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Moore, Stan G.

Publications and source records attributed to Moore, Stan G..

Extreme Metastability of Diamond and its Transformation to the BC8 Post-Diamond Phase of Carbon

Diamond possesses exceptional physical properties due to its remarkably strong carbon–carbon bonding, leading to significant resilience to structural transformations at very high pressures and temperatures. Despite several experimental attempts, synthesis and recovery of the theoretically predicted post-diamond BC8 phase remains elusive. Through quantum-accurate multimillion atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, we have uncovered the extreme metastability of diamond at very high pressures, significantly exceeding its range of thermodynamic stability. We predict the post-diamond BC8 phase to be experimentally accessible only within a narrow high pressure–temperature region of the carbon phase diagram. The diamond to BC8 transformation proceeds through premelting followed by BC8 nucleation and growth in the metastable carbon liquid. Here we propose a double-shock compression pathway for BC8 synthesis, which is currently being explored in experiments at the National Ignition Facility.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Enabling particle applications for exascale computing platforms

The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is invested in co-design to assure that key applications are ready for exascale computing. Within ECP, the Co-design Center for Particle Applications (CoPA) is addressing challenges faced by particle-based applications across four “sub-motifs”: short-range particle–particle interactions (e.g., those which often dominate molecular dynamics (MD) and smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) methods), long-range particle–particle interactions (e.g., electrostatic MD and gravitational N-body), particle-in-cell (PIC) methods, and linear-scaling electronic structure and quantum molecular dynamics (QMD) algorithms. Our crosscutting co-designed technologies fall into two categories: proxy applications (or “apps”) and libraries. Proxy apps are vehicles used to evaluate the viability of incorporating various types of algorithms, data structures, and architecture-specific optimizations and the associated trade-offs; examples include ExaMiniMD, CabanaMD, CabanaPIC, and ExaSP2. Libraries are modular instantiations that multiple applications can utilize or be built upon; CoPA has developed the Cabana particle library, PROGRESS/BML libraries for QMD, and the SWFFT and fftMPI parallel FFT libraries. Success is measured by identifiable “lessons learned” that are translated either directly into parent production application codes or into libraries, with demonstrated performance and/or productivity improvement. The libraries and their use in CoPA’s ECP application partner codes are also addressed.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

EMPIRE-PIC: A Performance Portable Unstructured Particle-in-Cell Code

In this study we introduce EMPIRE-PIC, a finite element method particle-in-cell (FEM-PIC) application developed at Sandia National Laboratories. The code has been developed in C++ using the Trilinos library and the Kokkos Performance Portability Framework to enable running on multiple modern compute architectures while only requiring maintenance of a single codebase. EMPIRE-PIC is capable of solving both electrostatic and electromagnetic problems in two- and three-dimensions to second-order accuracy in space and time. In this paper we validate the code against three benchmark problems — a simple electron orbit, an electrostatic Langmuir wave, and a transverse electromagnetic wave propagating through a plasma. We demonstrate the performance of EMPIRE-PIC on four different architectures: Intel Haswell CPUs, Intel's Xeon Phi Knights Landing, ARM Thunder-X2 CPUs, and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs attached to IBM POWER9 processors. This analysis demonstrates scalability of the code up to more than two thousand GPUs, and greater than one hundred thousand CPUs.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