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At least 343 records · Page 19

Dual-Purpose Canister Filling Demonstration Project Progress Report

This report discusses the progress made at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to support direct disposal of dual-purpose canisters (DPCs). Acceptable filler materials should demonstrate that the probability of criticality in DPCs during the disposal timeframe is below the probability threshold for inclusion in a repository performance assessment. This effort, which will ultimately result in a full-scale demonstration, includes computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling developed to gauge the filling process and to uncover any unforeseen issues. Filling simulations of the lower region (mouse holes) of a prototypic DPC show successfully simulate filling of the void space inside the canister and a smooth, even progression of the liquid level. Flow through a pipe that is similar to the drainpipe in a DPC is being investigated separately to gain valuable insight of the flow regime inside a pipe. Three physical experiments validating the computational filling model have been completed using surrogate liquids. One experiment using molten metal has been completed and the results demonstrate adequate filling of the canister void spaces. Although the scale experiment observed some void spaces related to shrinkage of the metal during cooling, the volume filled is expected to be sufficient to meet the purpose of moderator exclusion. Further experiments will scale up the geometry, moving towards a full-sized DPC demonstration, and provide a more rigorous investigation of candidate filler materials.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DUNE Software and Computing Challenges

The DUNE experiment will begin running in the late 2020's. The goals of the experiment include 1) studying neutrino oscillations using a beam of neutrinos from Fermilab in Illinois to the Sanford Underground Research Facility, 2) studying astrophysical neutrino sources and rare processes and 3) understanding the physics of neutrino interactions in matter. The DUNE Far Detector, consisting of four 17 kt LArTPC modules, will produce "events" rang-ing in size from 6 GBs to more than 100 TBs, posing unique challenges for DUNE software and computing. The data processing algorithms, particularly for raw data, drive the requirements for the future DUNE software framework documented here.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Uncovering Where Compensating Errors Could Hide in ENDF/B-VIII.0

Unconstrained physics spaces between two or more nuclear data observables in a library occur when their values can be simultaneously adjusted without violating the uncertainties in either differential information or simulations of relevant integral experiments. Differential data are often too imprecise to fully bound all nuclear data observables of interest for application simulations. Integral data are simulated with combinations of nuclear data so that an error in one observable may be hidden by a counterbalancing error in another. In this manner compensating errors may lurk within nuclear data libraries and these errors have the potential to undermine the predictive power of neutron transport simulations, particularly in situations where there is no conclusive validation experiment that resembles the application of interest. The EUCLID project (Experiments Underpinned by Computational Learning for Improvements in Nuclear Data) developed a preliminary workflow to identify these unconstrained physics spaces by bringing together results from a large collection of integral experiments with their simulated counter-parts as well as differential information that have a one-to-one correspondence to nuclear data. This wealth of information is processed by machine learning tools for subsequent refinement by human experts. Here, we show how the EUCLID work-flow is executed by applying it first to 239 Pu and then to 9 Be nuclear data in ENDF/B-VIII.0.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Risk-Averse Bi-Level Stochastic Network Interdiction Model for Cyber-Security Risk Management

Security of cyber networks is crucial; recent severe cyber-attacks have had a devastating effect on many large organizations. The attack graph, which maps the potential attack paths of a cyber network, is a popular tool for analyzing cyber system vulnerability. In this study, we propose a bi-level stochastic network interdiction model on an attack graph to enable a risk-averse, resource constrained cyber network defender to optimally deploy security countermeasures that protect against attackers with an uncertain budget. This risk- averse conditional-value-at-risk (CVaR) model minimizes a weighted sum of the expected maximum loss over all scenarios and the expected maximum loss from the most damaging attack scenarios. We develop a customized constraint and column generation algorithm to solve our model as well as several acceleration techniques to improve the computational efficiency. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the acceleration techniques enable the solution of relatively large problems within a reasonable amount of time: applying all the acceleration techniques also reduces the average computation time of the basic algorithm by 71% for 100-node graphs. Using metrics called mean-risk value of stochastic solution and value of risk-aversion, computational results suggest that our stochastic risk-averse model significantly outperforms deterministic and risk-neutral models when 1) the distribution of attacker budget is heavy-right-tailed and 2) the defender is highly risk-averse.

Bhuiyan, Tanveer H.↗

Curifactory: A research experiment manager

Curifactory is a command line tool and framework for organizing Python experiment code, configuration parameters, and results. It is an opinionated and lightweight approach to workflow management infrastructure and is primarily intended to support researchers conducting experiments on one machine. This software was developed to support the reproducibility of results for several data science projects in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Curifactory is intended to be a general framework and is not specific to machine learning or data science. It can aid in any field in which experiments are primarily computation-based studies and can be implemented in Python (e.g., high-energy physics, astronomy, computational chemistry). Here, the design emphasizes the automated caching of intermediate data analysis artifacts to speed up development involving computationally intensive tasks. It also allows for data provenance and experiment reproduction. Individual experiment runs are tracked through logs and their output reports, and entire copies of a run with all cached data and metadata can be exported for others to run using Curifactory on another machine. Curifactory experiments can either be integrated into a project from the beginning or can be written on top of an existing codebase without needing significant modification. A few important views of the Curifactory library can be seen in Figure 1.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Generators and the (Accelerated) Future

