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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
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

Traversing large graphs on GPUs with unified memory

Due to the limited capacity of GPU memory, the majority of prior work on graph applications on GPUs has been restricted to graphs of modest sizes that fit in memory. Recent hardware and software advances make it possible to address much larger host memory transparently as a part of a feature known as unified virtual memory. While accessing host memory over an interconnect is understandably slower, the problem space has not been sufficiently explored in the context of a challenging workload with low computational intensity and an irregular data access pattern such as graph traversal. We analyse the performance of breadth first search (BFS) for several large graphs in the context of unified memory and identify the key factors that contribute to slowdowns. Next, we propose a lightweight offline graph reordering algorithm, HALO (Harmonic Locality Ordering), that can be used as a pre-processing step for static graphs. HALO yields speedups of 1.5x-1.9x over baseline in subsequent traversals. Our method specifically aims to cover large directed real world graphs in addition to undirected graphs whereas prior methods only account for the latter. Additionally, we demonstrate ties between the locality ordering problem and graph compression and show that prior methods from graph compression such as recursive graph bisection can be suitably adapted to this problem.

Gera, Prasun↗
NASA NTRS1989

Stability and performance tradeoffs in bi-lateral telemanipulation

Kinesthetic force feedback provides measurable increase in remote manipulation system performance. Intensive computation time requirements or operation under conditions of time delay can cause serious stability problems in control-system design. Here, a simplified linear analysis of this stability problem is presented for the forward-flow generalized architecture, applying the hybrid two-port representation to express the loop gain of the traditional master-slave architecture, which can be subjected to similar analysis. The hybrid two-port representation is also used to express the effects on the fidelity of manipulation or feel of one design approach used to stabilize the forward-flow architecture. The results suggest that, when local force feedback at the slave side is used to reduce manipulator stability problems, a price is paid in terms of telemanipulation fidelity.

Hannaford, Blake↗
NASA NTRS1993

Sensitivity analysis of Lyapunov and Riccati equations with application to controls-structures integrated design

Controls-structure integrated design is a complicated multidisciplinary design optimization problem which involves the state equations pertaining to open-loop eigenvalues and control laws. In order to alleviate the intensity of the computation, this study uses the adjoint variable method to derive sensitivity equations for the eigenvalue, Liapunov, and Riccati equations. These individual sensitivity equations are then combined together to form the multidisciplinary sensitivity equations for the control structure integrated design problems. A set of linear sensitivity equations, proportional in number to the number of performance functions involved in the optimization process, are solved. This proposed approach may provide a great saving in computer resources. The validity of the newly developed sensitivity equations is verified by numerical examples.

Hou, Gene↗
DOE OSTI2014

A Study of Successive Over-relaxation Method Parallelization over Modern HPC Languages

Successive over-relaxation (SOR) is a computationally intensive, yet extremely important iterative solver for solving linear systems. Due to recent trends of exponential growth in amount of data generated and increasing problem sizes, serial platforms have proved to be insucient in providing the required computational power. In this paper, we present parallel implementations of red-black SOR method using three modern programming languages namely Chapel, D and Go. We employ SOR method for solving 2D steady-state heat conduction problem. We discuss the optimizations incorporated and the features of these languages which are crucial for improving the program performance. Experiments have been performed using 2, 4, and 8 threads and performance results are compared with serial execution. The analysis of results provides important insights into working of SOR method.

