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At least 1,405 records · Page 78

Mapping of electrical potential distribution with charged particle beams

Potentials were measured using a beam of soft X-rays in air at 2 x 10 to the -5 power Torr. Ions were detected by a continuous-dynode electron multiplier after they passed through a retarding field. Ultimate resolution depends upon the diameter of the X-ray beam which was 3 mm. When the fields in the region of interest were such to disperse the ions, only a small fraction were detected and the method of measurement was not very reliable. Yet reasonable data could be collected if the ions traveled in parallel paths toward the detector. Development should concentrate on increasing the aperture of the detector from the pinhole which was used to something measured in centimeters. Also increasing the strength of the source would provide a stronger signal and more reliable data. Measurements were made at an estimated ion current to 10 to the -15 power A from a 10 cm length of the X-ray beam, this current being several orders of magnitude below what would have a perturbing effect on the region to be measured. Consequently, the source strength can be increased and prospects for this method of measurement are good.

Robinson, J. W.↗

Experimental testing using a remotely operated flap with a 2D high lift model

The problem of efficient wind tunnel testing for multi-element airfoils was first addressed by the author during a previous ASEE fellowship. A modern three element model with internal actuators to position a flap in two degrees of freedom was designed and later built. Some preliminary testing proved that the approach was viable. The purpose of this summer's work was to fully develop experimental methods including efficient data acquisition. The final goal is to develop dense data sets for both lift and drag measurements as a function of flap position for both take-off and landing configurations. The model has a span of 36 in. and chord of 18 in. and is currently being fitted for a 3 ft. x 4 ft. low speed wind tunnel. The flap was reworked to allow all pressure taps to function after initial tests showed two blocked ports. The serial method of obtaining pressures from the surface taps was found to be exceedingly slow so a new method using 12 pressure transducers and a 12 port parallel scanning valve were developed. A new automated data acquisition and control algorithm was developed using LabView software and a PC platform. Flow two-dimensionality is currently under investigation with boundary layer control by blowing; this was previously omitted for initial testing. By the end of the summer a detailed data set (uncorrected) consisting of lift coefficient versus flap position for the landing configuration should be available.

Landman, Drew↗

Multiple strike slip faults sets: A case study from the Dead Sea transform

In many strike slip tectonic settings, large rotations of crust blocks about vertical axes have been inferred from paleomagnetic data. These blocks are bounded by sets of parallel faults which presumably accommodate the relative motion between the blocks as regional deformation progress. A mechanical model by Nur et al., (1986) suggests that rotations greater than phi sub c equals 25 to 45 degrees must be accommodated by more than one set of faults, with angle phi sub c between their direction; consequently the sum of the angles between sets must be roughly equal to the total tectonic material rotation. To test this model, the authors investigated the fault geometry and field relation of fault sets in the Mt. Hermon area in northern Israel, where paleomagnetic declination implies data 69 degrees plus or minus 13 degrees counter-clockwise block rotation. The statistical and field relation analysis of over 315 faults shows that the faulting is predominantly right lateral strike slip consisting of three distinct sets. The oldest set strikes 253 degrees, the second oldest set strikes 293 degrees and the youngest strikes 339 degrees. This last direction is consistent also with the current north-south direction of the maximum principle stress axis. The angle phi sub c between the first and second sets is 39 degrees and between the second and third sets 46 degrees, in good agreement with the phi sub c angle predicted from mechanical considerations. The sum of the two angles is 85 degrees, in good agreement with the 69 degrees plus or minus 13 degrees CCW paleomagnetically derived rotation. The results suggest specifically that the sequential development of multiple intersecting fault sets is responsible for the faulting in the Mt. Hermon area; and generally that the model of block rotation with multiple faults provides very good simple rules for analyzing very complex fault patterns.

Ron, Hagai↗

FUN3D Analyses in Support of the 1st AIAA Stability and Control Prediction Workshop