With the High Luminosity LHC coming online in the near future, event generators will need to provide very large event samples to match the experimental precision. Currently, the estimated cost to generate these events exceeds the computing budget of the LHC experiments. To address these issues, the computing efficiency of event generators need to be improved. Many different approaches are being taken to achieve this goal. I will cover the ongoing work on implementing event generators on the GPUs, machine learning the matrix element, machine learning the phase space, and minimizing the number of negative weight events.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

A Holistic Algorithmic Approach to Improving Accuracy, Robustness, and Computational Efficiency for Atmospheric Dynamics

Atmospheric weather and climate models must perform simulations very quickly to be useful. Therefore, modelers have traditionally focused on reducing computations as much as possible. However, in our new era of increasingly compute-capable hardware, data movement is now the prohibiting expense. This study examines the computational benefits of a new algorithmic approach to modeling atmospheric dynamics on scales relevant to weather and climate simulation. Rather than minimizing computations, this new approach considers the larger problem more holistically, including spatial accuracy, temporal accuracy, robustness (i.e., oscillations), on-node efficiency, and internode data transfers together at once. Numerical experiments demonstrate how computations can be strategically increased to simultaneously address each of these constraints while reducing data movement to adapt to modern accelerated hardware. The new algorithm can achieve at times up to 80% peak floating point throughput in single precision on the Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU, where the traditional approach is shown to only achieve single-digit floating point efficiency. Further, the new algorithm is twice as fast as a standard Runge--Kutta time integrator, and high-order accuracy with Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory (WENO) limiting came at less than 30% additional runtime cost on a GPU, thus increasing the accuracy per degree of freedom.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Pre-exascale accelerated application development: The ORNL Summit experience

High-performance computing (HPC) increasingly relies on heterogeneous architectures to achieve higher performance. In the Oak Ridge Leadership Facility (OLCF), Oak Ridge, TN, USA, this trend continues as its latest supercomputer, Summit, entered production in early 2019. The combination of IBM POWER9 CPU and NVIDIA V100 GPU, along with a fast NVLink2 interconnect and other latest technologies, pushes system performance to a new height and breaks the exascale barrier by certain measures. Due to Summit's powerful GPUs and much higher GPU–CPU ratio, offloading to accelerators becomes a requirement for any application, which intends to effectively use the system. To facilitate navigating a complex landscape of competing heterogeneous architectures, a collection of applications from a wide spectrum of scientific domains is selected for early adoption on Summit. In this article, the experience and lessons learned are summarized, in the hope of providing useful guidance to address new programming challenges, such as scalability, performance portability, and software maintainability, for future application development efforts on heterogeneous HPC systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Science Use Case Design Patterns for Autonomous Experiments

Connecting scientific instruments and robot-controlled laboratories with computing and data resources at the edge, the Cloud or the high-performance computing (HPC) center enables autonomous experiments, self-driving laboratories, smart manufacturing, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven design, discovery and evaluation. The Self-driven Experiments for Science / Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT) Open Architecture enables science breakthroughs using intelligent networked systems, instruments and facilities with a federated hardware/software architecture for the laboratory of the future. It relies on a novel approach, consisting of (1) science use case design patterns, (2) a system of systems architecture, and (3) a microservice architecture. This paper introduces the science use case design patterns of the INTERSECT Architecture. It describes the overall background, the involved terminology and concepts, and the pattern format and classification. It further offers an overview of the 12 defined patterns and 4 examples of patterns of 2 different pattern classes. It also provides insight into building solutions from these patterns. The target audience are computer, computational, instrument and domain science experts working in the field of autonomous experiments.

Engelmann, Christian↗

Validation of blade-resolved computational fluid dynamics for a MW-scale turbine rotor in atmospheric flow

In this study, simulation results of two different computational fluid dynamics codes, Nalu-Wind and EllipSys3D, are presented for a wind turbine rotor in complex yawed and sheared inflow. The results are compared to measurements from the DanAero experiments, to validate computed pressures and azimuthal trends. Despite different code methodologies and grid setups, the codes agree well in computed pressures and integrated forces along the blade for all blade azimuthal positions, however with some discrepancy in the very yawed case. Additionally, both codes capture well the azimuthal trends and force levels seen in measurements. Investigation into discrepancies shows that expanding grids before the rotor, lead to smearing of the wind profiles, which is likely the main cause of the differences in the results between the codes. Additionally, omission of the ground constraint cause discrepancies in relative velocity seen by the passing blade, due to an over speeding beneath the rotor.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