Mittal, Sparsh↗
DOE OSTI2012

Adjusting process count on demand for petascale global optimization

There are many challenges that need to be met before efficient and reliable computation at the petascale is possible. Many scientific and engineering codes running at the petascale are likely to be memory intensive, which makes thrashing a serious problem for many petascale applications. One way to overcome this challenge is to use a dynamic number of processes, so that the total amount of memory available for the computation can be increased on demand. This paper describes modifications made to the massively parallel global optimization code pVTdirect in order to allow for a dynamic number of processes. In particular, the modified version of the code monitors memory use and spawns new processes if the amount of available memory is determined to be insufficient. The primary design challenges are discussed, and performance results are presented and analyzed.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
NASA NTRS1977

The estimation of pointing angle and normalized surface scattering cross section from GEOS-3 radar altimeter measurements

The statistical error of the pointing angle estimation technique is determined as a function of the effective receiver signal to noise ratio. Other sources of error are addressed and evaluated with inadequate calibration being of major concern. The impact of pointing error on the computation of normalized surface scattering cross section (sigma) from radar and the waveform attitude induced altitude bias is considered and quantitative results are presented. Pointing angle and sigma processing algorithms are presented along with some initial data. The intensive mode clean vs. clutter AGC calibration problem is analytically resolved. The use clutter AGC data in the intensive mode is confirmed as the correct calibration set for the sigma computations.

Brown, G. S.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Algorithmic considerations of integrated design for CSI on a hypercube architecture

An approach is presented to the integrated design problem for actively controlled large, flexible mechanical systems for which Control Structure Interaction (CSI) problems are of concern. The two coupled design problems were identified as the optimal Structural Design problem the optimal Controller Design problem. These two problems can be addressed within a decision making loop that would consider each separately, and then sequentially analyze the effects of one on the other. Embedded in such a loop would be the simulation and coordination tasks as part of the decision tools required in a total (software) package. All of the above are compute-intensive tasks. In any such task, possible decompositions and gains due to the inherent parallelism have to be exploited. The problems under consideration, as applied to large flexible mechanical structures, are particularly suited to be mapped onto multicomputer systems in a hypercube topology.

Oezguener, UE.↗
DOE OSTI2022

Comparing machine learning and interpolation methods for loop-level calculations

The need to approximate functions is ubiquitous in science, either due to empirical constraints or high computational cost of accessing the function. In high-energy physics, the precise computation of the scattering cross-section of a process requires the evaluation of computationally intensive integrals. A wide variety of methods in machine learning have been used to tackle this problem, but often the motivation of using one method over another is lacking. Comparing these methods is typically highly dependent on the problem at hand, so we specify to the case where we can evaluate the function a large number of times, after which quick and accurate evaluation can take place. We consider four interpolation and three machine learning techniques and compare their performance on three toy functions, the four-point scalar Passarino-Veltman D_0 D 0 function, and the two-loop self-energy master integral M. We find that in low dimensions (d = 3), traditional interpolation techniques like the Radial Basis Function perform very well, but in higher dimensions (d=5, 6, 9) we find that multi-layer perceptrons (a.k.a neural networks) do not suffer as much from the curse of dimensionality and provide the fastest and most accurate predictions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2023

Helical Fins for Concentrated Solar Receivers: Design Optimization and Entropy Analysis

Concentrated solar power (CSP) with thermal energy storage (TES) has the potential to achieve grid parity. This can be realized by operating CSP systems at temperatures above 700 °C with high-efficiency sCO 2 power cycles. However, operating CSP systems at such temperatures poses several challenges, among which the design of solar receivers to accommodate increased thermal loads is critical. To this end, this work explores and optimizes various swirl-inducing internal fin designs for solar receiver tubes. These fin designs not only improve the thermal performance of receiver tubes but also levelize temperature unevenness caused by non-uniform thermal loading. In this work, the geometric parameters of the fin designs are optimized to maximize the Nusselt number with a constraint on the friction factor. This optimization, however, is computationally intensive, requiring hundreds of simulation calls to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models. Here, to circumvent this problem, surrogate models are used to approximate the simulation outputs needed during the optimization. In addition, this study also examines the fin designs from an entropy generation perspective. To this end, the entropy contributions from thermal and viscous effects are quantitatively compared while varying the operational Reynolds number.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
NASA NTRS1985

A computer controlled mass spectrometer system for investigating the decomposition of non-metallic materials under atmospheric conditions

A PDP 11/23 quadrupole mass spectrometer system was coupled to a nondiscriminating gas inlet system permitting gases at atmospheric pressure to be admitted into a high vacuum chamber containing the ion source of the mass spectrometer without separation of the gaseous components. The resolution of related software problems has resulted in a convenient computer-mass spectrometer system capable of generating masses, relative intensities and related data on the gaseous products resulting from the atmospheric thermal decomposition of nonmetallic materials.

