Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “Computer architecture”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 325 records · Page 18

Towards real-time simulation of large space structures: Stabilization of fluid/thermal/structure interactions and implementation on high performance supercomputers

Within the Center for Space Construction, the SIMSTRUC project's objectives center around the development of simulation tools for the realistic analysis of large space structures. The word 'tools' is the broad sense; it designates mathematical models, finite element/finite difference formulations, computational algorithms, implementations on advanced computer architectures, and visualization capabilities. The results of our activities during the first year within the SIMSTRUC project are reported. On the modeling side, an alternative approach to fluid/thermal/structure interaction analysis that is a departure from the 'loosely coupled' and 'unified' approaches that are being currently practiced are described. The advantages of our approach both in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency were demonstrated. On the computational side, a software architecture for parallel/vector and massively parallel supercomputers that speeds up finite element and finite difference computations by several orders of magnitude is presented. As an example, the simulation of the deployment of a space structure that used to require over six hours of a workstation using a conventional finite element software, now runs on a multiprocessor using a parallel computation strategy in less than three seconds. In order to promote the physical understanding of the simulation behavior, a real-time visualization capability on the Connection Machine, which allows the analyst to watch the graphical animation of the results at the same time these are generated, was also developed. It is believed that by combining efficient analytical formulations with the state-of-the-art high performance computer implementations and superfast visualization capabilities, SIMSTRUC is moving fast towards the real-time simulation of large space structures. The designers as well as the researchers will certainly benefit from this technology.

Farhat, C.↗

Early Evaluation of Directive-Based GPU Programming Models for Productive Exascale Computing

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-based parallel computer architectures have shown increased popularity as a building block for high performance computing, and possibly for future Exascale computing. However, their programming complexity remains as a major hurdle for their widespread adoption. To provide better abstractions for programming GPU architectures, researchers and vendors have proposed several directive-based GPU programming models. These directive-based models provide different levels of abstraction, and required different levels of programming effort to port and optimize applications. Understanding these differences among these new models provides valuable insights on their applicability and performance potential. In this paper, we evaluate existing directive-based models by porting thirteen application kernels from various scientific domains to use CUDA GPUs, which, in turn, allows us to identify important issues in the functionality, scalability, tunability, and debuggability of the existing models. Our evaluation shows that directive-based models can achieve reasonable performance, compared to hand-written GPU codes.

Lee, Seyong↗

Exploration of superconducting multi-mode cavity architectures for quantum computing

Superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) cavities coupled to transmon circuits have proven to be a promising platform for building high-coherence quantum information processors. An essential aspect of this realization involves designing high quality factor three-dimensional superconducting cavities to extend the lifetime of quantum systems. To increase the computational capability of this architecture, we are exploring a multimode approach. This paper presents the design optimization process of a multi-cell SRF cavity to perform quantum computation based on an existing design developed in the scope of particle accelerator technology. We perform parametric electromagnetic simulations to evaluate and optimize the design. In particular, we focus on the analysis of the interaction between a nonlinear superconducting circuit known as the transmon and the cavity. This parametric design optimization is structured to serve as a blueprint for future studies on similar systems.

Reineri, Alessandro↗

Nanoprobe Based Information Processing: Nanoprobe‐Electronics

Abstract With computational architectures becoming data‐centric and with the rise of in‐memory computing, the role of memory will be ever more crucial. In turn, storing massive amount of data demands for ultra‐low power and non‐volatile types necessitating new memory technologies. Here, a controllable nanoelectromechanical (NEM) spin memory is proposed for compact nonvolatile memory arrays. It combines the advantages of both nanomechanical and spin‐transfer torque (STT) magnetic memory devices to overcome fundamental scalability roadblocks of non‐hybrid alternatives. The hybrid system paves the way to a new memory technology in the regime of sub‐10‐nm lateral size with a sub‐1‐MA cm −2 switching energy.

