Kokkos Tensor Library
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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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This study investigates the heating performance of an integrated air-source heat pump (ASHP) with a thermoelectric subcooler (TES) module, revealing significant performance enhancements, particularly in colder temperatures. Results show that adding the portable TES boosts the ASHP's heating capacity, making it feasible for residential applications. The coefficient of performance (COP) for the TE system, which is influenced by condensing temperatures and ambient conditions, ranges from 1.51 to 2.07. If condensing temperatures are consistently maintained above 35 °C, a TE COP of approximately 2.07 is achievable, supporting system downsizing and reducing supplemental heating. When coupled with an oversized indoor coil, the TES-ASHP system delivers comparable heating to a baseline unit while achieving a 10 % higher COP. Capacity increases by 8.7 %–24 % with TES in colder conditions, though COP declines by 9 %–18 %, diminishing as temperatures drop. Compared to systems with supplemental heating, this setup achieves a COP 10 %–17 % higher. Future work will involve extended field testing in various climates, exploration of advanced materials for thermal efficiency, and assessment of alternative refrigerants to improve performance and sustainability. This integrated ASHP-TES system holds promise for increased efficiency and reduced environmental impact in cold climates.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Realta Fusion successfully executed a one-year collaborative effort to deploy the Portable Diagnostic Package (PDP) on the Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM) and to assess future diagnostic needs. The PDP consists of an optical emission spectroscopy (OES) subsystem and a Thomson scattering (TS) subsystem. Within the first two months, the PDP OES subsystem was installed, integrated with WHAM timing, and handed over to trained Realta personnel. It immediately delivered multi-channel impurity surveys and the first spatially resolved plasma-rotation profiles inferred from C III Doppler shifts. The TS subsystem was commissioned within the first six months; transportation of the class IV laser system, approval of the safety plan, and the integration with WHAM timing with 100 ns resolution. The TS subsystem provided the first localized electron temperature measurements in WHAM commissioning shots. Leveraging these results, the team has discussed a diagnostic concept map for Realta’s next-step facility, Anvil, identifying line-of-sight constraints, required temporal resolution, and hardware upgrades.
As hardware architectures and software stacks complexity grows, development productivity, performance and software portability, quickly evolve from desirable features to actual needs. SHAD, the Scalable High-performance Algorithms and Data-structures C++ library is designed to mitigate these issues: it provides general purpose building blocks as well as high-level custom utilities, and offers a shared-memory programming abstraction which facilitates the programming of complex systems, scaling up to High Performance Computing clusters. SHAD’s portability is achieved through an abstract runtime interface, which decouples the upper layers of the library and hides the low level details of the underlying architecture. This layer enables SHAD to interface with different runtime/threading systems, e.g. Intel TBB and Global Memory and Threading (GMT). However, current backends targeting distributed systems, rely on a centralized controller which may possibly limit scalability up to hundreds of nodes and creates a network hot spot due to all to one communication for synchronization, and possibly resulting in degraded performance at high process counts. In this research, we explore HPX, the C++ standard library for parallelism and concurrency, as an additional backend in support of the SHAD library, and present the methodologies in support of local and remote task executions in SHAD with respect to HPX. Finally, we evaluate the proposed system by comparing against existing backends of SHAD and analyzing their performance on C++ Standard Template Library algorithms.
In this dissertation, we demonstrate that it is possible to develop methods of empirical hardware-counter-based performance analysis for scientific applications running on diverse types of CPUs. Although hardware counters have been used in performance analysis for at least 30 years, the methods used are still limited to particular CPU vendors or even particular generations of CPUs from the same vendor. Our motivating hypothesis is that hardware counter-based measurements could be developed to provide consistent performance information on diverse CPU types. This dissertation proves the hypothesis was correct by demonstrating one such set of metrics.