Thompson, J. M.↗
NASA NTRS1973

Computational fracture mechanics

Numerical procedures for accurate determination of elastic stress intensity factors for the general two-dimensional crack problem are reviewed. The elastic perfectly plastic state of crack tip deformation is studied by a finite element procedure. Elastic-plastic fields in the immediate vicinity of a crack tip are determined numerically by finite element procedures based on asymptotic studies of crack tip singularities in plastic materials. The small-scale yielding problem is modeled, and expressions for crack tip opening displacement, shear singularity amplitude, and plastic zone extent are derived. A finite element solution to the large-scale yielding of a circumferentially cracked round tension bar is obtained. The three-dimensional aspects of flawed structures and numerical methods of treating them are studied. Ductile fracture mechanisms, in particular crack tip fracture on the microscale, are discussed.

Rice, J. R.↗
NASA NTRS1994

TOPEX/POSEIDON tides estimated using a global inverse model

Altimetric data from the TOPEX/POSEIDON mission will be used for studies of global ocean circulation and marine geophysics. However, it is first necessary to remove the ocean tides, which are aliased in the raw data. The tides are constrained by the two distinct types of information: the hydrodynamic equations which the tidal fields of elevations and velocities must satisfy, and direct observational data from tide gauges and satellite altimetry. Here we develop and apply a generalized inverse method, which allows us to combine rationally all of this information into global tidal fields best fitting both the data and the dynamics, in a least squares sense. The resulting inverse solution is a sum of the direct solution to the astronomically forced Laplace tidal equations and a linear combination of the representers for the data functionals. The representer functions (one for each datum) are determined by the dynamical equations, and by our prior estimates of the statistics or errors in these equations. Our major task is a direct numerical calculation of these representers. This task is computationally intensive, but well suited to massively parallel processing. By calculating the representers we reduce the full (infinite dimensional) problem to a relatively low-dimensional problem at the outset, allowing full control over the conditioning and hence the stability of the inverse solution. With the representers calculated we can easily update our model as additional TOPEX/POSEIDON data become available. As an initial illustration we invert harmonic constants from a set of 80 open-ocean tide gauges. We then present a practical scheme for direct inversion of TOPEX/POSEIDON crossover data. We apply this method to 38 cycles of geophysical data records (GDR) data, computing preliminary global estimates of the four principal tidal constituents, M(sub 2), S(sub 2), K(sub 1) and O(sub 1). The inverse solution yields tidal fields which are simultaneously smoother, and in better agreement with altimetric and ground truth data, than previously proposed tidal models. Relative to the 'default' tidal corrections provided with the TOPEX/POSEIDON GDR, the inverse solution reduces crossover difference variances significantly (approximately 20-30%), even though only a small number of free parameters (approximately equal to 1000) are actually fit to the crossover data.

Egbert, Gary D.↗
NASA NTRS1971

Multiple scattering of polarized light in planetary atmospheres. II - Sunlight reflected by terrestrial water clouds.

The intensity and polarization of sunlight reflected by terrestrial water clouds are computed with the doubling method. The calculations illustrate that this method can be effectively used in problems involving strongly anisotropic phase matrices. The method can, therefore, be used to derive information about planetary clouds, including those of the earth, from polarimetric observations. The results of the computations indicate that the polarization is more sensitive than the intensity to cloud microstructure, such as particle size and shape.