The 1st AIAA Stability and Control Prediction Workshop was created to establish best practices for the prediction of stability & control derivatives using computational fluid dynamics and assess the limitations of these computational methods when those best practices are applied. The inaugural workshop considers the ONERA version of the NASA/Boeing Common Research Model(CRM), which includes the wing, body, horizontal tail, and a vertical tail designed by ONERA. Wind tunnel tests have been conducted for this configuration with longitudinal tests having been previously published, in addition to unpublished data at small sideslip angles that will serve as ‘blind’ data for workshop data comparisons. Participants were provided a ‘family’ of unstructured grids for the full-span ONERA CRM model with the wind-tunnel sting included. This family of mixed-element grids consists of 5 levels of refinement (tiny, coarse, medium, fine, and extra fine) with surface and volume mesh scaling, resulting in a size range of 14.6 to 53.4 million nodes. In addition, a medium refinement mesh has been provided for the ONERA CRM configuration without a sting to evaluate the sting’s impact on static longitudinal stability characteristics. In addition to these workshop-provided grids, the present work also considers an equivalent ‘family’ of computational grids generated using Heldenmesh™, a rapid grid generation software by Helden Aerospace Corporation for creating high-quality, three-dimensional, mixed-element unstructured meshes. Because of the authors’ familiarity with this software, these additional grids were generated as a comparison to the workshop-provided grids and to better understand the implications of using volume-mirrored grids for stability and control predictions. The present work will contribute to the workshop with test case data generated using the NASA FUN3D code, a parallelized, unstructured, node-based, finite-volume discretization, Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes flow solver. Numerical simulations will be conducted using the Quadratic Constitutive Relationship (QCR) version of the Spalart-Allmaras (SA) turbulence model with negative turbulence variable provisions. Both steady and2nd-order, time-accurate simulation results are to be generated and compared for select test cases, as time permits, to investigate their impact on FUN3D predictions. The present work will consider the three primary workshop test cases: (1) grid convergence study, (2) Mach number effect on static stability, and (3) wind tunnel sting increments. Additionally, data will be provided for the two optional test cases, which include:(1) static stability derivative calculations and (2)sideslip angle sweeps. In each of the test cases, the vehicle is stationary, and the body is assumed to be rigid, where vehicle deformation has been accounted for in the model configuration geometry. For all test cases, longitudinal and lateral force and moment aerodynamic coefficients will be provided for the total configuration, in addition to a component-level breakdown that includes the port wing, starboard wing, fuselage, and tail.

CFD↗

Triton: Igiugig Fish Video Analysis (Project Report)

This document summarizes the analysis of video data collected around the Ocean Renewable Power Company’s RivGen® device in the Kvichak River during July and August 2015. Human (manual) analysis of the data was undertaken and used to develop automated algorithms to detect fish in the frames and describe interaction behavior. In addition, a web application, EyeSea, was developed to combine manual and automated processing, so that ultimately the automated algorithms could be used to identify where human analysis was needed (i.e., when fish are present in video frames). The aim of the project was to develop algorithms that could identify video frames with fish present that could then be used to enable faster manual analysis. However, the project has also identified recommendations for future data collection, and research that could help analysis and interpretation. The manual analysis started to look at all data from the start of the deployment; this was to ensure rare events were seen, and initially focused on night-time data when more fish were present. This process highlighted the amount of time taken to identify fish, and ultimately only 42.33 hours of video were reviewed due to the time-consuming analysis. The data were classified as ‘Fish’, when the reviewer was confident it was a fish, and ‘Maybe’ fish, when it was difficult to distinguish. This was based on the movement, shape and color characteristics. ‘Fish’ were further classified as ‘adult’, ‘juvenile’, or ‘unidentifiable’. Behavioral attributes were noted, which were broadly divided into passive and avoidance activities. In over 42 hours data, there were only 20 potential contact interactions, of which 3 were ‘Maybe’ classifications, 12 were juveniles and 5 were adults; on only one occasion was an actual contact confirmed, and this was an adult fish with the camera, not the turbine itself. This also highlights the difficulties associated with confirming a strike or collision event as occurring or being a near-miss. More interactions were detected at night; this was probably biased by nighttime artificial light use, which may have attracted fish, but also could have increased detection probability as the light is reflected from the fish itself. For the algorithm development, background subtraction, optical flow, and deep learning techniques were considered. The deep learning approach was determined as needing too much training data for this application, and therefore was not continued. The optical flow analysis was considered promising, but did not give immediate results, so would need further investigation. Therefore, background subtraction was the main focus. Three methods of background subtraction were tried: Robust Principal Components Analysis (RPCA), Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and Video Background Extraction(ViBE). A classification technique was then applied to the foreground images to determine fish presence. Using this combination, it was found that fish could be accurately detected when occupying more pixels (>200 pixels, 98.2% correct; 100-200 pixels, 99.6% correct; 5-100 pixels, 85.4% correct; 2-5 pixels, 66.3% correct). In parallel, EyeSea was developed to convert the video data to a usable form and to enable manual and automated analysis of the data that would have a standardized output. Recommendations for further research, and standardized methods for data collection are given.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗

An MPA-IO interface to HPSS

This paper describes an implementation of the proposed MPI-IO (Message Passing Interface - Input/Output) standard for parallel I/O. Our system uses third-party transfer to move data over an external network between the processors where it is used and the I/O devices where it resides. Data travels directly from source to destination, without the need for shuffling it among processors or funneling it through a central node. Our distributed server model lets multiple compute nodes share the burden of coordinating data transfers. The system is built on the High Performance Storage System (HPSS), and a prototype version runs on a Meiko CS-2 parallel computer.

