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At least 271 records · Page 15

The 0.125 degree finite-volume General Circulation Model on the NASA Columbia Supercomputer: Preliminary Simulations of Mesoscale Vortices

The NASA Columbia supercomputer was ranked second on the TOP500 List in November, 2004. Such a quantum jump in computing power provides unprecedented opportunities to conduct ultra-high resolution simulations with the finite-volume General Circulation Model (fvGCM). During 2004, the model was run in realtime experimentally at 0.25 degree resolution producing remarkable hurricane forecasts [Atlas et al., 2005]. In 2005, the horizontal resolution was further doubled, which makes the fvGCM comparable to the first mesoscale resolving General Circulation Model at the Earth Simulator Center [Ohfuchi et al., 2004]. Nine 5-day 0.125 degree simulations of three hurricanes in 2004 are presented first for model validation. Then it is shown how the model can simulate the formation of the Catalina eddies and Hawaiian lee vortices, which are generated by the interaction of the synoptic-scale flow with surface forcing, and have never been reproduced in a GCM before.)

Shen, B.-W.↗

Hurricane Forecasts with a Global Mesoscale-resolving Model on the NASA Columbia Supercomputer Preliminary Simulations of Hurricane Katrina (2005)

It is known that the General Circulation Models (GCMs) have sufficient resolution to accurately simulate hurricane near-eye structure and intensity. To overcome this limitation, the mesoscale-resolving finite-element GCM (fvGCM) has been experimentally deployed on the NASA Columbia supercomputer, and its performance is evaluated choosing hurricane Katrina as an example in this study. On late August 2005 Katrina underwent two stages of rapid intensification and became the sixth most intense hurricane in the Atlantic. Six 5-day simulations of Katrina at both 0.25 deg and 0.125 deg show comparable track forecasts, but the 0,125 deg runs provide much better intensity forecasts, producing center pressure with errors of only +/- 12 hPa. The 0.125 deg simulates better near-eye wind distributions and a more realistic average intensification rate. A convection parameterization (CP) is one of the major limitations in a GCM, the 0.125 deg run with CP disabled produces very encouraging results.

Shen, B.-W.↗

Impact of the Columbia Supercomputer on NASA Space and Exploration Mission

NASA's 10,240-processor Columbia supercomputer gained worldwide recognition in 2004 for increasing the space agency's computing capability ten-fold, and enabling U.S. scientists and engineers to perform significant, breakthrough simulations. Columbia has amply demonstrated its capability to accelerate NASA's key missions, including space operations, exploration systems, science, and aeronautics. Columbia is part of an integrated high-end computing (HEC) environment comprised of massive storage and archive systems, high-speed networking, high-fidelity modeling and simulation tools, application performance optimization, and advanced data analysis and visualization. In this paper, we illustrate the impact Columbia is having on NASA's numerous space and exploration applications, such as the development of the Crew Exploration and Launch Vehicles (CEV/CLV), effects of long-duration human presence in space, and damage assessment and repair recommendations for remaining shuttle flights. We conclude by discussing HEC challenges that must be overcome to solve space-related science problems in the future.

Biswas, Rupak↗

Performance Evaluation of Supercomputers using HPCC and IMB Benchmarks

The HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite and the Intel MPI Benchmark (IMB) are used to compare and evaluate the combined performance of processor, memory subsystem and interconnect fabric of five leading supercomputers - SGI Altix BX2, Cray XI, Cray Opteron Cluster, Dell Xeon cluster, and NEC SX-8. These five systems use five different networks (SGI NUMALINK4, Cray network, Myrinet, InfiniBand, and NEC IXS). The complete set of HPCC benchmarks are run on each of these systems. Additionally, we present Intel MPI Benchmarks (IMB) results to study the performance of 11 MPI communication functions on these systems.

Saini, Subhash↗

High Resolution Aerospace Applications using the NASA Columbia Supercomputer

This paper focuses on the parallel performance of two high-performance aerodynamic simulation packages on the newly installed NASA Columbia supercomputer. These packages include both a high-fidelity, unstructured, Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solver, and a fully-automated inviscid flow package for cut-cell Cartesian grids. The complementary combination of these two simulation codes enables high-fidelity characterization of aerospace vehicle design performance over the entire flight envelope through extensive parametric analysis and detailed simulation of critical regions of the flight envelope. Both packages. are industrial-level codes designed for complex geometry and incorpor.ats. CuStomized multigrid solution algorithms. The performance of these codes on Columbia is examined using both MPI and OpenMP and using both the NUMAlink and InfiniBand interconnect fabrics. Numerical results demonstrate good scalability on up to 2016 CPUs using the NUMAIink4 interconnect, with measured computational rates in the vicinity of 3 TFLOP/s, while InfiniBand showed some performance degradation at high CPU counts, particularly with multigrid. Nonetheless, the results are encouraging enough to indicate that larger test cases using combined MPI/OpenMP communication should scale well on even more processors.

