the thermal behavior of each individual FPGA in the cluster. We then propose two thermal management strategies guided by our thermal model. First, we mitigate thermal variation and hotspots across the cluster by proactive thermal-aware task placement. Under the tested system and benchmarks, we achieve up to 26.4° C and on average 13.3° C system temperature reduction with no performance penalty. Second, we utilize this thermal model to guide HLS parameter tuning at the task design stage to achieve improved thermal response after deployment.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Structured Prompt Interrogation and Recursive Extraction of Semantics (SPIRES): a method for populating knowledge bases using zero-shot learning

Abstract Motivation Creating knowledge bases and ontologies is a time consuming task that relies on manual curation. AI/NLP approaches can assist expert curators in populating these knowledge bases, but current approaches rely on extensive training data, and are not able to populate arbitrarily complex nested knowledge schemas. Results Here we present Structured Prompt Interrogation and Recursive Extraction of Semantics (SPIRES), a Knowledge Extraction approach that relies on the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform zero-shot learning and general-purpose query answering from flexible prompts and return information conforming to a specified schema. Given a detailed, user-defined knowledge schema and an input text, SPIRES recursively performs prompt interrogation against an LLM to obtain a set of responses matching the provided schema. SPIRES uses existing ontologies and vocabularies to provide identifiers for matched elements. We present examples of applying SPIRES in different domains, including extraction of food recipes, multi-species cellular signaling pathways, disease treatments, multi-step drug mechanisms, and chemical to disease relationships. Current SPIRES accuracy is comparable to the mid-range of existing Relation Extraction methods, but greatly surpasses an LLM’s native capability of grounding entities with unique identifiers. SPIRES has the advantage of easy customization, flexibility, and, crucially, the ability to perform new tasks in the absence of any new training data. This method supports a general strategy of leveraging the language interpreting capabilities of LLMs to assemble knowledge bases, assisting manual knowledge curation and acquisition while supporting validation with publicly-available databases and ontologies external to the LLM. Availability and implementation SPIRES is available as part of the open source OntoGPT package: https://github.com/monarch-initiative/ontogpt.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

A neural network-based approach to predicting absorption in nanostructured, disordered photoelectrodes

Disordered nanostructures in photoelectrodes can increase light absorption in photoelectrochemical system designs. Predicting their optical properties is an elusive task due to the immensity of unique configurations and the intrinsic variance of each. A neural network trained from a small subset of simulations can emulate the complex absorption properties of the entire configuration space for a model disordered system with quantifiable accuracy and computational efficiency.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Towards a RAG-based summarization for the Electron Ion Collider

Abstract The complexity and sheer volume of information — encompassing documents, papers, data, and other resources — from large-scale experiments demand significant time and effort to navigate, making the task of accessing and utilizing these varied forms of information daunting, particularly for new collaborators and early-career scientists.To tackle this issue, a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)-based Summarization AI for EIC (RAGS4EIC) is under development. This AI-Agent not only condenses information but also effectively references relevant responses, offering substantial advantages for collaborators. Our project involves a two-step approach: first, querying a comprehensive vector database containing all pertinent experiment information; second, utilizing a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate concise summaries enriched with citations based on user queries and retrieved data. We describe the evaluation methods that use RAG assessments (RAGAs) scoring mechanisms to assess the effectiveness of responses. Furthermore, we describe the concept of prompt template based instruction-tuning which provides flexibility and accuracy in summarization. Importantly, the implementation relies on LangChain [1], which serves as the foundation of our entire workflow. This integration ensures efficiency and scalability, facilitating smooth deployment and accessibility for various user groups within the Electron Ion Collider (EIC) community. This innovative AI-driven framework not only simplifies the understanding of vast datasets but also encourages collaborative participation, thereby empowering researchers. As a demonstration, a web application has been developed to explain each stage of the RAG Agent development in detail. The application can be accessed athttps://rags4eic-ai4eic.streamlit.app.[A tagged version of the source code can be found inhttps://github.com/ai4eic/EIC-RAG-Project/releases/tag/AI4EIC2023_PROCEEDING.]