Silicon (Si) is a leading next-generation Li-ion battery anode candidate that meets rigorous performance demands for portable power including enhanced power and energy density with robust cycling performance. However, a series of complex and interrelated reactions lead to reduced calendar life in Si-containing systems and therefore challenge practical adoption. In the present work, we probe the mechanisms underlying observed performance improvements by adding a pitch-carbon coating onto nano-Si material. We pair solid-phase (X-ray photoemission spectroscopy, Fourier-transform infrared), semi-volatile phase (solid-phase microextraction-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry), and gas-phase (gas chromatography-flame-ionization detector) characterization signals to comprehensively evaluate the impact of pitch-carbon coating on the evolution of the Si solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) and the associated impacts on electrode/electrolyte reactivity. The pitch-carbon is found to serve as a physicochemical barrier, reducing the electro-active surface area for Si/electrolyte reactivity and preventing Si oxidation. Further, the pitch-carbon coating promotes the evolution of a more-favorable SEI by subsuming substantial functionality typically associated with the fluoroethylene carbonate (FEC) electrolyte additive - such as alkoxide scavenging and suppression of transesterification pathways - and by shifting the competitive electrolyte degradation pathways' favorability. The multi-phase characterization approach enables holistic end-products evaluation from complex (electro)chemical interfacial reactions, which informs a robust interpretation of the carbon coating's role in electrochemical performance improvements. The present mechanistic evaluation aids the rational design for improved nano-Si materials.
Software containers are a key channel for delivering portable and reproducible scientific software in high performance computing (HPC) environments. HPC environments are different from other types of computing environments primarily due to usage of the message passing interface (MPI) and drivers for specialized hard- ware to enable distributed computing capabilities. This distinction directly impacts how software containers are built for HPC applications and can complicate software quality assurance efforts including portability and performance. This work introduces a strategy for building containers for HPC applications that adopts layering as a mechanism for software quality assurance. The strategy is demonstrated across three different HPC systems, two of them petaflops scale with entirely different interconnect technologies and/or processor chipsets but running the same container. Performance consequences of the containerization strategy are found to be less than 5-14% while still achieving portable and reproducible containers for HPC systems.
CG-Kit is a new Code Generation tool-Kit that we have developed as a part of the solution for portability and maintainability for multiphysics computing applications. The development of CG-Kit is rooted in the urgent need created by the shifting landscape of high-performance computing platforms and the algorithmic complexities of a particular large-scale multiphysics application: Flash-X. To efficiently use computing resources on a heterogeneous node, an application must have a map of computation to resources and a mechanism to move the data and computation to the resources according to the map. Most existing performance portability solutions are focussed on abstracting the expression of computations so that a unified source code can be specialized to run on different resources. However, such an approach is insufficient for a code like Flash-X, which has a multitude of code components that can be assembled in various permutations and combinations to form different instances of applications. Similar challenges apply to any code that has composability, where a single specified way of apportioning work among devices may not be optimal. Additionally, use cases arise where the optimal control flow of computation may differ for different devices while the underlying numerics remain identical. This combination leads to unique challenges including handling an existing large code base in Fortran and/or C/C++, subdivision of code into a great variety of units supporting a wide range of physics and numerical methods, different parallelization techniques for distributed and shared memory systems and accelerator devices, and heterogeneity of computing platforms requiring coexisting variants of parallel algorithms. All of these challenges demand that scientific software developers apply existing knowledge about domain applications, algorithms, and computing platforms to determine custom abstractions and granularity for code generation. There is a critical lack of tools to tackle those problems. CG-Kit is designed to fill this gap by providing a user with the ability to express their desired control flow and computation-to-resource map in the form a pseudocode-like recipe. It consists of standalone tools that can be combined into highly specific and, we argue, highly effective portability and maintainability toolchains. Here we present the design of our new tools: parametrized source trees, control flow graphs, and recipes. The tools are implemented in Python. They are agnostic to the programming language of the source code targeted for code generation. In conclusion, we demonstrate the capabilities of the toolkit with two examples, first, multithreaded variants of the basic AXPY operation, and second, variants of parallel algorithms within a hydrodynamics solver, called Spark, from Flash-X that operates on block-structured adaptive meshes.
Scientific applications rely on third-party libraries, which may have multiple implementations. While sharing an application programming interface (API), many of these implementations do not have a shared application binary interface (ABI) and require recompiling. Recompiling can be a long and complex process and sometimes not even an option when the application is shipped binary only. ABI incompatibility strikes at the heart of portability, productivity, and performance by (1) impeding application execution across different HPC and Cloud systems; (2) adding developer hours rebuilding an application; and (3) not taking advantage of host-optimized libraries. This tutorial teaches attendees a portable way to address ABI incompatibility in MPI using the Wi4MPI library. Wi4MPI translates the ABI dynamically from the MPI library used to build the application to a different MPI library available at run time. With Wi4MPI, HPC practitioners can break the portability barrier imposed by ABI incompatibility, potentially increase performance, and increase user productivity. The tutorial is broken down in three components: (1) Understanding ABI compatibility in MPI; (2) Translating MPI libraries dynamically; and (3) Applying dynamic translation to key use cases in HPC, including Containers. If you use more than one MPI library or supercomputer, this tutorial is for you.
