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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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228 records · Page 13

Automatic Transformation of MPI Programs to Asynchronous, Graph-Driven Form

The goals of this project are to develop new, scalable, high-fidelity algorithms for atomic-level simulations and program transformations that automatically restructure existing applications, enabling them to scale forward to Petascale systems and beyond. The techniques enable legacy MPI application code to exploit greater parallelism though increased latency hiding and improved workload assignment. The techniques were successfully demonstrated on high-end scalable systems located at DOE laboratories. Besides the automatic MPI program transformations efforts, the project also developed several new scalable algorithms for ab-initio molecular dynamics, including new massively parallel algorithms for hybrid DFT and new parallel in time algorithms for molecular dynamics and ab-initio molecular dynamics. These algorithms were shown to scale to very large number of cores, and they were designed to work in the latency hiding framework developed in this project. The effectiveness of the developments was enhanced by the direct application to real grand challenge simulation problems covering a wide range of technologically important applications, time scales and accuracies. These included the simulation of the electronic structure of mineral/fluid interfaces, the very accurate simulation of chemical reactions in microsolvated environments, and the simulation of chemical behavior in very large enzyme reactions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The Design of a Distributed Key-Value Store for Petascale Hot Storage in Data Acquisition Systems

Data acquisition systems for high energy physics experiments readout terabytes of data per second from a large number of electronic components. They are thus inherently distributed systems and require fast online data selection, otherwise requirements for permanent storage would be enormous. Still, incoming data need to be buffered while waiting for this selection to happen. Each minute of an experiment can produce hundreds of terabytes that cannot be lost before a selection decision is made. In this context, we present the design of DAQDB (Data Acquisition Database) - a distributed key-value store for high-bandwidth, generic data storage in event-driven systems. DAQDB offers not only high-capacity and low-latency buffer for fast data selection, but also opens a new approach in high-bandwidth data acquisition by decoupling the lifetime of the data analysis processes from the changing event rate due to the duty cycle of the data source. This is achievable by the option to extend its capacity even up to hundreds of petabytes to store hours of an experiment’s data. Our initial performance evaluation shows that DAQDB is a promising alternative to generic database solutions for the high luminosity upgrades of the LHC at CERN.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

HiCOO: Hierarchical cooperation for scalable communication in Global Address Space programming models on Cray XT systems

Global Address Space (GAS) programming models enable a convenient, shared-memory style addressing model. Typically this is realized through one-sided operations that can enable asynchronous communication and data movement. With the size of petascale systems reaching 10,000s of nodes and 100,000s of cores, the underlying runtime systems face critical challenges in (1) scalably managing resources (such as memory for communication buffers), and (2) gracefully handling unpredictable communication patterns and any associated contention. For any solution that addresses these resource scalability challenges, equally important is the need to maintain the performance of GAS programming models. In this paper, we describe a Hierarchical COOperation (HiCOO) architecture for scalable communication in GAS programming models. HiCOO formulates a cooperative communication architecture: with inter-node cooperation amongst multiple nodes (a.k.a multinode) and hierarchical cooperation among multinodes that are arranged in various virtual topologies. We have implemented HiCOO for a popular GAS runtime library, Aggregate Remote Memory Copy Interface (ARMCI). By extensively evaluating different virtual topologies in HiCOO in terms of their impact to memory scalability, network contention, and application performance, we identify MFCG as the most suitable virtual topology. The resulting HiCOO architecture is able to realize scalable resource management and achieve resilience to network contention, while at the same time maintaining or enhancing the performance of scientific applications. In one case, it reduces the total execution time of an NWChem application by 52%.

Computer Science↗

Reducing I/O variability using dynamic I/O path characterization in petascale storage systems

In petascale systems with a million CPU cores, scalable and consistent I/O performance is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain mainly because of I/O variability. Furthermore, the I/O variability is caused by concurrently running processes/jobs competing for I/O or a RAID rebuild when a disk drive fails. We present a mechanism that stripes across a selected subset of I/O nodes with the lightest workload at runtime to achieve the highest I/O bandwidth available in the system. In this paper, we propose a probing mechanism to enable application-level dynamic file striping to mitigate I/O variability. We also implement the proposed mechanism in the high-level I/O library that enables memory-to-file data layout transformation and allows transparent file partitioning using subfiling. Subfiling is a technique that partitions data into a set of files of smaller size and manages file access to them, making data to be treated as a single, normal file to users. Here, we demonstrate that our bandwidth probing mechanism can successfully identify temporally slower I/O nodes without noticeable runtime overhead. Experimental results on NERSC’s systems also show that our approach isolates I/O variability effectively on shared systems and improves overall collective I/O performance with less variation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Expanding Access to Science Participation: A FAIR Framework for Petascale Data Visualization and Analytics

