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At least 343 records · Page 19

RadVolViz: An Information Display-Inspired Transfer Function Editor for Multivariate Volume Visualization

In volume visualization transfer functions are widely used for mapping voxel properties to color and opacity. Typically, volume density data are scalars which require simple 1D transfer functions to achieve this mapping. If the volume densities are vectors of three channels, one can straightforwardly map each channel to either red, green or blue, which requires a trivial extension of the 1D transfer function editor. Here, we devise a new method that applies to volume data with more than three channels. These types of data often arise in scientific scanning applications, where the data are separated into spectral bands or chemical elements. Our method expands on prior work in which a multivariate information display, RadViz, was fused with a radial color map, in order to visualize multi-band 2D images. In this work, we extend this joint interface to blended volume rendering. The information display allows users to recognize the presence and value distribution of the multivariate voxels and the joint volume rendering display visualizes their spatial distribution. We design a set of operators and lenses that allow users to interactively control the mapping of the multivariate voxels to opacity and color. This enables users to isolate or emphasize volumetric structures with desired multivariate properties. Furthermore, it turns out that our method also enables more insightful displays even for RGB data. We demonstrate our method with three datasets obtained from spectral electron microscopy, high energy X-ray scanning, and atmospheric science.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

FastML Science Benchmarks: Accelerating Real-Time Scientific Edge Machine Learning

Applications of machine learning (ML) are growing by the day for many unique and challenging scientific applications. However, a crucial challenge facing these applications is their need for ultra low-latency and on-detector ML capabilities. Given the slowdown in Moore's law and Dennard scaling, coupled with the rapid advances in scientific instrumentation that is resulting in growing data rates, there is a need for ultra-fast ML at the extreme edge. Fast ML at the edge is essential for reducing and filtering scientific data in real-time to accelerate science experimentation and enable more profound insights. To accelerate real-time scientific edge ML hardware and software solutions, we need well-constrained benchmark tasks with enough specifications to be generically applicable and accessible. These benchmarks can guide the design of future edge ML hardware for scientific applications capable of meeting the nanosecond and microsecond level latency requirements. To this end, we present an initial set of scientific ML benchmarks, covering a variety of ML and embedded system techniques.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Toward a Seamless Integration of Computing, Experimental, and Observational Science Facilities: A Blueprint to Accelerate Discovery

The Department of Energy, Office of Science operates world-leading facilities for experimental, observational, and computational science. DOE supercomputing facilities will reach performance at the scale of ExaFLOPs in the coming years, enabling new vistas of scale and precision for large scale simulations and data analysis. Experimental scientific facilities are undergoing similar upgrades that will lead to higher data rates and correspondingly larger computational demands, and will increase the need for near-real-time processing and resilient support for more complex workflows. A transformation of science is underway, with workloads at supercomputing facilities increasingly driven by this explosion of data from instruments and experimental facilities, as well as the accelerating use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a tool for scientific discovery. A seamless integration of computing, networking, instruments, and experimental facilities is required to support these emerging workloads and open up a new frontier of U.S. leadership in scientific discovery. We propose to accomplish this by providing frictionless access to the ASCR supercomputing facilities. We describe our vision of combining the power of ASCR supercomputers and networking infrastructure into an integrated scalable fabric, available to end user scientists via interfaces that aim to automate and simplify access to high performance computing systems. This will enable unprecedented computational science capabilities for experimental and observational facilities, and will create new opportunities to combine large simulations and modeling with experimental facility data analysis. This blueprint for creating an integrated network of computational and experimental facilities will provide an enriched discovery environment and open doors for new scientific communities to access the DOE’s world-leading computing and networking capabilities.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Consist v0.1.0

A Python library for provenance tracking, intelligent caching, and data virtualization in scientific simulation workflows. It automatically records code, configuration, and input data to skip redundant computations and enables querying results across many runs without manual bookkeeping. Designed to support multi-model simulation workflows like the BEAM CORE toolset at LBL, but designed to be extensible to a wide range of research workflows. Combines lineage tracking features as provided by OpenLineage with deterministic hashing like SnakeMake, and adds powerful analysis tools on model outputs.