This study introduces a novel framework designed to enhance the performance, scalability, and portability of the kilometer-scale E3SM Land Model (km-ELM) within the E3SM modeling infrastructure. By seamlessly integrating cutting-edge data tools, we address existing challenges such as slow performance, limited scalability, and difficulties in software integration in current data-driven ELM simulation over large geographic areas. Our innovative approach leverages the KiloCraft data toolkit to generate unified inputs for simulations ranging from a single-cite case, to a 72,083-cell regional case to a continental configuration encompassing 21.6 million land grid cells at a 1 km × 1 km resolution. We conduct extensive strong- and weak-scaling experiments on three state-of-the-art supercomputers, utilizing up to 100,800 CPU cores across 2400 compute nodes to evaluate end-to-end metrics including wall-clock time, simulation-years-per-day (SYPD), initialization costs, and I/O throughput. Our results reveal the land (LND) component’s efficient scaling, demonstrating near-ideal weak scaling and strong-scaling parallel efficiencies reaching up to 87% at 50,400 cores. We confirm portability and reproducibility through bitwise-equivalent outputs across different machines using identical inputs over supported machines. Notably, at extreme scales, we identify I/O as a critical bottleneck and that leads to effective solution with the SCORPIO/ADIOS stack. Collectively, these findings validate the deployment of km-ELM at a continental scale with high parallel efficiency and provide essential guidance on configuration, decomposition, and I/O settings for optimized kilometer-scale land simulations in E3SM. This work emphasizes the innovative design and practical solutions that enhance the operational capabilities of km-ELM, focusing on software performance and scalability while leaving detailed scientific evaluations of simulated land processes for future investigations.
Parallel rasterization can suffer from race conditions during fragment generation, which is traditionally addressed by using specialized hardware accessible via vendor graphics APIs. Unfortunately, graphics APIs are increasingly problematic on high-performance computers, either because they are not provided or because of concerns about dependencies with in situ visualization. In response, we present a hardware-agnostic rasterization algorithm that handles race conditions using only data-parallel primitives (DPPs), enabling efficient rendering on HPC systems without graphics API dependencies and aligning with recent efforts to deliver visualization software with DPPs. Our evaluation consists of three phases: (1) evaluating portability across different CPU and GPU architectures, (2) evaluating competitiveness with a community standard, and (3) evaluating performance across varying workloads and available parallelism. The supporting experiments run on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, considering data sets as large as 460 million triangles and 160 million pixels. While performance generally falls short of graphics API baselines, it achieves interactive frame rates on most workloads. As a result, we conclude our approach is a viable solution for rasterization on high-performance computers since our approach is portably performant across different architectures without the need for specialized vendor support.
We are investigating a microwave cavity-based transducer for in-core high-temperature fluid flow sensing in molten salt cooled reactors (MSCR) and sodium fast reactors (SFR). This sensor is a hollow metallic cylindrical cavity, which can be fabricated from stainless steel, and as such is expected to be resilient to radiation, high temperature and corrosive environment of MSCR and SFR. The principle of sensing consists of making one wall of the cylindrical cavity flexible enough so that dynamic pressure, which is proportional to fluid velocity, will cause membrane deflection. Membrane deflection causes cavity volume change, which leads to a shift in the resonant frequency. Feasibility of the sensor was initially investigated with analytical derivations and with COMSOL RF Module computer simulations of resonant frequency spectral shift due to uniform load. We also investigated the mechanical integrity of the flowmeter’s membrane through analytical modelling and COMSOL Structural Mechanics Module computer simulations. Both the analytic model and COMSOL model showed that maximum stresses on the plate, which are at the radial boundary of the plate, are three orders of magnitude smaller than the material’s yield strength and ultimate tensile strength. This indicates that the sensor is at a low risk of mechanical failure. Using results from models, we have developed an initial design for a microwave K-band sensor. A cylindrical resonator prototype was fabricated from brass for the initial tests. The external dimensions of the cavity are matched to the flange of a standard WR-42 waveguide. Microwave field is coupled into the resonant cavity through a subwavelength-size aperture. A test article was developed consisting of a piping Tee with a bulkhead WR-42 microwave waveguide installed in a leak-proof assembly. A microwave waveguide circulator was installed in the setup to suppress the effect of reflections at the cavity entrance by increasing the isolation between the input and the output port. Preliminary spectral characterization of cavity spectral response was performed with a portable PXIe chassis microwave VNA with a custom GUI. Preliminary dry tests of the transducer response were conducted with a set of calibrated weights. Transducer frequency shift was shown to be monotonically increasing with increasing pressure. The next steps will involve investigation of the transducer performance for water flow sensing.