Jones, Terry↗

SPACE: 3D parallel solvers for Vlasov-Maxwell and Vlasov-Poisson equations for relativistic plasmas with atomic transformations

A parallel, relativistic, three-dimensional particle-in-cell code SPACE has been developed for the simulation of electromagnetic fields, relativistic particle beams, and plasmas. In addition to the standard second-order Particle-in-Cell (PIC) algorithm, SPACE includes efficient novel algorithms to resolve atomic physics processes such as multi-level ionization of plasma atoms, recombination, and electron attachment to dopants in dense neutral gases. SPACE also contains a highly adaptive particle-based method, called Adaptive Particle-in-Cloud (AP-Cloud), for solving the Vlasov-Poisson problems. It eliminates the traditional Cartesian mesh of PIC and replaces it with an adaptive octree data structure. The code's algorithms, structure, capabilities, parallelization strategy, and performance have been discussed. Additionally, typical examples of SPACE applications to accelerator science and engineering problems are described.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Interactive Correlation Analysis and Visualization of Climate Data

The relationship between our ability to analyze and extract insights from visualization of climate model output and the capability of the available resources to make those visualizations has reached a crisis point. The large volume of data currently produced by climate models is overwhelming the current, decades-old visualization workflow. The traditional methods for visualizing climate output also have not kept pace with changes in the types of grids used, the number of variables involved, and the number of different simulations performed with a climate model or the feature-richness of high-resolution simulations. This project has developed new and faster methods for visualization in order to get the most knowledge out of the new generation of high-resolution climate models. While traditional climate images will continue to be useful, there is need for new approaches to visualization and analysis of climate data if we are to gain all the insights available in ultra-large data sets produced by high-resolution model output and ensemble integrations of climate models such as those produced for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. Towards that end, we have developed new visualization techniques for performing correlation analysis. We have also introduced highly scalable, parallel rendering methods for visualizing large-scale 3D data. This project was done jointly with climate scientists and visualization researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and NCAR.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Optimizing Lossy Compression Rate-Distortion from Automatic Online Selection between SZ and ZFP

With ever-increasing volumes of scientific data produced by high-performance computing applications, significantly reducing data size is critical because of limited capacity of storage space and potential bottlenecks on I/O or networks in writing/reading or transferring data. SZ and ZFP are two leading BSD licensed open source C/C++ libraries for compressed floating-point arrays that support high throughput read and write random access. However, their performance is not consistent across different data sets and across different fields of some data sets, which raises the need for an automatic online (during compression) selection between SZ and ZFP, with minimal overhead. In this paper, the automatic selection optimizes the rate-distortion, an important statistical quality metric based on the signal-to-noise ratio. To optimize for rate-distortion, we investigate the principles of SZ and ZFP. We then propose an efficient online, low-overhead selection algorithm that predicts the compression quality accurately for two compressors in early processing stages and selects the best-fit compressor for each data field. Here, we implement the selection algorithm into an open-source library, and we evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed solution against plain SZ and ZFP in a parallel environment with 1,024 cores. Evaluation results on three data sets representing about 100 fields show that our selection algorithm improves the compression ratio up to 70 percent with the same level of data distortion because of very accurate selection (around 99 percent) of the bestfit compressor, with little overhead (less than 7 percent in the experiments).

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Charon Toolkit for Parallel, Implicit Structured-Grid Computations: Functional Design

In a previous report the design concepts of Charon were presented. Charon is a toolkit that aids engineers in developing scientific programs for structured-grid applications to be run on MIMD parallel computers. It constitutes an augmentation of the general-purpose MPI-based message-passing layer, and provides the user with a hierarchy of tools for rapid prototyping and validation of parallel programs, and subsequent piecemeal performance tuning. Here we describe the implementation of the domain decomposition tools used for creating data distributions across sets of processors. We also present the hierarchy of parallelization tools that allows smooth translation of legacy code (or a serial design) into a parallel program. Along with the actual tool descriptions, we will present the considerations that led to the particular design choices. Many of these are motivated by the requirement that Charon must be useful within the traditional computational environments of Fortran 77 and C. Only the Fortran 77 syntax will be presented in this report.