Instruments & Instrumentation↗

Multifidelity validation of digital surrogates using variable-density turbulent mixing models

In this study, ensembles of experimental data are presented and utilized to compare and validate two models used in the simulation of variable-density (Atwood = 0.22), compressible turbulent mixing. Though models of this kind (Reynolds averaged NavierStokes and large-eddy simulations) have been validated extensively with more canonical flows in previous studies, here the present approach offers novelty in the complexity of the geometry, the ensemble-based validation, and the uniformity of the computational framework on which the models are tested. Moreover, all experimental and computational tasks were completed by the authors which has led to a tightly coupled experimental configuration with its “digital twin.” The experimental divergent-shock-tube facility and its data acquisition methods are described and replicated in simulation space. A 2D Euler model which neglects the turbulent mixing at the interface is optimized to experimental data using a Gaussian process. This model then serves as the basis for both the 2D RANS and 3D LES studies that make comparisons to the mixing-layer data from the experiment. A relatively simple RANS model is shown to produce good agreement with experimental data only at late flow development times. The LES ensembles generally show good agreement with experimental data but display sensitivity to the characterization of initial conditions. Resolution-dependent behavior is also observed for certain higher-order statistics of interest. Overall, the LES model successfully captures the effects of divergent geometry, compressibility, and combined nonlinear instabilities inherent to the problem. The successful prediction of mixing width and its growth rate highlight the existence of three distinct regimes in the development of the instability, each with similarities to previously studied instabilities.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Extremely Scalable Distributed Computation of Contour Trees via Pre-Simplification

Contour trees offer an abstract representation of the level set topology in scalar fields and are widely used in topological data analysis and visualization. However, applying contour trees to large-scale scientific datasets remains challenging due to scalability limitations. Recent developments in distributed hierarchical contour trees have addressed these challenges by enabling scalable computation across distributed systems. Building on these structures, advanced analytical tasks—such as volumetric branch decomposition and contour extraction—have been introduced to facilitate large-scale scientific analysis. Despite these advancements, such analytical tasks substantially increase memory usage, which hampers scalability. In this paper, we propose a pre-simplification strategy to significantly reduce the memory overhead associated with analytical tasks on distributed hierarchical contour trees. We demonstrate enhanced scalability through strong scaling experiments, constructing the largest known contour tree—comprising over half a trillion nodes with complex topology—in under 15 minutes on a dataset containing 550 billion elements.

Li, Mingzhe [University of Utah]↗

MOOSE-Workbench integration and MOOSE meshing capability enhancements to facilitate inputs and outputs for multiphysics modeling

The Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) is an open-source framework that supports many of the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) technical areas (TA). These TAs develop and use NEAMS physics and coupling modules in multiple ways to enable the research and development of complex physics models. In addition to the MOOSE framework, the NEAMS Workbench user interface provides a common analysis environment with user-interaction accelerators that streamline the tasks of model creation, review, execution, and out put inspection. In FY 2024, objectives were realized in the MOOSE framework application development support and user-oriented improvements. Application development improvements support both developers and users with an expanded Reactor Module and Mesh System, stateful material property support for mortar contact, and customizable convergence criteria. Additionally, new user-oriented features were implemented in the MOOSE framework language server, including autocompletion snippets, definition from source and find reference navigations, and syntax overrides. Lastly, improvements were made to the input interpreter necessary to support the MOOSE language server and the NEAMS Workbench so that they can interact with syntactically incomplete user inputs. These improvements and more were intended to address stakeholder feedback and improve developer and user ability to conduct advanced nuclear energy modeling and simulation in support of DOE and industry needs.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Learning quantum computers' errors using interpretable neural networks

Learning and reducing the errors and noise in quantum computing systems is necessary for achieving quantum computation’s promise. However, rapid advances in experimental quantum computing are making this task increasingly difficult, because state-of-the-art systems now contain hundreds of qubits and many characterization techniques are hard to apply at this scale. Furthermore, complex kinds of errors in these systems, such as crosstalk and non-Markovian effects, must be understood and decreased, but these errors are challenging to study with most existing methods. In this project, we explored using neural networks for scalable characterization of complex errors in quantum computers. We proposed and demonstrated characterizing a quantum computer’s errors with neural networks that have interpretable parameters corresponding to the rates of different kinds of errors, within a sparse Lindbladian parameterization for errors. To enable scaling to many qubit systems, these networks then predict how these errors combine within quantum circuits and impact their outcomes using an efficient approximations. We demonstrated these networks ability to learn coherent crosstalk errors and context-dependent errors in a simulated 4-qubit system.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Pulse control of superconducting cavity-based qudits with a Fock-state basis