Needell, Zachary [Lawrence Berkeley National Labor↗

Enhancing Discoverability and Management of Atmospheric Data at Scale: Solutions from the ARM Data Center

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) is a multi-laboratory and multi-institutional U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science National User Facility. The ARM Data Center (ADC), located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, collects, archives, and shares vast atmospheric data crucial for climate research. The ADC manages over 7 PB of data from 460 instruments worldwide, processing it into more than 11,000 diverse data products using the Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) for machine-independent accessibility. The primary challenge addressed in this paper is the efficient management and distribution of vast and diverse datasets essential for the climate research community, enhancing accessibility through advanced tools like Data Discovery. The ADC has developed advanced infrastructure and software architecture to handle the continuous influx of heterogeneous data to enhance data discoverability, resulting in increased scientific collaboration. In 2023, users from over 34 countries downloaded and utilized ARM data, resulting in 1,455 publications. The ADC’s efforts have significantly improved the discoverability and usability of atmospheric data, fostering extensive scientific research and collaboration. This paper details the solutions implemented by the ADC team for efficient data discovery and distribution, and it demonstrates ARM’s capability of staging processed data for scientific analysis.

Shah, Chirag [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000203145737)↗

Scientific machine learning benchmarks

Deep learning has transformed the use of machine learning technologies for the analysis of large experimental datasets. In science, such datasets are typically generated by large-scale experimental facilities, and machine learning focuses on the identification of patterns, trends and anomalies to extract meaningful scientific insights from the data. In upcoming experimental facilities, such as the Extreme Photonics Application Centre (EPAC) in the UK or the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the rate of data generation and the scale of data volumes will increasingly require the use of more automated data analysis. Furthermore, at present, identifying the most appropriate machine learning algorithm for the analysis of any given scientific dataset is a challenge due to the potential applicability of many different machine learning frameworks, computer architectures and machine learning models. Historically, for modelling and simulation on high-performance computing systems, these issues have been addressed through benchmarking computer applications, algorithms and architectures. Extending such a benchmarking approach and identifying metrics for the application of machine learning methods to open, curated scientific datasets is a new challenge for both scientists and computer scientists. Here, we introduce the concept of machine learning benchmarks for science and review existing approaches. As an example, we describe the SciMLBench suite of scientific machine learning benchmarks.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Automatic Generation of Algorithms for High-Speed Reliable Lossy Data Compression (Final Report)

Fast reliable data compression is urgently needed for many leading-edge scientific instruments and for exascale high-performance computing applications because they produce vast amounts of data at extremely high rates. The goal of this project has been to develop a framework named LC that is able to automatically generate high-speed lossless and reliable lossy compression and decompression algorithms that can be customized for different kinds of data. The resulting LC framework is freely available on GitHub. To achieve high-speed operation, LC outputs optimized and parallelized CPU and GPU implementations of the generated algorithms. To ensure the quality of lossily compressed data, LC guarantees the user-provided error bound. To be able to customize the compression algorithm to various use cases, LC can synthesize millions of different algorithms and automatically search for the one that works best for the given data. We have already employed LC to create state-of-the-art lossless and lossy compressors for scientific data as well as leading lossless compressors for images. We hope that LC and the customized, fast, reliable, and CPU/GPU-compatible compression algorithms that it can generate will greatly benefit the many scientific applications that need not only high trustworthiness but also high performance.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The Artificial Scientist: in-Transit Machine Learning of Plasma Simulations

Large-scale simulations or scientific experiments produce petabytes of data per run. This poses massive challenges for I/O and storage when scientific analysis workflows are run manually offline. Unsupervised deep learning-based techniques to extract patterns and non-linear relations from these large amounts of data provide a way to build scientific understanding from raw data, reducing the need for manual pre-selection of analysis steps, but require exascale compute and memory to process the full dataset available. In this paper, we demonstrate a heterogeneous streaming workflow in which plasma simulation data is streamed directly to a Machine Learning (ML) application training a model on the simulation data in-transit, completely circumventing the capacity-constrained filesystem bottleneck. This workflow employs openPMD to provide a high level interface to describe scientific data and also uses ADIOS2, to transfer volumes of data that exceed the capabilities of the filesystem. We employ experience replay to avoid catastrophic forgetting in learning from this non-steady state process in a continual manner and adapt it to improve model convergence while learning in-transit. As a proof-of-concept, we approach the ill-posed inverse problem of predicting particle dynamics from radiation in a particle-incell (PIConGPU) simulation of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI). We detail hardware-software co-design challenges as we scale PIConGPU to full Frontier, the Top-1 system as of June 2024 Top500 list.