Yi, Bao↗

Development of multi-scale computational frameworks to solve fusion materials science challenges

Over the past two decades, the US-DOE has funded multiple projects that rely on high-performance computing and exascale computing platforms to accelerate scientific discoveries and address grand scientific challenges, such as harnessing fusion energy. In this article, we review in detail one of these efforts aimed at enhancing our capability to model plasma-facing materials subject to plasma and high-energy ion/neutron irradiation. The plasma surface interactions project has built a multi-scale modeling framework where many of the plasma- and high-energy ion/neutron irradiation-induced effects occurring in tungsten are explored. Here, this knowledge is used to develop atomistically-informed, high-fidelity continuum and meso-scale models that can be validated against experiments. We review the developments within this project, with attention to experimental validation efforts, and specifically highlight activities associated with: helium bubble bursting and equation of state, and hydrogen-helium interactions in tungsten; atomistically-informed model development for beryllium-tungsten material mixing; coupling of scrape-of-layer plasma, sheath and material models; and coupling of stochastic cluster-dynamics and crystal plasticity models to address radiation effects in tungsten under stress. Finally, we present how the project is preparing for future computational architectures, for instance through efforts to adapt atomistic methods to exascale computing.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Livermore Big Artificial Neural Network Toolkit

LBANN is a toolkit that is designed to train artificial neural networks efficiently on high performance computing architectures. It is optimized to take advantages of key High Performance Computing features to accelerate neural network training. Specifically it is optimized for low-latency, high bandwidth interconnects, node-local NVRAM, node-local GPU accelerators, and high bandwidth parallel file systems. It is built on top of the open source Elemental distributed-memory dense and spars-direct linear algebra and optimization library that is released under the BSD license. The algorithms contained within LBANN are drawn from the academic literature and implemented to work within a distributed-memory framework.

Essen, BrianVan↗

Programming a hillslope water movement model on the MPP

A physically based numerical model was developed of heat and moisture flow within a hillslope on a parallel architecture computer, as a precursor to a model of a complete catchment. Moisture flow within a catchment includes evaporation, overland flow, flow in unsaturated soil, and flow in saturated soil. Because of the empirical evidence that moisture flow in unsaturated soil is mainly in the vertical direction, flow in the unsaturated zone can be modeled as a series of one dimensional columns. This initial version of the hillslope model includes evaporation and a single column of one dimensional unsaturated zone flow. This case has already been solved on an IBM 3081 computer and is now being applied to the massively parallel processor architecture so as to make the extension to the one dimensional case easier and to check the problems and benefits of using a parallel architecture machine.

Devaney, J. E.↗

Parallel VLSI architecture emulation and the organization of APSA/MPP

The Applicative Programming System Architecture (APSA) combines an applicative language interpreter with a novel parallel computer architecture that is well suited for Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) implementation. The Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) can simulate VLSI circuits by allocating one processing element in its square array to an area on a square VLSI chip. As long as there are not too many long data paths, the MPP can simulate a VLSI clock cycle very rapidly. The APSA circuit contains a binary tree with a few long paths and many short ones. A skewed H-tree layout allows every processing element to simulate a leaf cell and up to four tree nodes, with no loss in parallelism. Emulation of a key APSA algorithm on the MPP resulted in performance 16,000 times faster than a Vax. This speed will make it possible for the APSA language interpreter to run fast enough to support research in parallel list processing algorithms.

Odonnell, John T.↗

The design and implementation of a parallel unstructured Euler solver using software primitives

This paper is concerned with the implementation of a three-dimensional unstructured grid Euler-solver on massively parallel distributed-memory computer architectures. The goal is to minimize solution time by achieving high computational rates with a numerically efficient algorithm. An unstructured multigrid algorithm with an edge-based data structure has been adopted, and a number of optimizations have been devised and implemented in order to accelerate the parallel communication rates. The implementation is carried out by creating a set of software tools, which provide an interface between the parallelization issues and the sequential code, while providing a basis for future automatic run-time compilation support. Large practical unstructured grid problems are solved on the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube and Intel Touchstone Delta machine. The quantitative effect of the various optimizations are demonstrated, and we show that the combined effect of these optimizations leads to roughly a factor of three performance improvement. The overall solution efficiency is compared with that obtained on the CRAY-YMP vector supercomputer.

Das, R.↗

Design and implementation of a parallel unstructured Euler solver using software primitives

This paper is concerned with the implementation of a three-dimensional unstructured-grid Euler solver on massively parallel distributed-memory computer architectures. The goal is to minimize solution time by achieving high computational rates with a numerically efficient algorithm. An unstructured multigrid algorithm with an edge-based data structure has been adopted, and a number of optimizations have been devised and implemented to accelerate the parallel computational rates. The implementation is carried out by creating a set of software tools, which provide an interface between the parallelization issues and the sequential code, while providing a basis for future automatic run-time compilation support. Large practical unstructured grid problems are solved on the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube and Intel Touchstone Delta machine. The quantitative effects of the various optimizations are demonstrated, and we show that the combined effect of these optimizations leads to roughly a factor of 3 performance improvement. The overall solution efficiency is compared with that obtained on the Cray Y-MP vector supercomputer.

