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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 163 records · Page 9

A pseudospectral matrix method for time-dependent tensor fields on a spherical shell

We construct a pseudospectral method for the solution of time-dependent, non-linear partial differential equations on a three-dimensional spherical shell. The problem we address is the treatment of tensor fields on the sphere. As a test case we consider the evolution of a single black hole in numerical general relativity. A natural strategy would be the expansion in tensor spherical harmonics in spherical coordinates. Instead, we consider the simpler and potentially more efficient possibility of a double Fourier expansion on the sphere for tensors in Cartesian coordinates. As usual for the double Fourier method, we employ a filter to address time-step limitations and certain stability issues. We find that a tensor filter based on spin-weighted spherical harmonics is successful, while two simplified, non-spin-weighted filters do not lead to stable evolutions. The derivatives and the filter are implemented by matrix multiplication for efficiency. A key technical point is the construction of a matrix multiplication method for the spin-weighted spherical harmonic filter. As example for the efficient parallelization of the double Fourier, spin-weighted filter method we discuss an implementation on a GPU, which achieves a speed-up of up to a factor of 20 compared to a single core CPU implementation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A domain decomposition method for pseudo-spectral electromagnetic simulations of plasmas

Pseudo-spectral electromagnetic solvers (i.e. representing the fields in Fourier space) have extraordinary precision. In particular, Haber et al. presented in 1973 a pseudo-spectral solver that integrates analytically the solution over a finite time step, under the usual assumption that the source is constant over that time step. Yet, pseudo-spectral solvers have not been widely used, due in part to the difficulty for efficient parallelization owing to global communications associated with global FFTs on the entire computational domains. A method for the parallelization of electromagnetic pseudo-spectral solvers is proposed and tested on single electromagnetic pulses, and on Particle-In-Cell simulations of the wakefield formation in a laser plasma accelerator. The method takes advantage of the properties of the Discrete Fourier Transform, the linearity of Maxwell’s equations and the finite speed of light for limiting the communications of data within guard regions between neighboring computational domains. Although this requires a small approximation, test results show that no significant error is made on the test cases that have been presented. The proposed method opens the way to solvers combining the favorable parallel scaling of standard finite-difference methods with the accuracy advantages of pseudo-spectral methods.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

A high-order discontinuous Galerkin method for fluid–structure interaction with efficient implicit–explicit time stepping

We present a high-order accurate scheme for coupled fluid–structure interaction problems. The fluid is discretized using a discontinuous Galerkin method on unstructured tetrahedral meshes, and the structure uses a high-order volumetric continuous Galerkin finite element method. Standard radial basis functions are used for the mesh deformation. The time integration is performed using a partitioned approach based on implicit–explicit Runge–Kutta methods. The resulting scheme fully decouples the implicit solution procedures for the fluid and the solid parts, which we perform using two separate efficient parallel solvers. We demonstrate up to fifth order accuracy in time on a non-trivial test problem, on which we also show that additional subiterations are not required. We solve a benchmark problem of a cantilever beam in a shedding flow, and show good agreement with other results in the literature. Finally, we solve for the flow around a thin membrane at a high angle of attack in both 2D and 3D, and compare with the results obtained with a rigid plate.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Moments-based interface reconstruction, remap and advection

Here, we present a new moment-of-fluid (MOF 2 ) interface reconstruction method. It uses the zeroth, first, and second moments of the fragment of material inside a cell of the mesh to reconstruct a convex material polygon or a union of convex polygons that approximate the respective material fragment. The new method requires information about the material moments only for the cell under consideration. The MOF 2 method allows to exactly reproduce several convex shapes: corners, filaments, and some concave shapes: cell-complements to corners and filaments. Interface reconstruction is formulated as a local (for each cell), non-linear, equality constrained optimization problem, which does not require additional communication and allows for an efficient parallel implementation. We present an extensive set of test problems, both for interface reconstruction on a single cell, and for reconstruction of a variety of shapes on a variety of meshes. We describe how to perform two-material advection using the MOF 2 method and present the results for the classical advection tests. We also show the examples of material interface remapping needed in the framework of multi-material arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian methods, and give a brief description of a procedure that can be used to update the material moments on the Lagrangian stage of those methods.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

An adaptive moments-based interface reconstruction using intersection of the cell with one half-plane, two half-planes and a circle