Hansen, J. E.↗
DOE OSTI2018

Accelerating nuclear configuration interaction calculations through a preconditioned block iterative eigensolver

We describe a number of recently developed techniques for improving the performance of large-scalenuclear configuration interaction calculations on high performance parallel computers. We show thebenefit of using a preconditioned block iterative method to replace the Lanczos algorithm that hastraditionally been used to perform this type of computation. The rapid convergence of the block iterativemethod is achieved by a proper choice of starting guesses of the eigenvectors and the construction of aneffective preconditioner. These acceleration techniques take advantage of special structure of the nuclearconfiguration interaction problem which we discuss in detail. The use of a block method also allows usto improve the concurrency of the computation, and take advantage of the memory hierarchy of modernmicroprocessors to increase the arithmetic intensity of the computation relative to data movement. Wealso discuss the implementation details that are critical to achieving high performance on massivelyparallel multi-core supercomputers, and demonstrate that the new block iterative solver is two to threetimes faster than the Lanczos based algorithm for problems of moderate sizes on a Cray XC30 system.

Shao, Meiyue↗
DOE OSTI2018

A High-Order Low-Order Algorithm with Exponentially Convergent Monte Carlo for Thermal Radiative Transfer

In this paper, we have implemented a new high-order low-order (HOLO) algorithm for solving thermal radiative transfer problems. The low-order (LO) system is based on the spatial and angular moments of the transport equation and a linear-discontinuous finite-element spatial representation, producing equations similar to the standard S 2 equations. The LO solver is fully implicit in time and efficiently resolves the nonlinear temperature dependence at each time step. The high-order (HO) solver utilizes exponentially convergent Monte Carlo (ECMC) to give a globally accurate solution for the angular intensity to a fixed-source pure-absorber transport problem. This global solution is used to compute consistency terms, which require the HO and LO solutions to converge toward the same solution. The use of ECMC allows for the efficient reduction of statistical noise in the Monte Carlo solution, reducing inaccuracies introduced through the LO consistency terms. Finally, we compare results with an implicit Monte Carlo code for one-dimensional gray test problems and demonstrate the efficiency of ECMC over standard Monte Carlo in this HOLO algorithm.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2011

Quantum Monte Carlo Endstation for Petascale Computing

The major achievements enabled by QMC Endstation grant include * Performance improvement on clusters of x86 multi-core systems, especially on Cray XT systems * New and improved methods for the wavefunction optimizations * New forms of trial wavefunctions * Implementation of the full application on NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA The scaling studies of QMCPACK on large-scale systems show excellent parallel efficiency up to 216K cores on Jaguarpf (Cray XT5). The GPU implementation shows speedups of 10-15x over the CPU implementation on older generation of x86. We have implemented hybrid OpenMP/MPI scheme in QMC to take advantage of multi-core shared memory processors of petascale systems. Our hybrid scheme has several advantages over the standard MPI-only scheme. * Memory optimized: large read-only data to store one-body orbitals and other shared properties to represent the trial wave function and many-body Hamiltonian can be shared among threads, which reduces the memory footprint of a large-scale problem. * Cache optimized: the data associated with an active Walker are in cache during the compute-intensive drift-diffusion process and the operations on an Walker are optimized for cache reuse. Thread-local objects are used to ensure the data affinity to a thread. * Load balanced: Walkers in an ensemble are evenly distributed among threads and MPI tasks. The two-level parallelism reduces the population imbalance among MPI tasks and reduces the number of point-to-point communications of large messages (serialized objects) for the Walker exchange. * Communication optimized: the communication overhead, especially for the collective operations necessary to determine ET and measure the properties of an ensemble, is significantly lowered by using less MPI tasks. The multiple forms of parallelism afforded by QMC algorithms make them ideal candidates for acceleration in the many-core paradigm. We presented the results of our effort to port the QMCPACK simulation code to the NVIDIA CUDA GPU platform. We restructured the CPU algorithms to express additional parallelism, minimize GPU-CPU communication, and efficiently utilize the GPU memory hierarchy. Using mixed precision on GT200 GPUs and MPI for intercommunication and load balancing, we observe typical full-application speedups of approximately 10x to 15x relative to quad-core Xeon CPUs alone, while reproducing the double-precision CPU results within statistical error. We developed an all-electron quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method for solids that does not rely on pseudopotentials, and used it to construct a primary ultra-high-pressure calibration based on the equation of state of cubic boron nitride. We computed the static contribution to the free energy with the QMC method and obtained the phonon contribution from density functional theory, yielding a high-accuracy calibration up to 900 GPa usable directly in experiment. We computed the anharmonic Raman frequency shift with QMC simulations as a function of pressure and temperature, allowing optical pressure calibration. In contrast to present experimental approaches, small systematic errors in the theoretical EOS do not increase with pressure, and no extrapolation is needed. This all-electron method is applicable to first-row solids, providing a new reference for ab initio calculations of solids and benchmarks for pseudopotential accuracy. We compared experimental and theoretical results on the momentum distribution and the quasiparticle renormalization factor in sodium. From an x-ray Compton-profile measurement of the valence-electron momentum density, we derived its discontinuity at the Fermi wavevector finding an accurate measure of the renormalization factor that we compared with quantum-Monte-Carlo and G0W0 calculations performed both on crystalline sodium and on the homogeneous electron gas. Our calculated results are in good agreement with the experiment. We have been studying the heat of formation for various Kubas complexes of molecular hydrogen on Ti(1,2)ethylene-nH2 using Diffusion Monte Carlo. This work has been started and is ongoing. We are studying systems involving 1 and 2 Ti bonding sites with up to 10 hydrogen molecules in numerous configurations. This work will establish a benchmark that will test the accuracy of density functional calculations and establish the feasibility of our methods for similar systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
NASA NTRS1990