Das, R.↗

CFD Research, Parallel Computation and Aerodynamic Optimization

During the last five years, CFD has matured substantially. Pure CFD research remains to be done, but much of the focus has shifted to integration of CFD into the design process. The work under these cooperative agreements reflects this trend. The recent work, and work which is planned, is designed to enhance the competitiveness of the US aerospace industry. CFD and optimization approaches are being developed and tested, so that the industry can better choose which methods to adopt in their design processes. The range of computer architectures has been dramatically broadened, as the assumption that only huge vector supercomputers could be useful has faded. Today, researchers and industry can trade off time, cost, and availability, choosing vector supercomputers, scalable parallel architectures, networked workstations, or heterogenous combinations of these to complete required computations efficiently.

Ryan, James S.↗

Livermore Big Artificial Neural Network Toolkit

LBANN is a toolkit that is designed to train artificial neural networks efficiently on high performance computing architectures. It is optimized to take advantages of key High Performance Computing features to accelerate neural network training. Specifically it is optimized for low-latency, high bandwidth interconnects, node-local NVRAM, node-local GPU accelerators, and high bandwidth parallel file systems. It is built on top of the open source Elemental distributed-memory dense and spars-direct linear algebra and optimization library that is released under the BSD license. The algorithms contained within LBANN are drawn from the academic literature and implemented to work within a distributed-memory framework.

Essen, Brian Van↗

Optimizing the hypre solver for manycore and GPU architectures

The solution of large-scale combustion problems with codes such as Uintah on modern computer architectures requires the use of multithreading and GPUs to achieve performance. Uintah uses a low-Mach number approximation that requires iteratively solving a large system of linear equations. The Hypre iterative solver has solved such systems in a scalable way for Uintah, but the use of OpenMP with Hypre leads to at least slowdown due to OpenMP overheads. The proposed solution uses the MPI Endpoints within Hypre, where each team of threads acts as a different MPI rank. This approach minimizes OpenMP synchronization overhead and performs as fast or (up to 1.44) faster than Hypre's MPI-only version, and allows the rest of Uintah to be optimized using OpenMP. The profiling of the GPU version of Hypre shows the bottleneck to be the launch overhead of thousands of micro-kernels. The GPU performance was improved by fusing these micro-kernels and was further optimized by using Cuda-aware MPI, resulting in an overall speedup of 1.16—1.44 compared to the baseline GPU implementation. The above optimization strategies were published in the International Conference on Computational Science 2020 [1]. This work extends the previously published research by carrying out the second phase of communication-centered optimizations in Hypre to improve its scalability on large-scale supercomputers. Additionally, this includes an efficient non-blocking inter-thread communication scheme, communication-reducing patch assignment, and expression of logical communication parallelism to a new version of the MPICH library that utilizes the underlying network parallelism [2]. The above optimizations avoid communication bottlenecks previously observed during strong scaling and improve performance by up to 2 on 256 nodes of Intel Knight's Landing processor.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) Middleware Overview

High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) is a joint project between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to develop a high-performance multi-core radiation hardened flight processor. HPSC offers a new flight computing architecture to meet the needs of NASA missions through 2030 and beyond. Providing on the order of 100X the computational capacity of current flight processors for the same amount of power, the multicore architecture of the HPSC processor, or "Chiplet" provides unprecedented flexibility in a flight computing system by enabling the operating point to be set dynamically, trading among needs for computational performance, energy management and fault tolerance. The HPSC Chiplet is being developed by Boeing under contract to NASA, and is expected to provide prototypes in 2021. The HPSC Chiplet prototypes will be delivered with an evaluation board, system emulators, comprehensive system software, and a software development kit. In addition to the vendor deliverables, the AFRL is funding the development of a flexible Middleware to be developed by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The HPSC Middleware provides a suite of thirteen high level services to manage the compute, memory and I/O resources of this complex device.This presentation will provide an overview of the HPSC project, including a hardware overview, system software overview, Middleware overview, and mission use cases. The hardware overview will provide a look at the 8 core High Performance Processing Subsystem (HPPS), the Real Time Processing Subsystem (RTPS), the Chiplet Configuration Management Subsystem, on chip peripherals, and high speed I/O. The system software overview will introduce the boot loaders, operating systems, device drivers, and software development environment. The Middleware overview will provide insight into the high-level services that will be provided to help mission developers manage the many resources and configurations made possible with the Chiplet. Finally, the presentation will provide a brief look at the mission use cases that can be enabled with this next generation architecture.