VanderWijngaart, Rob F.↗

A Parallel Computing Framework for Finding the Supported Solutions to a Biobjective Network Optimization Problem

Abstract Solving multi‐objective combinatorial optimization problems can quickly become computationally challenging when applied to large networks generated from big data. Present‐day first‐rate Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) solvers have parallelism built‐in to take advantage of multicore architectures; but specialized network optimization algorithms that can often solve graph problems more efficiently than a general MIP solver are typically programmed serially. Thus, these network algorithm implementations do not take full advantage of modern multicore computer capabilities. Many parallel computing languages include a fork/join framework into their concurrency packages that allow for simple conversion of recursive serial algorithms to operate in parallel without having to use complicated low‐level message‐passing interfaces. Fork/join is particularly well suited to divide and conquer algorithms such as Non‐Inferior Set Estimation (NISE) method for computing the supported Pareto front of a multi‐objective optimization problem. This work develops a simple general parallel NISE (pNISE) implementation using the Java 7 concurrency tools, and then offers results from a specific implementation of solving a bi‐objective shortest path problem. The results indicate that this method is capable of sizeable speed‐ups on both small‐scale personal computers as well as large‐scale shared memory supercomputers. Finally, other network problems suitable to this method are discussed, including multi‐objective variants of the minimum spanning tree problem, transportation problem, assignment problem, maximum flow problem, and the minimum‐cost flow problem. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Medrano, Fernando Antonio↗

Elucidating the challenges in extracting ultra-slow flame speeds in a closed vessel - A CH 2 F 2 microgravity case study using optical and pressure-rise data

Refrigerants with a low global warming potential (GWP) possess mild flammability. Hence, a fundamental understanding of their combustion characteristics is required to assess their fire-hazardous potential. The laminar burning velocity is one fundamental property to describe these under safety evaluation aspects. However, measuring laminar burning velocities for slow-burning components, such as low-GWP alternatives, is challenging. This is due to influencing effects such as buoyant flame deformation, stretch, radiation, and confinement, especially at the flammability limits. Here, in the present study, we investigated near-limit flames of the representative refrigerant difluoromethane (CH 2 F 2 ) with nitrogen-enriched oxidizer mixtures to elucidate the potentials and limitations at ultra-slow flame speeds of two widely used flame speed measurement methods in the closed vessel configuration: the optical flame speed measurement in the early quasi-isobaric regime and the flame speed determination from the pressure-rise during the later phase of the isochoric combustion process. Experiments were performed under terrestrial- and microgravity, conducted in a specially designed setup suitable for drop tower applications, using both methods in parallel. Recommendations for the extraction of flame speed data are derived from the non-buoyant reference investigations under microgravity and transferred to ultra-slow flames at terrestrial gravity. Near-limit flames under microgravity were found to be significantly affected by stretch effects for the optical method so that flame speed extrapolations to unstretched conditions are prone to errors. Stretch also affects the pressure method’s lower evaluation limit, and errors can be estimated by combining flame speed data from the pressure method and Markstein lengths from optical experiments.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Athena: High-Performance Sparse Tensor Contraction Sequence on Heterogeneous Memory

Sparse tensor contraction sequence has been widely employed in many fields, such as chemistry and physics. However, how to efficiently implement the sequence faces multiple challenges, such as redundant computations and memory operations, massive memory consumption, and inefficient utilization of hardware. To address the above challenges, we introduce Athena, a high-performance framework for SpTC sequences. Athena introduces new data structures, leverages emerging Optane-based heterogeneous memory (HM) architecture, and stage parallelism. In particular, Athena introduces shared hash table-represented sparse accumulator to eliminate unnecessary input processing and data migration; Athena uses a novel data-semantic guided dynamic migration solution to make the best use of the Optane-based HM for high performance; Athena also co-runs execution phases with different characteristics to enable high hardware utilization. Evaluating with 12 datasets, we show that Athena brings 327-7362× speedup over the state-of-the-art SpTC algorithm. With the dynamic data placement guided by data semantics, Athena brings performance improvement on Optane-based HM over a state-of-the-art software-based data management solution, a hardware-based data management solution, and PMM-only by 1.58×, 1.82×, and 2.34× respectively.