We present a new adaptive moment-of-fluid (A-MOF) interface reconstruction method. It uses the zeroth, first, and second moments of the fragment of material inside a cell of the mesh to construct a shape that approximates the respective material fragment. The new method requires information about the material moments only for the cell under consideration. The adaptive method chooses between shapes obtained by the intersection of the cell with one half-plane, two half-planes, or a circle. The A-MOF method allows to exactly reproduce several convex shapes: corners, filaments, and their concave cell-complements; as well as pieces of the circles and its cell-compliments. Interface reconstruction is formulated as a local (for each cell), non-linear, equality constrained optimization problem, which does not require additional communication and allows for an efficient parallel implementation. In conclusion, we present an extensive set of test problems, both for interface reconstruction on a single cell, and for reconstruction of a variety of shapes on the entire mesh.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Efficient Heterogeneous Execution on Large Multicore and Accelerator Platforms: Case Study Using a Block Tridiagonal Solver

The algorithmic and implementation principles are explored in gainfully exploiting GPU accelerators in conjunction with multicore processors on high-end systems with large numbers of compute nodes, and evaluated in an implementation of a scalable block tridiagonal solver. The accelerator of each compute node is exploited in combination with multicore processors of that node in performing block-level linear algebra operations in the overall, distributed solver algorithm. Optimizations incorporated include: (1) an efficient memory mapping and synchronization interface to minimize data movement, (2) multi-process sharing of the accelerator within a node to obtain balanced load with multicore processors, and (3) an automatic memory management system to efficiently utilize accelerator memory when sub-matrices spill over the limits of device memory. Results are reported from our novel implementation that uses MAGMA and CUBLAS accelerator software systems simultaneously with ACML for multithreaded execution on processors. Overall, using 940 nVidia Tesla X2090 accelerators and 15,040 cores, the best heterogeneous execution delivers a 10.9-fold reduction in run time relative to an already efficient parallel multicore-only baseline implementation that is highly optimized with intra-node and inter-node concurrency and computation-communication overlap. Detailed quantitative results are presented to explain all critical runtime components contributing to hybrid performance.

Park, Alfred J↗

Reconstructing householder vectors from Tall-Skinny QR

The Tall-Skinny QR (TSQR) algorithm is more communication efficient than the standard Householder algorithm for QR decomposition of matrices with many more rows than columns. However, TSQR produces a different representation of the orthogonal factor and therefore requires more software development to support the new representation. Further, implicitly applying the orthogonal factor to the trailing matrix in the context of factoring a square matrix is more complicated and costly than with the Householder representation. We show how to perform TSQR and then reconstruct the Householder vector representation with the same asymptotic communication efficiency and little extra computational cost. We demonstrate the high performance and numerical stability of this algorithm both theoretically and empirically. The new Householder reconstruction algorithm allows us to design more efficient parallel QR algorithms, with significantly lower latency cost compared to Householder QR and lower bandwidth and latency costs compared with Communication-Avoiding QR (CAQR) algorithm. Experiments on supercomputers demonstrate the benefits of the communication cost improvements: in particular, our experiments show substantial improvements over tuned library implementations for tall-and-skinny matrices. Furthermore, we also provide algorithmic improvements to the Householder QR and CAQR algorithms, and we investigate several alternatives to the Householder reconstruction algorithm that sacrifice guarantees on numerical stability in some cases in order to obtain higher performance.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A nonhydrostatic formulation for MPAS-Ocean

The Model for Prediction Across Scales-Ocean (MPAS-Ocean) is an open-source, global ocean model and is one component of a family of climate models within the MPAS framework, including atmosphere, sea-ice, and land-ice models. Here, in this work, a new formulation for the ocean model is presented that solves the nonhydrostatic, incompressible Boussinesq equations on an unstructured, staggered, z-level grid. The introduction of this nonhydrostatic capability is necessary for the resolution of internal wave dynamics and large eddy simulations. Compared to the standard, hydrostatic formulation, a nonhydrostatic pressure solver and a vertical momentum equation are added, where the PETSc (Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation) library is used for the inversion of a large sparse system for the nonhydrostatic pressure. Numerical results on a stratified seiche, internal solitary wave, overflow and lock-exchange test cases are presented, and the parallel efficiency of the code is evaluated using up to 1024 processors.

3D Poisson equation↗

A nonhydrostatic formulation for MPAS-Ocean

The Model for Prediction Across Scales-Ocean (MPAS-Ocean) is an open-source, global ocean model and is one component of a family of climate models within the MPAS framework, including atmosphere, sea-ice, and land-ice models. Here, in this work, a new formulation for the ocean model is presented that solves the nonhydrostatic, incompressible Boussinesq equations on an unstructured, staggered, z-level grid. The introduction of this nonhydrostatic capability is necessary for the resolution of internal wave dynamics and large eddy simulations. Compared to the standard, hydrostatic formulation, a nonhydrostatic pressure solver and a vertical momentum equation are added, where the PETSc (Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation) library is used for the inversion of a large sparse system for the nonhydrostatic pressure. Numerical results on a stratified seiche, internal solitary wave, overflow and lock-exchange test cases are presented, and the parallel efficiency of the code is evaluated using up to 1024 processors.