The massive data generated by scientists daily serve as both a major catalyst for new discoveries and innovations, as well as a significant roadblock that restricts access to the data. Here, our paper introduces a new approach to removing Big Data barriers and democratizing access to petascale data for the broader scientific community. Our novel data fabric abstraction layer allows user-friendly querying of scientific information while hiding the complexities of dealing with file systems or cloud services. We enable FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) access to datasets such as NASA’s petascale climate datasets. Our paper presents an approach to managing, visualizing, and analyzing petabytes of data within a browser on equipment ranging from the top NASA supercomputer to commodity hardware like a laptop. Our novel data fabric abstraction utilizes state-of-the art progressive compression algorithms and machine-learning insights to power scalable visualization dashboards for petascale data. The result provides users with the ability to identify extreme events or trends dynamically, expanding access to scientific data and further enabling discoveries. We validate our approach by improving the ability of climate scientists to visually explore their data via three fully interactive dashboards. We further validate our approach by deploying the dashboards and simplified training materials in the classroom at a minority-serving institution. These dashboards, released in simplified form to the general public, contribute significantly to a broader push to democratize the access and use of climate data.

Computer science↗

Petascale solvers for anisotropic PDEs in atmospheric modelling on GPU clusters

Memory bound applications such as solvers for large sparse systems of equations remain a challenge for GPUs. Fast solvers should be based on numerically efficient algorithms and implemented such that global memory access is minimised. To solve systems with trillions ( O ( 10 12 ) ) unknowns the code has to make efficient use of several million individual processor cores on large GPU clusters. We describe the multi-GPU implementation of two algorithmically optimal iterative solvers for anisotropic PDEs which are encountered in (semi-) implicit time stepping procedures in atmospheric modelling. In this application the condition number is large but independent of the grid resolution and both methods are asymptotically optimal, albeit with different absolute performance. In particular, an important constant in the discretisation is the CFL number; only the multigrid solver is robust to changes in this constant. We parallelise the solvers and adapt them to the specific features of GPU architectures, paying particular attention to efficient global memory access. We achieve a performance of up to 0.78 PFLOPs when solving an equation with 0.55 · 10 12 unknowns on 16384 GPUs; this corresponds to about 3% of the theoretical peak performance of the machine and we use more than 40% of the peak memory bandwidth with a Conjugate Gradient (CG) solver. Although the other solver, a geometric multigrid algorithm, has a slightly worse performance in terms of FLOPs per second, overall it is faster as it needs less iterations to converge; the multigrid algorithm can solve a linear PDE with half a trillion unknowns in about one second.

Computer Science↗

Low-Cost Parallel Algorithms for 2:1 Octree Balance

The logical structure of a forest of octrees can be used to create scalable algorithms for parallel adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), which has recently been demonstrated for several petascale applications. Among various frequently used octree-based mesh operations, including refinement, coarsening, partitioning, and enumerating nodes, ensuring a 2:1 size balance between neighboring elements has historically been the most expensive in terms of CPU time and communication volume. The 2:1 balance operation is thus a primary target to optimize. One important component of a parallel balance algorithm is the ability to determine whether any two given octants have a consistent distance/size relation. Based on new logical concepts we propose fast algorithms for making this decision for all types of 2:1 balance conditions in 2D and 3D. Since we are able to achieve this without constructing any parent nodes in the tree that would otherwise need to be sorted and communicated, we can significantly reduce the required memory and communication volume. In addition, we propose a lightweight collective algorithm for reversing the asymmetric communication pattern induced by non-local octant interactions. We have implemented our improvements as part of the opensource “p4est” software. Benchmarking this code with both synthetic and simulation-driven adapted meshes we are able to demonstrate much reduced runtime and excellent weak and strong scalability. On our largest benchmark problem with 5.13 × 10 11 octants the new 2:1 balance algorithm executes in less than 8 seconds on 112,128 CPU cores of the Jaguar Cray XT5 supercomputer.

Computer Science↗

Petaflops router

Disclosed is a method and system for performing operations on at least one input data vector in order to produce at least one output vector to permit easy, scalable and fast programming of a petascale equivalent supercomputer. A PetaFlops Router may comprise one or more PetaFlops Nodes, which may be connected to each other and/or external data provider/consumers via a programmable crossbar switch external to the PetaFlops Node. Each PetaFlops Node has a FPGA and a programmable intra-FPGA crossbar switch that permits input and output variables to be configurably connected to various physical operators contained in the FPGA as desired by a user. This allows a user to specify the instruction set of the system on a per-application basis. Further, the intra-FPGA crossbar switch permits the output of one operation to be delivered as an input to a second operation. By configuring the external crossbar switch, the output of a first operation on a first PetaFlops Node may be used as the input for a second operation on a second PetaFlops Node. An embodiment may provide an ability for the system to recognize and generate pipelined functions. Streaming operators may be connected together at run-time and appropriately staged to allow data to flow through a series of functions. This allows the system to provide high throughput and parallelism when possible. The PetaFlops Router may implement the user desired instructions by appropriately configuring the intra-FPGA crossbar switch on each PetaFlops Node and the external crossbar switch.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Multi-petascale highly efficient parallel supercomputer