Mavriplis, Dimitri J.↗

Hurricane Intensity Forecasts with a Global Mesoscale Model on the NASA Columbia Supercomputer

It is known that General Circulation Models (GCMs) have insufficient resolution to accurately simulate hurricane near-eye structure and intensity. The increasing capabilities of high-end computers (e.g., the NASA Columbia Supercomputer) have changed this. In 2004, the finite-volume General Circulation Model at a 1/4 degree resolution, doubling the resolution used by most of operational NWP center at that time, was implemented and run to obtain promising landfall predictions for major hurricanes (e.g., Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne). In 2005, we have successfully implemented the 1/8 degree version, and demonstrated its performance on intensity forecasts with hurricane Katrina (2005). It is found that the 1/8 degree model is capable of simulating the radius of maximum wind and near-eye wind structure, and thereby promising intensity forecasts. In this study, we will further evaluate the model s performance on intensity forecasts of hurricanes Ivan, Jeanne, Karl in 2004. Suggestions for further model development will be made in the end.

Shen, Bo-Wen↗

Supercomputing in the Age of Discovering Superearths, Earths and Exoplanet Systems

NASA's Kepler Mission was launched in March 2009 as NASA's first mission capable of finding Earth-size planets orbiting in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars, that range of distances for which liquid water would pool on the surface of a rocky planet. Kepler has discovered over 1000 planets and over 4600 candidates, many of them as small as the Earth. Today, Kepler's amazing success seems to be a fait accompli to those unfamiliar with her history. But twenty years ago, there were no planets known outside our solar system, and few people believed it was possible to detect tiny Earth-size planets orbiting other stars. Motivating NASA to select Kepler for launch required a confluence of the right detector technology, advances in signal processing and algorithms, and the power of supercomputing.

exoplanet↗

NASA Blazes a Different Path to Energy-Efficient Supercomputing

For years, NASA had a very straightforward process for replacing high-performance computing hardware: over a three-year period, when it became more expensive to operate an older suite of hardware than it did to replace it with new products that could accomplish the same work, we simply replaced the old hardware. For NASA’s High-End Computing Capability (HECC) Project, that process changed when we reached the limits of our facility’s power, cooling, and floor-loading capacity, becoming a strategy of decommissioning the least productive hardware and replacing it with more capable counterparts. The impact was that we provided our users with less supercomputing capability than we would have without the limitations. Additionally, with 25% of our total power consumption going to cool our systems and 50,000 gallons of water per day being evaporated, we wanted a solution that would expand our compute facility while being sensitive to the impact on our environment.

Thigpen, William↗

TopiQAL: Topic-aware Question Answering using Scalable Domain-specific Supercomputers

We all have questions. About today's temperature, scores of our favorite baseball team, the Universe, and about vaccine for COVID-19. Life, physical, and natural scientists have been trying to find answers to various topics using scientific methods and experiments, while computer scientists have built language models as a tiny step towards automatically answering all of these questions across domains given a little bit of context. In this paper, we propose an architecture using state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing language models namely Topic Models and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) that can transparently and automatically retrieve articles of relevance to questions across domains, and fetch answers to topical questions related to COVID-19 current and historical medical research literature. We demonstrate the benefits of using domain-specific supercomputers like Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), residing on cloud-based infrastructure, using which we could achieve significant gains in training and inference times, also with very minimal cost.

Penberthy, Scott↗

The impact of the U.S. supercomputing initiative will be global

Last July, President Obama issued an executive order that created a coordinated federal strategy for HPC research, development, and deployment called the U.S. National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI). However, this bold, necessary step toward building the next generation of supercomputers has inaugurated a new era for U.S. high performance computing (HPC).

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↗

Scaling the Summit: Deploying the World's Fastest Supercomputer

Summit, the latest flagship supercomputer deployed at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), became the number one system in the Top500 list in June 2018 and remains in the top spot in the most recent edition of the list. An extensive acceptance test plan was developed to evaluate the unique features introduced in the Summit architecture and system software stack. The acceptance test also includes tests to ensure that the system is reliable, stable, and performant.

Melesse Vergara, Veronica↗

Dynamic Modeling of Power Conversion Stages for an Exascale Supercomputer

In this paper a power conversion and energy consumption model for an exascale supercomputer is investigated. Power consumption, energy loss and efficiency are derived for the 27.2 MW liquid-cooled, centralized, High Performance Computing (HPC) power system, which is supplied directly from the 480 V three-phase mains. Two energy conversion stages are analyzed, measured and modeled. The model is developed in order to be adapted and implemented in a digital twin platform utilizing a Resource Allocator and Power Simulator (RAPS) module. RAPS enables estimation of potential energy savings in the direct AC power supply architecture via both conventional rectifier load sharing (commonly used in HPC systems), as well as smart rectifier load sharing. Moreover, besides the direct AC supply architecture analysis, the full direct DC supply architecture with with 1 kV DC bus were also studied. Comparison of 10 hour time frame operation of the system, with direct 480 V AC voltage supply with conventional and smart load sharing and medium dc voltage supply were done. For the direct AC supply architecture, with conventional and smart load sharing the predicted power loss was approximately 840 kW and 820 kW, respectively and the predicted total system efficiency was 92.87% and 93.05%, respectively. For the direct DC supply architecture with the 1000 V DC supply bus power loss was approximately 340 kW and the predicted total system efficiency was 97.02%.