Kelling, Jeffrey [Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden Rossen↗

QProR: An Efficient Framework for Quantity-of-Interest Based Progressive Retrieval with Guaranteed Error Control

Scientific applications generate an unprecedented volume of data, overwhelming the network and file systems’ bandwidth and posing challenges for efficient and scalable data retrieval and analysis. Progressive data compression offers a promising solution by enabling on-demand retrieval at reduced size. However, existing progressive methods either fail to bound the errors in essential quantities of interest (QoIs) derived from raw data or suffer from suboptimal retrieval efficiency. In this work, we propose QProR, an efficient QoI-based progressive framework that optimizes progressive retrieval for target QoIs. Our key contributions include: (1) a systematic framework that integrates error-controlled lossy compressors with bitplane encoding while decoupling the two processes for high flexibility and adaptability; (2) a novel weighted bitplane encoding method which incorperates QoI knowledge into data refactoring to enhance retrieval efficiency; (3) an optimized retrieval strategy that accounts for the varying impacts of different variables on multivariate QoIs; (4) comprehensive evaluations using six real-world datasets from multiple scientific applications and thorough comparisons against state of the arts. Experimental results demonstrate that QProR achieves up to 80.38% reduction in the retrieval size under the same requested QoI error tolerance, when compared with the best-performing existing methods. When transferring 384 GB of scientific data to remote sites, QProR delivers up to 1.68 × speedup in the end-to-end data transfer performance.

Li, Wenbo [University of Kentucky]↗

An Autonomous MCP Bridge to Rucio: Enhancing Data Management Accessibility for High Energy Physics

The Rucio Data Management System [1] is an important tool used by High Energy Physics experiments, including those at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, to store and manage exabyte-scale scientific datasets. Despite its central role in coordinating data across globally distributed storage sites, Rucio's command line interface (CLI) presents a steep learning curve, and makes it difficult for scientists to navigate through. To solve this issue, a containerized Model Context Protocol (MCP) [2] server was built that connects Large Language Models directly to Rucio, allowing AI agents to handle data tasks by using simple, natural language rather than memorized terminal commands. The core engineering focus of this project was moving the server away from slow terminal commands that require text parsing and replacing them with a native Python Client API toolset and a planned REST API framework. Moving to the Python API handles data operations directly in memory, which helps clear up formatting errors, provides the AI with clean, structured JSON data and speeds up tool execution. To prove that the system actually works, a benchmarking pipeline was also built with various questions to test the AI across four different model configurations. The questions included finding data scopes, tracking down specific datasets, and checking replication rules. Through benchmarking, early runs showed that with raw terminal text, the model would get confused and stuck, whereas switching to the Python API to feed the AI clean, structured data yielded massive improvement. By creating an intelligent and autonomous bridge to a storage network, this project shows how AI can be implemented in scientific data management, which ultimately helps scientists at Fermilab spend less time sorting through data and more time focusing on their experiments and analysis.

Akella, Kashyap [William Rainey Harper Coll.]↗

Unpaired image translation to mitigate domain shift in liquid argon time projection chamber detector responses

Deep learning algorithms often are developed and trained on a training dataset and deployed on test datasets. Any systematic difference between the training and a test dataset may severely degrade the final algorithm performance on the test dataset—what is known as the domain shift problem . This issue is prevalent in many scientific domains where algorithms are trained on simulated data but applied to real-world datasets. Typically, the domain shift problem is solved through various domain adaptation (DA) methods. However, these methods are often tailored for a specific downstream task, such as classification or semantic segmentation, and may not easily generalize to different tasks. This work explores the feasibility of using an alternative way to solve the domain shift problem that is not specific to any downstream algorithm. The proposed approach relies on modern Unpaired Image-to-Image (UI2I) translation techniques, designed to find translations between different image domains in a fully unsupervised fashion. In this study, the approach is applied to a domain shift problem commonly encountered in Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) detector research when seeking a way to translate samples between two differently distributed LArTPC detector datasets deterministically. This translation allows for mapping real-world data into the simulated data domain where the downstream algorithms can be run with much less domain-shift-related performance degradation. Conversely, using the translation from the simulated data to a real-world domain can increase the realism of the simulated dataset and reduce the magnitude of any systematic uncertainties. To evaluate the quality of the translations, we use both pixel-wise metrics and a downstream task to measure the effectiveness of UI2I methods for mitigating the domain shift problem. We adapted several popular UI2I translation algorithms to work on scientific data and demonstrated the viability of these techniques for solving the domain shift problem with LArTPC detector data. To facilitate further development of DA techniques for scientific datasets, the ‘Simple Liquid-Argon Track Samples’ dataset used in this study is also published.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Scalable Data-Intensive Geocomputation: A Design for Real-Time Continental Flood Inundation Mapping