3D Poisson equation↗

Gyrokinetic particle-in-cell optimization on emerging multi- and manycore platforms

The next decade of high-performance computing (HPC) systems will see a rapid evolution and divergence of multi- and manycore architectures as power and cooling constraints limit increases in microprocessor clock speeds. Understanding efficient optimization methodologies on diverse multicore designs in the context of demanding numerical methods is one of the greatest challenges faced today by the HPC community. In this paper, we examine the efficient multicore optimization of GTC, a petascale gyrokinetic toroidal fusion code for studying plasma microturbulence in tokamak devices. For GTC’s key computational components (charge deposition and particle push), we explore efficient parallelization strategies across a broad range of emerging multicore designs, including the recently-released Intel Nehalem-EX, the AMD Opteron Istanbul, and the highly multithreaded Sun UltraSparc T2+. We also present the first study on tuning gyrokinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithms for graphics processors, using the NVIDIA C2050 (Fermi). Our work discusses several novel optimization approaches for gyrokinetic PIC, including mixed-precision computation, particle binning and decomposition strategies, grid replication, SIMDized atomic floating-point operations, and effective GPU texture memory utilization. Overall, we achieve significant performance improvements of 1.3–4.7× on these complex PIC kernels, despite the inherent challenges of data dependency and locality. Finally, our work also points to several architectural and programming features that could significantly enhance PIC performance and productivity on next-generation architectures.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Exploring the interplay of resilience and energy consumption for a task-based partial differential equations preconditioner

Here, we discuss algorithm-based resilience to silent data corruptions (SDCs) in a task-based domain-decomposition preconditioner for partial differential equations (PDEs). The algorithm exploits a reformulation of the PDE as a sampling problem, followed by a solution update through data manipulation that is resilient to SDCs. The implementation is based on a server-client model where all state information is held by the servers, while clients are designed solely as computational units. Scalability tests run up to ~51K cores show a parallel efficiency greater than 90%. We use a 2D elliptic PDE and a fault model based on random single and double bit-flip to demonstrate the resilience of the application to synthetically injected SDC. We discuss two fault scenarios: one based on the corruption of all data of a target task, and the other involving the corruption of a single data point. We show that for our application, given the test problem considered, a four-fold increase in the number of faults only yields a 2% change in the overhead to overcome their presence, from 7% to 9%. We then discuss potential savings in energy consumption via dynamic voltage/frequency scaling, and its interplay with fault-rates, and application overhead.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Optimization of processor allocation for domain decomposed Monte Carlo calculations

Load imbalance plagues domain decomposed Monte Carlo calculations when sources are not uniform. Parallel efficiency for domain decomposed Monte Carlo transport calculations improves through a nonuniform allocation of processors over subdomains. In this work, we optimize the allocation with runtime diagnostics collected during a calibration step, then complete the full calculation. The diagnostic-based approach is compared to implicit filtering, an optimization algorithm for bound constrained noisy optimization problems. Finally, we consider both forward and hybrid radiation transport calculations to measure performance.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Numerical Analysis of the Dynamics of Two- and Three-Dimensional Fluidized Bed Reactors using an Euler-Lagrange Approach

Biomass thermochemical conversion, often done in fluidized beds, recently gained a lot of attention due to its potential to efficiently produce renewable liquid fuels. Optimization of reactor design and operating conditions, however, requires a fundamental understanding of bed dynamics. In this work, a numerical framework based on an Euler-Lagrange approach is developed and used to perform and analyze large-scale simulations of two- and three-dimensional periodic fluidized beds. Collisions are handled using a soft-sphere model. An efficient parallel implementation allows one to explicitly track over 30 million particles, which is representative of the number of particles found in lab-scale reactor, therefore demonstrating the capability of Lagrangian approaches to simulate realistic systems at that scale. An on-the-fly bubble identification and tracking algorithm is used to characterize bubble dynamics for inlet velocities up to 9 times the minimum fluidization velocity. Statistics for gas volume fraction, gas and particle velocities, bed expansion, and bubble size and velocity, is compared across the two- and three-dimensional configurations, and comparison with literature data generally shows good agreement. The wide distribution of gas residence times observed in the simulations is linked to the different gas hold-up characteristics of the gas-solid system.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

Hands-on Performance Tuning of 3D Finite Difference Earthquake Simulation on GPU Fermi Chipset