A Multi-Petascale Highly Efficient Parallel Supercomputer of 100 petaflop-scale includes node architectures based upon System-On-a-Chip technology, where each processing node comprises a single Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). The ASIC nodes are interconnected by a five dimensional torus network that optimally maximize the throughput of packet communications between nodes and minimize latency. The network implements collective network and a global asynchronous network that provides global barrier and notification functions. Integrated in the node design include a list-based prefetcher. The memory system implements transaction memory, thread level speculation, and multiversioning cache that improves soft error rate at the same time and supports DMA functionality allowing for parallel processing message-passing.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Scalable molecular dynamics on CPU and GPU architectures with NAMD

NAMD is a molecular dynamics program designed for high-performance simulations of very large biological objects on CPU- and GPU-based architectures. NAMD offers scalable performance on petascale parallel supercomputers consisting of hundreds of thousands of cores, as well as on inexpensive commodity clusters commonly found in academic environments. It is written in C++ and leans on Charm++ parallel objects for optimal performance on low-latency architectures. NAMD is a versatile, multipurpose code that gathers state-of-the-art algorithms to carry out simulations in apt thermodynamic ensembles, using the widely popular CHARMM, AMBER, OPLS, and GROMOS biomolecular force fields. Here, we review the main features of NAMD that allow both equilibrium and enhanced-sampling molecular dynamics simulations with numerical efficiency. We describe the underlying concepts utilized by NAMD and their implementation, most notably for handling long-range electrostatics; controlling the temperature, pressure, and pH; applying external potentials on tailored grids; leveraging massively parallel resources in multiple-copy simulations; and hybrid quantum-mechanical/molecular-mechanical descriptions. We detail the variety of options offered by NAMD for enhanced-sampling simulations aimed at determining free-energy differences of either alchemical or geometrical transformations and outline their applicability to specific problems. Last, we discuss the roadmap for the development of NAMD and our current efforts toward achieving optimal performance on GPU-based architectures, for pushing back the limitations that have prevented biologically realistic billion-atom objects to be fruitfully simulated, and for making large-scale simulations less expensive and easier to set up, run, and analyze. NAMD is distributed free of charge with its source code at www.ks.uiuc.edu.

high-performance computing↗

RTN-095: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Data Preview 1

We present Rubin Data Preview 1 (DP1), the first release of data from the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, consisting of raw and calibrated single-epoch images, coadds, difference images, detection catalogs, and other derived data products. DP1 is based on 1792 science-grade optical/near-infrared exposures acquired over 48 distinct nights by the Rubin Commissioning Camera, LSSTComCam, on the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Summit Facility on Cerro Pachón, Chile during the first on-sky commissioning campaign in late 2024. DP1 covers a total of ~15 sq. deg. over seven roughly equally-sized non-contiguous fields, each independently observed in six broad photometric bands, ugrizy, spanning a range of stellar densities and latitudes and overlapping with external reference datasets. The median image quality across all bands, measured by the FWHM of the point-spread function, is approximately 1.13 arcseconds, with the sharpest images reaching about 0.65 arcseconds. DP1 contains approximately 2.3 million distinct astrophysical objects, of which 1.6 million are extended in at least one band, and 431 solar system objects, of which 93 are new discoveries. DP1 is approximately 3.5 TB in size and available to Rubin data rights holders via the Rubin Science Platform, a cloud-based environment for the analysis of petascale astronomical data. While small compared to future LSST releases, its high quality and diversity of data support a broad range of early science investigations across all four LSST themes, providing a valuable opportunity to engage with Rubin data ahead of the start of full operations in late 2025.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Data Preview 1

We present Rubin Data Preview 1 (DP1), the first data from the National Science Foundation–Department of Energy Vera C. Rubin Observatory, comprising raw and calibrated single-epoch images, coadds, difference images, detection catalogs, and ancillary data products. DP1 is based on 1792 optical–near-infrared exposures acquired over 48 distinct nights by the Rubin Commissioning Camera (LSSTComCam) on the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Summit Facility on Cerro Pachón, Chile in late 2024. DP1 covers ∼15 deg 2 distributed across seven roughly equal-sized noncontiguous fields, each independently observed in six broad photometric bands, ugrizy. The median FWHM of the point-spread function across all bands is approximately 1"14, with the sharpest images reaching about 0." 58. The 5σ point-source depths for coadded images in the deepest field, the Extended Chandra Deep Field South, are u = 24.55, g = 26.18, r = 25.96, i = 25.71, z = 25.07, and y = 23.1. Other fields are no more than 2.2 mag shallower in any band, where they have nonzero coverage. DP1 contains approximately 2.3 million distinct astrophysical objects, of which 1.6 million are extended in at least one band in coadds, and 431 solar system objects, of which 93 are new discoveries. DP1 is approximately 3.5 TB in size and is available to Vera C. Rubin Observatory data rights holders via the Rubin Science Platform, a cloud-based environment for the analysis of petascale astronomical data. While small compared to future LSST releases, its high quality and diversity of data support a broad range of early science investigations ahead of full operations in 2026.

Ground-based astronomy↗