The convergence of data-intensive and extreme-scale computing enables an integrated software and data ecosystem for scientific discovery. Developments in this realm will fuel transformative research in data-driven interdisciplinary domains. Geocomputation provides computing paradigms in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for interactive computing of geographic data, processes, models, and maps. Because GIS is data-driven, the computational scalability of a geocomputation workflow is directly related to the scale of the GIS data layers, their resolution and extent, as well as the velocity of the geo-located data streams to be processed. Unique in high user interactivity and low end-to-end latency requirements, geocomputation applications will dramatically benefit from the convergence of high-end data analytics (HDA) and high-performance computing (HPC). The application level challenge, however, is to identify and eliminate computational bottlenecks that arise along a geocomputation workflow. Indeed, poor scalability at any of the workflow components is detrimental to the entire end-to-end pipeline. Here, we study a large geocomputation use case in flood inundation mapping that handles multiple national-scale geospatial datasets and targets low end-to-end latency. We discuss benefits and challenges for harnessing both HDA and HPC for data-intensive geospatial data processing and intensive numerical modeling of geographic processes. We propose an HDA+HPC geocomputation architecture design that couples HDA (e.g., Spark)-based spatial data handling and HPC-based parallel data modeling. Key techniques for coupling HDA and HPC to bridge the two different software stacks are reviewed and discussed.

Liu, Yan↗

A Data Deposition Platform for Sharing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Data

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data are rarely deposited in open databases, leading to loss of critical scientific knowledge. Existing data reporting methods (images, tables, lists of values) contain less information than raw data, and are poorly standardized. Together, these issues limit FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) access to these data, which in turn creates barriers for compound dereplication and the development of new data-driven discovery tools. Existing NMR databases are either not designed for natural products data, or employ complex deposition interfaces that disincentivize deposition. Journals, including the Journal of Natural Products (JNP), are now requiring data submission as part of the publication process, creating the need for a streamlined, user-friendly mechanism to deposit and distribute NMR data. Recently, our team reported the development of the Natural Products Magnetic Resonance Database (NP-MRD; www.np-mrd.org). Here in this paper we present a new data deposition platform for the NP-MRD project that is designed to enable users to deposit NMR data for published or submitted manuscripts in under five minutes. This platform includes a suite of automated data extraction and standardization tools, together with a simple-to-use web-based interface and detailed error reporting to simplify the data deposition process and is available at www.np-mrd.org/submissions.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

LCLS Big Data Handling – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Data Deluge

Advanced data and computing systems are vital to Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) operations, data interpretation and overall scientific productivity. The transition to MHz-era operation marks a fundamental change in scale that requires new infrastructure and architectures to link LCLS to the required scale of computing needed for scientific interpretation. The LCLS-II Data System meets big data challenges by implementing configurable data reduction that can adapt to multiple science areas, real-time analysis frameworks to provide visualization and fast feedback, and the ability to transfer data to local and remote computational facilities for near real time analysis at the appropriate scale. Feature extracted information generated in the data analysis pipeline - at the edge, local compute, or remote High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources - can be used to steer experiments and inform user decisions during beam time. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) techniques present new opportunities to rapidly analyse large datasets and direct experiments, but create new challenges in scaling, adaptability, complexity, and trustworthiness. We describe how the LCLS-II Data System architecture addresses its data-driven challenges in the areas of data acquisition, data processing, data management, and workflow orchestration to decrease the overall time-to-science and provide a vision for future developments.

artificial intelligence↗

Hyper Suprime-Cam Legacy Archive

Abstract We present the launch of the Hyper Suprime-Cam Legacy Archive (HSCLA), a public archive of processed, science-ready data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC). HSC is an optical wide-field imager installed at the prime focus of the Subaru Telescope and has been in operation since 2014. While ∼1/3 of the total observing time of HSC has been used for the Subaru Strategic Program (SSP), the remainder of the time is used for Principal Investigator (PI)-based programs. We have processed the data from these PI-based programs and make the processed, high-quality data available to the community through HSCLA. The current version of HSCLA includes data taken in the first year of science operation, 2014. We provide both individual and coadd images as well as photometric catalogs. The photometric catalog from the coadd is loaded to the database, which offers a fast access to the large catalog. There are other online tools such as an image browser and an image cutout tool and they will be useful for science analyses. The coadd images reach 24–27th magnitudes at 5σ for point sources and cover approximately 580 square degrees in at least one filter with 150 million objects in total. We perform extensive quality assurance tests and verify that the photometric and astrometric quality of the data is good enough for most scientific explorations. However, the data are not without problems and users are referred to the list of known issues before exploiting the data for science. All the data and documentations can be found at the data release site, 〈https://hscla.mtk.nao.ac.jp/〉.