Fock-basis-encoding qudits allow quantum gates to operate on multiple qudit levels simultaneously. This capability is advantageous for applications involving complex local gate operations, such as the digital quantum simulation of non-Abelian gauge theories. However, compiling unitary operations to native qudit gates remains a challenging task, often requiring substantial computational resources. In this work, we theoretically investigate the direct pulse control of a superconducting radio-frequency cavity coupled to an ancilla transmon for gate synthesis. We will discuss the improvements and limitations applicable to high Fock states. This work paves the way toward more efficient and robust qudit-gate synthesis.

Li, Andy C.Y. [Fermilab] (ORCID:0000000345423739)↗

Pulse control of superconducting cavity-based qudits with a Fock-state basis

Fock-basis-encoding qudits allow quantum gates to operate on multiple qudit levels simultaneously. This capability is advantageous for applications involving complex local gate operations, such as the digital quantum simulation of non-Abelian gauge theories. However, compiling unitary operations to native qudit gates remains a challenging task, often requiring substantial computational resources. In this work, we theoretically investigate the direct pulse control of a superconducting radio-frequency cavity coupled to an ancilla transmon for gate synthesis. We will discuss the improvements and limitations applicable to high Fock states. This work paves the way toward more efficient and robust qudit-gate synthesis.

Li, Andy C.Y. [Fermilab] (ORCID:0000000345423739)↗

MOOSE–Workbench Integration and MOOSE Meshing Capability Enhancements to Facilitate Inputs and Outputs for Multiphysics Modeling

The Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) is an open-source framework that supports many of the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) technical areas (TA). These TAs develop and use NEAMS physics and coupling modules in multiple ways to enable the research and development of complex physics models. In addition to the MOOSE framework, the NEAMS Workbench user interface provides a common analysis environment with user-interaction accelerators that streamline the tasks of model creation, review, execution, and output inspection. In FY 2024, objectives were realized in the MOOSE framework application development support and user-oriented improvements. Application development improvements support both developers and users with an expanded Reactor Module and Mesh System, stateful material property support for mortar contact, and customizable convergence criteria. Additionally, new user-oriented features were implemented in the MOOSE framework language server, including autocompletion snippets, definition from source and find reference navigations, and syntax overrides. Lastly, improvements were made to the input interpreter necessary to support the MOOSE language server and the NEAMS Workbench so that they can interact with syntactically incomplete user inputs. These improvements and more were intended to address stakeholder feedback and improve developer and user ability to conduct advanced nuclear energy modeling and simulation in support of DOE and industry needs.

97 - MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Parallel algorithms for placement and routing in VLSI design

The computational requirements for high quality synthesis, analysis, and verification of very large scale integration (VLSI) designs have rapidly increased with the fast growing complexity of these designs. Research in the past has focused on the development of heuristic algorithms, special purpose hardware accelerators, or parallel algorithms for the numerous design tasks to decrease the time required for solution. Two new parallel algorithms are proposed for two VLSI synthesis tasks, standard cell placement and global routing. The first algorithm, a parallel algorithm for global routing, uses hierarchical techniques to decompose the routing problem into independent routing subproblems that are solved in parallel. Results are then presented which compare the routing quality to the results of other published global routers and which evaluate the speedups attained. The second algorithm, a parallel algorithm for cell placement and global routing, hierarchically integrates a quadrisection placement algorithm, a bisection placement algorithm, and the previous global routing algorithm. Unique partitioning techniques are used to decompose the various stages of the algorithm into independent tasks which can be evaluated in parallel. Finally, results are presented which evaluate the various algorithm alternatives and compare the algorithm performance to other placement programs. Measurements are presented on the parallel speedups available.