3D simulation of earthquake ground motion is one of the most challenging computational problems in science. The emergence of graphic processing units (GPU) as an effective alternative to traditional general purpose processors has become increasingly capable in terms of accelerating scientific computing research. In this paper, we describe our experiences in porting AWP-ODC, a 3D finite difference seismic wave propagation code, to the latest GPU Fermi chipset. We completely rewrote this Fortran-based 13-point asymmetric stencil computation code in C and MPI-CUDA in order to take advantage of the powerful GPU computing capabilities. Our new CUDA code implemented the asymmetric 3D stencil on Fermi to make the best use of GPU on-chip memory for an aggressive parallel efficiency. Benchmark on NVIDIA Tesla M2090 demonstrated 10x speedup versus the original fully optimized AWP-ODC FORTRAN MPI code running on a single Intel Nehalem 2.4 GHz CPU socket (4 cores/CPU), and 15x speedup versus the same MPI code running on a single AMD Istanbul 2.6 GHz CPU socket (6 cores/CPU). Sustained single-GPU performance of 143.8 GFLOPS in single precision is benchmarked for the testing case of 128x128x960 mesh size.

3D Stencil Computation↗

PySpawn: Software for Nonadiabatic Quantum Molecular Dynamics

The ab initio multiple spawning (AIMS) method enables nonadiabatic quantum molecular dynamics simulations in an arbitrary number of dimensions, with potential energy surfaces provided by electronic structure calculations performed on-the-fly. However, the intricacy of the AIMS algorithm complicates software development, deployment on modern shared computer resources, and post-simulation data analysis. PySpawn is a nonadiabatic molecular dynamics software package that addresses these issues. Here, the program is designed to be easily interfaced with electronic structure software, and an interface to the TeraChem software package is described here. PySpawn introduces a task-based reorganization of the AIMS algorithm, allowing fine-grained restart capability and setting the stage for efficient parallelization in a future release. PySpawn includes a user-friendly and interactive Python analysis module that will enable novice users to painlessly adopt AIMS. As a demonstration of PySpawn’s simulation capability and analysis module, we report complete active space self-consistent field–based AIMS simulations of the 1,2- dithienyl-1,2-dicyanoethene molecule, a promising molecular photoswitch.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

A Massively Parallel Implementation of the CCSD(T) Method Using the Resolution-of-the-Identity Approximation and a Hybrid Distributed/Shared Memory Parallelization Model

In this work, a parallel algorithm is described for the coupled-cluster singles and doubles method augmented with a perturbative correction for triple excitations [CCSD(T)] using the resolution-of-the-identity (RI) approximation for two-electron repulsion integrals (ERIs). The algorithm bypasses the storage of four-center ERIs by adopting an integral-direct strategy. The CCSD amplitude equations are given in a compact quasi-linear form by factorizing them in terms of amplitude-dressed three-center intermediates. A hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallelization scheme is employed, which uses the OpenMP-based shared memory model for intranode parallelization and the MPI-based distributed memory model for internode parallelization. Parallel efficiency has been optimized for all terms in the CCSD amplitude equations. Two different algorithms have been implemented for the rate-limiting terms in the CCSD amplitude equations that entail and -scaling computational costs, where N O and N V denote the number of correlated occupied and virtual orbitals, respectively. One of the algorithms assembles the four-center ERIs requiring N V 4 and N O 2 N V 2 -scaling memory costs in a distributed manner on a number of MPI ranks, while the other algorithm completely bypasses the assembling of quartic memory-scaling ERIs and thus largely reduces the memory demand. It is demonstrated that the former memory-expensive algorithm is faster on a few hundred cores, while the latter memory-economic algorithm shows a better strong scaling in the limit of a few thousand cores. The program is shown to exhibit a near-linear scaling, in particular for the compute-intensive triples correction step, on up to 8000 cores. The performance of the program is demonstrated via calculations involving molecules with 24–51 atoms and up to 1624 atomic basis functions. As the first application, the complete basis set (CBS) limit for the interaction energy of the π-stacked uracil dimer from the S66 data set has been investigated. This work reports the first calculation of the interaction energy at the CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVQZ level without local orbital approximation. The CBS limit for the CCSD correlation contribution to the interaction energy was found to be -8.01 kcal/mol, which agrees very well with the value -7.99 kcal/mol reported by Schmitz, Hättig, and Tew [ Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2014 , 16 , 22167-22178]. The CBS limit for the total interaction energy was estimated to be -9.64 kcal/mol.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

The Importance of Three-Body Interactions in Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Water with the Fragment Molecular Orbital Method

The analytic first derivative with respect to nuclear coordinates is formulated and implemented in the framework of the three-body fragment molecular orbital (FMO) method. The gradient has been derived and implemented for restricted Hartree-Fock, second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation, and density functional theories. The importance of the three-body fully analytic gradient is illustrated through the failure of the two-body FMO method during molecular dynamics simulations of a small water cluster. The parallel implementation of the fragment molecular orbital method, its parallel efficiency, and its scalability on the Blue Gene/Q architecture up to 262,144 CPU cores, are also discussed.

Pruitt, Spencer R.↗