Models of space averaged energetics of plates

The analysis of high frequency vibrations in plates is of particular interest in the study of structure borne noise in aircrafts. The current methods of analysis are either too expensive (finite element method) or may have a confidence band wider than desirable (Statistical Energy Analysis). An alternative technique to model the space and time averaged response of structural acoustics problems with enough detail to include all significant mechanisms of energy generation, transmission, and absorption is highly desirable. The focus of this paper is the development of a set of equations which govern the space and time averaged energy density in plates. To solve this equation, a new type of boundary value problem must be treated in terms of energy density variables using energy and intensity boundary conditions. A computer simulation verification study of the energy governing equation is performed. A finite element formulation of the new equations is also implemented and several test cases are analyzed and compared to analytical solutions.

Bouthier, O. M.↗
DOE OSTI2010

The ecloud measurement setup in the Main Injector

Ecloud has been observed in many high intensity accelerators which can limit the amount of current that can be stored in them. In particular, for ProjectX, the amount of beam current that will be stored in the MI (Main Injector) will be {approx}160 x 10{sup 12} protons while the present maximum intensity is {approx}45 x 10{sup 12} protons which is about 3.5x less beam. Although ecloud has been observed in the MI, it has not caused instabilities at the present running conditions. However, there is no guarantee that instabilities caused by ecloud will not be a problem at ProjectX intensities. Therefore, a program has been started to study the ecloud effects with both computer simulations and experiments. In this paper, we will be focusing our attention on how coatings can affect the production of secondary electrons. We have installed an ecloud measurement setup in a straight section of MI which consists of one coated and one uncoated beam pipe with the same physical dimensions and at the same location, together with four retarding field analyzers (RFAs) and three sets of beam position monitors (BPMs) which can be used for the microwave measurements. An ecloud measurement setup was installed in a straight section of the Main Injector in 2009. The goal of the setup was to compare the characteristics of different beam pipe coatings when subjected to proton beam. The setup consists of one coated and one uncoated beam pipe with the same physical dimensions installed at the same location. Four RFAs (retarding field analyzers) and three BPMs (beam position monitors) used for microwave measurements have been used to measure the ecloud densities. The RFAs have performed very well and have collected both the time evolution and energy distribution of the ecloud for bare and two types of beam pipe coatings.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