Liu, Jiawen↗

Parallelism maps for optically contacted etalons

A measurement technique is described that is capable of producing accurate numerical maps of the parallelism defect of optically contacted Fabry-Perot etalons. A photoelectric raster scan of the etalon transmission intensity distribution is performed at each of three closely spaced etalon tunings, one at maximum on-axis and two at the half-maxima on-axis positions. Simple data manipulation gives numerical or contour maps of the parallelism defect. Results demonstrating the effect of mechanical constraints on etalon parallelism are presented

Killeen, T. L.↗

Distributed-Memory Parallel Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

We develop the first distributed-memory parallel implementation of Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (SymNMF), a key data analytics kernel for clustering and dimensionality reduction. Our implementation includes two different algorithms for SymNMF, which give comparable results in terms of time and accuracy. The first algorithm is a parallelization of an existing sequential approach that uses solvers for non symmetric NMF. The second algorithm is a novel approach based on the Gauss-Newton method. It exploits second-order information without incurring large computational and memory costs. We evaluate the scalability of our algorithms on the Summit system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scaling up to 128 nodes (4,096 cores) with 70% efficiency. Additionally, we demonstrate our software on an image segmentation task.

Eswar, Srinivas↗

Software Engineering Support of the Third Round of Scientific Grand Challenge Investigations: Earth System Modeling Software Framework Survey

One of the most significant challenges in large-scale climate modeling, as well as in high-performance computing in other scientific fields, is that of effectively integrating many software models from multiple contributors. A software framework facilitates the integration task, both in the development and runtime stages of the simulation. Effective software frameworks reduce the programming burden for the investigators, freeing them to focus more on the science and less on the parallel communication implementation. while maintaining high performance across numerous supercomputer and workstation architectures. This document surveys numerous software frameworks for potential use in Earth science modeling. Several frameworks are evaluated in depth, including Parallel Object-Oriented Methods and Applications (POOMA), Cactus (from (he relativistic physics community), Overture, Goddard Earth Modeling System (GEMS), the National Center for Atmospheric Research Flux Coupler, and UCLA/UCB Distributed Data Broker (DDB). Frameworks evaluated in less detail include ROOT, Parallel Application Workspace (PAWS), and Advanced Large-Scale Integrated Computational Environment (ALICE). A host of other frameworks and related tools are referenced in this context. The frameworks are evaluated individually and also compared with each other.

Talbot, Bryan↗

Automatic variable selection in ecological niche modeling: A case study using Cassin’s Sparrow (Peucaea cassinii)

MERRA/Max provides a feature selection approach to dimensionality reduction that enables direct use of global climate model outputs in ecological niche modeling. The system accomplishes this reduction through a Monte Carlo optimization in which many independent MaxEnt runs, operating on a species occurrence file and a small set of randomly selected variables in a large collection of variables, converge on an estimate of the top contributing predictors in the larger collection. These top predictors can be viewed as potential candidates in the variable selection step of the ecological niche modeling process. MERRA/Max’s Monte Carlo algorithm operates on files stored in the underlying filesystem, making it scalable to large data sets. Its software components can run as parallel processes in a high-performance cloud computing environment to yield near real-time performance. In tests using Cassin’s Sparrow (Peucaea cassinii) as the target species, MERRA/Max selected a set of predictors from Worldclim’s Bioclim collection of 19 environmental variables that have been shown to be important determinants of the species’ bioclimatic niche. It also selected biologically and ecologically plausible predictors from a more diverse set of 86 environmental variables derived from NASA’s Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications Version 2 (MERRA-2) reanalysis, an output product of the Goddard Earth Observing System Version 5 (GEOS-5) modeling system. We believe these results point to a technological approach that could expand the use global climate model outputs in ecological niche modeling, foster exploratory experimentation with otherwise difficult-to-use climate data sets, streamline the modeling process, and, eventually, enable automated bioclimatic modeling as a practical, readily accessible, low-cost, commercial cloud service.

John L. Schnase↗

BCL: A Cross-Platform Distributed Data Structures Library

One-sided communication is a useful paradigm for irregular parallel applications, but most one-sided programming environments, including MPI's one-sided interface and PGAS programming languages, lack application-level libraries to support these applications. We present the Berkeley Container Library, a set of generic, cross-platform, high-performance data structures for irregular applications, including queues, hash tables, Bloom filters and more. BCL is written in C++ using an internal DSL called the BCL Core that provides one-sided communication primitives such as remote get and remote put operations. The BCL Core has backends for MPI, OpenSHMEM, GASNet-EX, and UPC++, allowing BCL data structures to be used natively in programs written using any of these programming environments. Along with our internal DSL, we present the BCL ObjectContainer abstraction, which allows BCL data structures to transparently serialize complex data types while maintaining efficiency for primitive types. We also introduce the set of BCL data structures and evaluate their performance across a number of high-performance computing systems, demonstrating that BCL programs are competitive with hand-optimized code, even while hiding many of the underlying details of message aggregation, serialization, and synchronization.

Brock, Benjamin↗