PIONEER: Studies of Rare Pion Decays

A next-generation rare pion decay experiment, PIONEER, is strongly motivated by several inconsistencies between Standard Model (SM) predictions and data pointing towards the potential violation of lepton flavor universality. It will probe non-SM explanations of these anomalies through sensitivity to quantum effects of new particles even if their masses are at very high scales. Measurement of the charged-pion branching ratio to electrons vs. muons $R_{e/\mu}$ is extremely sensitive to new physics effects. At present, the SM prediction for $R_{e/\mu}$ is known to 1 part in $10^4$, which is 15 times more precise than the current experimental result. An experiment reaching the theoretical accuracy will test lepton flavor universality at an unprecedented level, probing mass scales up to the PeV range. Measurement of pion beta decay, $\pi^+\to \pi^0 e^+ \nu (\gamma)$, with 3 to 10-fold improvement in sensitivity, will determine $V_{ud}$ in a theoretically pristine manner and test CKM unitarity, which is very important in light of the recently emerged tensions. In addition, various exotic rare decays involving sterile neutrinos and axions will be searched for with unprecedented sensitivity. The experiment design benefits from experience with the recent PIENU and PEN experiments at TRIUMF and the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI). Excellent energy and time resolutions, greatly increased calorimeter depth, high-speed detector and electronics response, large solid angle coverage, and complete event reconstruction are all critical aspects of the approach. The PIONEER experiment design includes a 3$\pi$ sr 25 radiation length calorimeter, a segmented low gain avalanche detector stopping target, a positron tracker, and other detectors. Using intense pion beams, and state-of-the-art instrumentation and computational resources, the experiments can be performed at the PSI ring cyclotron.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Leveraging High-throughput Computation and Machine Learning to Discover and Understand Low-Temperature Fast Oxygen Conductors (Final Technical Report)

The major goals of this work are twofold: (1) to enable transformative basic understanding of structure-property-performance relationships governing oxygen transport in oxygen-active materials and (2) facilitate the discovery and rational design of new oxygen-active materials which transport oxygen efficiently at low temperature. Transformative understanding and materials design will be accomplished by synergistically combining materials data mining, machine learning, high-throughput computation and targeted experiments.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

A knowledge gap analysis for transient CHF prediction within RELAP5-3D

Here we compare several experimental pool and flow boiling critical heat flux experiments with corresponding computational models developed with RELAP5-3D. Encompassed within this paper are several sensitivity analyses for the boiling heat transfer correlations, critical heat flux (CHF) prediction within RELAP5-3D and the thermal properties of the cladding for experiments in the Transient Reactor Test Loop (TRTL) and Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) facilities. The sensitivity analyses were consistent in determining that there is a large contribution from the critical heat flux multiplier which in this application, accounts for the effects of power transient critical heat flux. Comparison to experimental results of both the TREAT CHF-SERTTA experimental campaign and a University of New Mexico (UNM) pool boiling experimental campaign demonstrate both the under-prediction of transient CHF and nucleate boiling heat transfer. To address the gaps in knowledge regarding the transient heating effect for both boiling heat transfer and CHF prediction, we present an experimental test matrix for the TRTL facility that will isolate the power transient effect under PWR relevant operational conditions. The test matrix will incorporate 6 power pulses with a constant energy deposition and a timescale that spans over several orders of magnitude, including a steady state test with an exponential period of 10 s.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

Speeding up and reducing memory usage for scientific machine learning via mixed precision

Scientific machine learning (SciML) has emerged as a versatile approach to address complex computational science and engineering problems. Within this field, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and deep operator networks (DeepONets) stand out as the leading techniques for solving partial differential equations by incorporating both physical equations and experimental data. However, training PINNs and DeepONets require significant computational resources, including long computational times and large amounts of memory. In search of computational efficiency, training neural networks using half precision (float16) rather than the conventional single (float32) or double (float64) precision has gained substantial interest, given the inherent benefits of reduced computational time and memory consumed. However, we find that float16 cannot be applied to SciML methods, because of gradient divergence at the start of training, weight updates going to zero, and the inability to converge to a local minima. To overcome these limitations, we explore mixed precision, which is an approach that combines the float16 and float32 numerical formats to reduce memory usage and increase computational speed. Our experiments showcase that mixed precision training not only substantially decreases training times and memory demands but also maintains model accuracy. Here, we also reinforce our empirical observations with a theoretical analysis. The research has broad implications for SciML in various computational applications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

X-ray Spectroscopy Fingerprints of Pristine and Functionalized Graphene

In this work, we demonstrate how to identify and characterize the atomic structure of pristine and functionalized graphene materials from a combination of computational simulation of X-ray spectra, on the one hand, and computer-aided interpretation of experimental spectra, on the other. Despite the enormous scientific and industrial interest, the precise structure of these 2D materials remains under debate. As we show in this study, a wide range of model structures from pristine to heavily oxidized graphene can be studied and understood with the same approach. We move systematically from pristine to highly oxidized and defective computational models, and we compare the simulation results with experimental data. Comparison with experiments is valuable also the other way around; this method allows us to verify that the simulated models are close to the real samples, which in turn makes simulated structures amenable to several computational experiments. Our results provide ab initio semiquantitative information and a new platform for extended insight into the structure and chemical composition of graphene-based materials.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