Tanaka, Masayuki↗

Discovery of Probabilistic Dirichlet-to-Neumann Maps on Graphs

Dirichlet-to-Neumann maps enable the coupling of multiphysics simulations across computational subdomains by ensuring continuity of state variables and fluxes at artificial interfaces. We present a novel method for learning Dirichlet-to-Neumann maps on graphs using Gaussian processes, specifically for problems where the data obey a conservation law arising from an underlying partial differential equation. Our approach combines discrete exterior calculus and nonlinear optimal recovery to infer relationships between vertex and edge values. This framework yields data-driven predictions with uncertainty quantification across the entire graph, even when observations are limited to a subset of vertices and edges. By minimizing the reproducing kernel Hilbert space norm while penalizing kernel complexity through maximum likelihood estimation, our method ensures that the resulting surrogate strictly enforces conservation laws without overfitting. We demonstrate our method on two representative applications: subsurface flow in fracture networks and arterial blood flow. Finally, the results demonstrate that the method maintains high accuracy and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates even under severe data scarcity, highlighting its potential for scientific applications where limited data and reliable uncertainty quantification are critical.

Dirichlet-to-Neumann map↗

Data associated with the manuscript “Radiative impact of record-breaking wildfires from integrated ground-based data” collected in Richland, Washington in September 2020

This data package is associated with the publication “Radiative impact of record-breaking wildfires from integrated ground-based data” submitted to Nature Scientific Reports (Kassianov et al., 2024). Data from ground-based measurements of shortwave and spectrally resolved irradiance and aerosol optical depth (AOD) in the visible and near-infrared spectral ranges were assessed to quantify the radiative impact of the September 2020 wildfires that occurred in the Western United States. Data were collected in September 2020 by several ground-based instruments at the Atmospheric Measurements Laboratory (AML) located in Richland, Washington (46.3451, -119.2792). These data include (1) Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD); (2) spectrally resolved and shortwave (SW) irradiances; (3) backscatter profiles; (4) total sky images; and (5) near-surface ambient air temperatures.The data package consists of five sub-directories: (1) “AML_Ceilometer_”; (2)” AML_CSPHOT_”; (3) “AML_MFRSR_irradiances_”; (4) “AML_SW_irradiances_and_Temp_”; (5) “AML_TSI_images_”; and 6 files stored at the directory level, including the readme, file-level metadata file, and data dictionary. The file-level metadata file (the file ending in “_flmd.csv”) lists all files contained in this data package and descriptions for each. The data dictionary (the file ending in “_dd.csv”) describes each tabular column header’s unit, definition, and structure. Below are descriptions of each sub-directory:“AML_Ceilometer_” includes ceilometer data collected at the AML. These files contain the corresponding narratives of data. Details related to the ceilometer data can be found in Morris (2016). “AML_CSPHOT_” includes ascii files with high-temporal resolution (about 10-15 min) AML CSPHOT data and their daily-averaged counterparts. These two files contain the corresponding narratives of data. Details related to the CSPHOT data can be found in Gregory (2011). “AML_MFRSR_irradiances_” includes ascii files with the AML MFRSR-measured diffuse, normal, and total spectrally resolved irradiance. Details related to the MFRSR data can be found in Hodges and Michalsky (2016) and Koontz et al. (2013). “AML_SW_irradiances_+_Temp_” includes near-surface ambient air temperature and SW irradiances, namely direct normal, diffuse hemispherical, and total hemispheric (global), measured at the AML. These files also incorporate the corresponding narratives of data. Details related to the SW irradiances can be found in Andreas et al. (2018). “AML_TSI_images_” includes Total Sky Images (TSIs) collected at the AML. Details related to the TSI data can be found in Morris (2005).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Data-Driven Supervised Dimension Reduction for Scientific Discovery (LDRD QTI Report)

This report summarizes the findings of a four months FY24 Advanced Science & Technology (AS&T) LDRD Quick Targeted Investigation (QTI) project focused on the exploration of supervised dimension reduction approaches based on autoencoders. Autoencoders have been extensively employed in literature for unsupervised learning tasks, however, their use for supervised regression tasks, which are common within scientific applications, has been limited. Motivated by linear dimension reduction strategies like Active Subspaces and Adaptive Basis, we explored the possibility of employing autoencoders to discover a non-linear manifold able to represent the original function in fewer dimensions. In this report, we discuss a neural network architecture and we perform a numerical campaign on several problems ranging from simple two-dimensional functions to a model problem for magnetohydrodynamics in five dimensions. In our preliminary results, we show that the proposed approach is found to be superior to linear dimension reduction strategies in representing the target function even with a single latent variable.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