Wojda, Rafal↗

Multi-GPU Implementation of a 3D Finite Difference Time Domain Earthquake Code on Heterogeneous Supercomputers

We have developed a highly scalable 3D Finite Difference GPU code for use in earthquake engineering and disaster management through regional petascale earthquake simulations. This MPI-CUDA code is based on a widely-used wave propagation code called AWP-ODC and restructured for high throughput and efficiency on a heterogeneous computing architecture. We present an effective communication reduction technique for leveraging GPUs with minimal PCI-e overhead, and a novel overlapping method to fully hide data communication latency between GPUs. The optimization concept used in this work can be extended to general stencil computing on a structured grid. The benchmarks demonstrated sustained 100 TFlops in single precision for 49 billion mesh points using 952 GPUs on the NCCS Titan Phase 5 system, which is a 77-fold speedup compared to the CPU version of the code. This multi-GPU implementation has been validated and used for a large-scale verification wave propagation simulation of Mw5.4 Chino Hills earthquake using 128 GPUs.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

pyRMG: A framework for high-throughput, large-cell DFT calculations on supercomputers

Exascale computing delivers the raw power to simulate ever larger and more chemically realistic systems, but realizing this potential requires codes that can efficiently use thousands of processors. Our real-space multigrid (RMG) density functional theory (DFT) code’s grid-decomposition approach scales nearly linearly with the number of graphics processing units (GPUs), even for simulations exceeding thousands of atoms. This scalability makes RMG a compelling tool for high-throughput DFT studies of materials that would otherwise be bottlenecked in other codes (for example, by global fast Fourier transforms in plane-wave DFT). However, the limited workflow infrastructure for RMG has thus far constrained its adoption to a small user community. In this work, we present pyRMG, a Python package designed to streamline the setup and execution of RMG DFT calculations. Built on the pymatgen and ASE (Atomic Simulation Environment) computational materials science Python packages, pyRMG automates input generation and convergence checking, and it integrates with modern job schedulers (e.g., Flux) on leadership-class platforms such as Frontier and Perlmutter. Here, we demonstrate pyRMG for a high-throughput study of strain effects in 2D 2L-Bi 2 Se 3 /2L-NbSe 2 heterostructures, which offers chemical insights into this system and shows that RMG-based workflows can converge with limited user intervention.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Petascale supercomputing to accelerate the design of high-temperature alloys

Recent progress in high-performance computing and data informatics has opened up numerous opportunities to aid the design of advanced materials. Herein, we demonstrate a computational workflow that includes rapid population of high-fidelity materials datasets via petascale computing and subsequent analyses with modern data science techniques. We use a first-principles approach based on density functional theory to derive the segregation energies of 34 microalloying elements at the coherent and semi-coherent interfaces between the aluminium matrix and the θ '-Al 2 Cu precipitate, which requires several hundred supercell calculations. We also perform extensive correlation analyses to identify materials descriptors that affect the segregation behaviour of solutes at the interfaces. Finally, we show an example of leveraging machine learning techniques to predict segregation energies without performing computationally expensive physics-based simulations. As a result, the approach demonstrated in the present work can be applied to any high-temperature alloy system for which key materials data can be obtained using high-performance computing.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Analyzing diffuse scattering with supercomputers. Corrigendum

The study by Michels-Clark et al. (2013 [Michels-Clark, T. M., Lynch, V. E., Hoffmann, C. M., Hauser, J., Weber, T., Harrison, R. & Bürgi, H. B. (2013). J. Appl. Cryst. 46, 1616-1625.]) contains misleading errors which are corrected here. The numerical results reported in that paper and the conclusions given there are not affected and remain unchanged. The transition probabilities in Table 1 (rows 4, 5, 7, 8) and Fig. 2 (rows 1 and 2) of the original paper were different from those used in the numerical calculations. Corrected transition probabilities as used in the computations are given in Table 1 and Fig. 1 of this article. The Δ parameter in the stacking model expresses the preference for the fifth layer in a five-layer stack to be eclipsed with respect to the first layer. This statement corrects the original text on p. 1622, lines 4–7. In the original Fig. 2 the helicity of the layer stacks b L and b R in rows 3 and 4 had been given as opposite to those in rows 1, 2 and 5. Fig. 1 of this article shows rows 3 and 4 corrected to correspond to rows 1, 2 and 5.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Clock Agreement Among Parallel Supercomputer Nodes

This dataset presents measurements that quantify the clock synchronization time-agreement characteristics among several high performance computers including the current world's most powerful machine for open science, the U.S. Department of Energy's Titan machine sited at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These ultra-fast machines derive much of their computational capability from extreme node counts (over 18000 nodes in the case of the Titan machine). Time-agreement is commonly utilized by parallel programming applications and tools, distributed programming application and tools, and system software. Our time-agreement measurements detail the degree of time variance between nodes and how that variance changes over time. The dataset includes empirical measurements and the accompanying spreadsheets.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