This work compares a portable laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) analyzer to a portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) device for quantification of gallium (Ga) in a plutonium surrogate matrix of cerium (Ce) for the first time. Calibration methods are developed with spectra of Ce–Ga samples from both devices. Here, metrics such as limit of detection (LoD) and mean average percent error (MAPE) are examined to evaluate calibration performance. While the portable LIBS device can yield a nearly instantaneous analytical measurement, its accuracy is hampered by self-absorption. By employing a self-absorption correction and increasing gating delay, LIBS calibrations with errors in the low single percents and LoDs of 0.1% Ga were constructed. The XRF device produces calibrations with superlative sensitivity, yielding LoDs for gallium in the low tens of parts-per-million (ppm), two orders of magnitude lower than the corrected LIBS models. However, a clear trade-off of measurement fidelity is established between the instantaneous analysis of the LIBS device and the minutes-long XRF measurement yielding superior detection limits.
Office of Nuclear Smuggling Detection and Deterrence (NSDD) is charged to identify and develop technologies to detect, disrupt, and investigate smuggling of radiological and nuclear materials •Border protection involves primary inspections using Radiation Portal Monitors (RPM), complimented with secondary and area survey inspections, usually performed manually using portable radiation detectors (PRDs) -RPM rely on fast technologies which provide quick scans of passing cargo/vehicles -Secondary inspections rely on trained, field deployed staff responsible for additional interdiction of screened cargo/vehicle putting them in potentially hazardous environment -Area survey inspections rely on trained, field deployed staff responsible for scanning and identifying presence of radiation while patrolling through a facility or public space •This project explores the use of technology which could reduce risks to field inspectors and add efficiency •The work presented here is a proof of principle of detector-robot integration to perform area survey inspections
The MPICH project is an example of translational research in computer science before that term was well known or even coined. The project began in 1992 as an effort to develop a portable, high-performance implementation of the emerging Message-Passing Interface (MPI) Standard. It has enabled the widespread adoption of MPI as a way to write scalable parallel applications on systems of all sizes including upcoming exascale supercomputers. In this paper, we describe how the translational research process was used in MPICH, how that led to its success, the challenges encountered and lessons learned, and how the process could be applied to other similar projects.
This manual describes the use of PETSc for the numerical solution of partial differential equations and related problems on high-performance computers. The Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc) is a suite of data structures and routines that provide the building blocks for the implementation of large-scale application codes on parallel (and serial) computers. PETSc uses the MPI standard for all message-passing communication. PETSc includes an expanding suite of parallel linear solvers, nonlinear solvers, and time integrators that may be used in application codes written in Fortran, C, C++, and Python. PETSc provides many of the mechanisms needed within parallel application codes, such as parallel matrix and vector assembly routines. The library is organized hierarchically, enabling users to employ the level of abstraction that is most appropriate for a particular problem. By using techniques of object-oriented programming, PETSc provides enormous flexibility for users. PETSc is a sophisticated set of software tools; as such, for some users it initially has a much steeper learning curve than a simple subroutine library. In particular, for individuals without some computer science background, experience programming in C, C++, python, or Fortran and experience using a debugger such as gdb or dbx, it may require a significant amount of time to take full advantage of the features that enable efficient software use. However, the power of the PETSc design and the algorithms it incorporates may make the efficient implementation of many application codes simpler than \rolling them" yourself.
There is an emerging need for adaptive, lightweight communication in irregular HPC applications at exascale, where GPU accelerators provide the majority of available compute cycles. To address this need, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is developing a programming system to support distributed-memory HPC application development using the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model. This work includes two major components: UPC++ and GASNet-EX. UPC++ is a C++ template library providing Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC) communication interfaces. GASNet-EX is a portable, high-performance communication middleware library, used by the implementations of UPC++ and many other PGAS programming models. We describe recent advances in GASNet-EX to efficiently implement zero-copy Remote Memory Access (RMA) communication to and from memory on accelerator devices such as GPUs. We demonstrate performance improvements via benchmark results from UPC++ (on Summit) and the Legion programming system (on DGX-1), both using GASNet-EX for communication.