Brouwer, Randall Jay↗

Object oriented development of engineering software using CLIPS

Engineering applications involve numeric complexity and manipulations of a large amount of data. Traditionally, numeric computation has been the concern in developing an engineering software. As engineering application software became larger and more complex, management of resources such as data, rather than the numeric complexity, has become the major software design problem. Object oriented design and implementation methodologies can improve the reliability, flexibility, and maintainability of the resulting software; however, some tasks are better solved with the traditional procedural paradigm. The C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS), with deffunction and defgeneric constructs, supports the procedural paradigm. The natural blending of object oriented and procedural paradigms has been cited as the reason for the popularity of the C++ language. The CLIPS Object Oriented Language's (COOL) object oriented features are more versatile than C++'s. A software design methodology based on object oriented and procedural approaches appropriate for engineering software, and to be implemented in CLIPS was outlined. A method for sensor placement for Space Station Freedom is being implemented in COOL as a sample problem.

Yoon, C. John↗

Artificial intelligence and design: Opportunities, research problems and directions

The issues of industrial productivity and economic competitiveness are of major significance in the U.S. at present. By advancing the science of design, and by creating a broad computer-based methodology for automating the design of artifacts and of industrial processes, we can attain dramatic improvements in productivity. It is our thesis that developments in computer science, especially in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in related areas of advanced computing, provide us with a unique opportunity to push beyond the present level of computer aided automation technology and to attain substantial advances in the understanding and mechanization of design processes. To attain these goals, we need to build on top of the present state of AI, and to accelerate research and development in areas that are especially relevant to design problems of realistic complexity. We propose an approach to the special challenges in this area, which combines 'core work' in AI with the development of systems for handling significant design tasks. We discuss the general nature of design problems, the scientific issues involved in studying them with the help of AI approaches, and the methodological/technical issues that one must face in developing AI systems for handling advanced design tasks. Looking at basic work in AI from the perspective of design automation, we identify a number of research problems that need special attention. These include finding solution methods for handling multiple interacting goals, formation problems, problem decompositions, and redesign problems; choosing representations for design problems with emphasis on the concept of a design record; and developing approaches for the acquisition and structuring of domain knowledge with emphasis on finding useful approximations to domain theories. Progress in handling these research problems will have major impact both on our understanding of design processes and their automation, and also on several fundamental questions that are of intrinsic concern to AI. We present examples of current AI work on specific design tasks, and discuss new directions of research, both as extensions of current work and in the context of new design tasks where domain knowledge is either intractable or incomplete. The domains discussed include Digital Circuit Design, Mechanical Design of Rotational Transmissions, Design of Computer Architectures, Marine Design, Aircraft Design, and Design of Chemical Processes and Materials. Work in these domains is significant on technical grounds, and it is also important for economic and policy reasons.

Amarel, Saul↗

Analysis of EDP performance

The objective of this contract was the investigation of the potential performance gains that would result from an upgrade of the Space Station Freedom (SSF) Data Management System (DMS) Embedded Data Processor (EDP) '386' design with the Intel Pentium (registered trade-mark of Intel Corp.) '586' microprocessor. The Pentium ('586') is the latest member of the industry standard Intel X86 family of CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) microprocessors. This contract was scheduled to run in parallel with an internal IBM Federal Systems Company (FSC) Internal Research and Development (IR&D) task that had the goal to generate a baseline flight design for an upgraded EDP using the Pentium. This final report summarizes the activities performed in support of Contract NAS2-13758. Our plan was to baseline performance analyses and measurements on the latest state-of-the-art commercially available Pentium processor, representative of the proposed space station design, and then phase to an IBM capital funded breadboard version of the flight design (if available from IR&D and Space Station work) for additional evaluation of results. Unfortunately, the phase-over to the flight design breadboard did not take place, since the IBM Data Management System (DMS) for the Space Station Freedom was terminated by NASA before the referenced capital funded EDP breadboard could be completed. The baseline performance analyses and measurements, however, were successfully completed, as planned, on the commercial Pentium hardware. The results of those analyses, evaluations, and measurements are presented in this final report.

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