middleware↗

High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) Middleware Update

High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) is a joint project between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to develop a high-performance multi-core radiation hardened flight processor. HPSC offers a new flight computing architecture to meet the needs of NASA missions through 2030 and beyond. Providing on the order of 100X the computational capacity of current flight processors for the same amount of power, the multicore architecture of the HPSC processor, or "Chiplet" provides unprecedented flexibility in a flight computing system by enabling the operating point to be set dynamically, trading among needs for computational performance, energy management and fault tolerance. The HPSC Chiplet is being developed by Boeing under contract to NASA, and is expected to provide prototypes, an evaluation board, system emulators, comprehensive system software, and a software development kit. In addition to the vendor deliverables, the AFRL is funding the development of a flexible Middleware to be developed by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The HPSC Middleware provides a suite of thirteen high level services to manage the compute, memory and I/O resources of this complex device.This presentation will provide an HPSC project update, an overview of the latest HPSC System Software release, an overview of HPSC Middleware Release 2, and a preview of the third HPSC Middleware release. The presentation will begin with a project update that will provide a look at the high-level changes since the project was introduced at the Flight Software Workshop last year. Next, the presentation will provide an overview of the current suite of HPSC System Software which includes the vendor provided bootloaders, operating systems, emulator, and development tools. Next, the HPSC Middleware progress will be presented, which includes an overview of the features and capabilities of HPSC Middleware Release 2, followed by a look at the reference flight software applications which utilize the Middleware. Finally, the presentation will give a preview of the HPSC Middleware Release 3.

Cudmore, Alan↗

Simulation at Extreme-Scale: Co-Design Thinking and Practices

The current trend of computer architecture evolving towards exaflop/s is the fast increasing floating point performance (the so-called “free” flops) accompanied by much slowly improving the bandwidth of memory and network. Numerical simulation would undergo the challenge posed by the unbalanced increase in the compute power and the capability of data movement. In this paper, after reviewing the challenges of hardware and software in moving towards exascale computing, we present co-design thinking for selecting, optimizing, and developing a numerical algorithm and a simulation tool to meet the challenge of simulation at extreme scale. Examples are presented to demonstrate the new way of thinking and its effectiveness on the emerging architecture.

Computer Science↗

Wilson Dslash Kernel From Lattice QCD Optimization

Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) is a numerical technique used for calculations in Theoretical Nuclear and High Energy Physics. LQCD is traditionally one of the first applications ported to many new high performance computing architectures and indeed LQCD practitioners have been known to design and build custom LQCD computers. Lattice QCD kernels are frequently used as benchmarks (e.g. 168.wupwise in the SPEC suite) and are generally well understood, and as such are ideal to illustrate several optimization techniques. In this chapter we will detail our work in optimizing the Wilson-Dslash kernels for Intel Xeon Phi, however, as we will show the technique gives excellent performance on regular Xeon Architecture as well.

Lattice QCD, Wilson-Dslash, Parallel Computing, Op↗

IRIS: A Performance-Portable Framework for Cross-Platform Heterogeneous Computing

From edge to exascale, computer architectures are becoming more heterogeneous and complex. The systems typically have fat nodes, with multicore CPUs and multiple hardware accelerators such as GPUs, FPGAs, and DSPs. This complexity is causing a crisis in programming systems and performance portability. Several programming systems are working to address these challenges, but the increasing architectural diversity is forcing software stacks and applications to be specialized for each architecture. As we show, all of these approaches critically depend on their software framework for discovery, execution, scheduling, and data orchestration. To address this challenge, we believe that a more agile and proactive software framework is essential to increase performance portability and improve user productivity. To this end, we have designed and implemented IRIS: a performance-portable framework for cross-platform heterogeneous computing. IRIS can discover available resources, manage multiple diverse programming platforms (e.g., CUDA, Hexagon, HIP, Level Zero, OpenCL, OpenMP) simultaneously in the same execution, respect data dependencies, orchestrate data movement proactively, and provide for user-configurable scheduling. To simplify data movement, IRIS introduces a shared virtual device memory with relaxed consistency among different heterogeneous devices. IRIS also adds an automatic kernel workload partitioning technique using the polyhedral model so that it can resize kernels for a wide range of devices. Our evaluation on three architectures, ranging from Qualcomm Snapdragon to a Summit supercomputer node, shows that IRIS improves portability across a wide range of diverse heterogeneous architectures with negligible overhead.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