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At least 37 records · Page 2

Performance Monitoring of Distributed Data Processing Systems

Test and checkout systems are essential components in ensuring safety and reliability of aircraft and related systems for space missions. A variety of systems, developed over several years, are in use at the NASA/KSC. Many of these systems are configured as distributed data processing systems with the functionality spread over several multiprocessor nodes interconnected through networks. To be cost-effective, a system should take the least amount of resource and perform a given testing task in the least amount of time. There are two aspects of performance evaluation: monitoring and benchmarking. While monitoring is valuable to system administrators in operating and maintaining, benchmarking is important in designing and upgrading computer-based systems. These two aspects of performance evaluation are the foci of this project. This paper first discusses various issues related to software, hardware, and hybrid performance monitoring as applicable to distributed systems, and specifically to the TCMS (Test Control and Monitoring System). Next, a comparison of several probing instructions are made to show that the hybrid monitoring technique developed by the NIST (National Institutes for Standards and Technology) is the least intrusive and takes only one-fourth of the time taken by software monitoring probes. In the rest of the paper, issues related to benchmarking a distributed system have been discussed and finally a prescription for developing a micro-benchmark for the TCMS has been provided.

Ojha, Anand K.↗

NAS Parallel Benchmarks I/O Version 2.4

We describe a benchmark problem, based on the Block-Tridiagonal (BT) problem of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB), which is used to test the output capabilities of high-performance computing systems, especially parallel systems. We also present a source code implementation of the benchmark, called NPBIO2.4-MPI, based on the MPI implementation of NPB, using a variety of ways to write the computed solutions to file.

Wong, Parkson↗

Multi-Core Processor Memory Contention Benchmark Analysis Case Study

Multi-core processors dominate current mainframe, server, and high performance computing (HPC) systems. This paper provides synthetic kernel and natural benchmark results from an HPC system at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center that illustrate the performance impacts of multi-core (dual- and quad-core) vs. single core processor systems. Analysis of processor design, application source code, and synthetic and natural test results all indicate that multi-core processors can suffer from significant memory subsystem contention compared to similar single-core processors.

Simon, Tyler↗

Random circuit block-encoded matrix and a proposal of quantum LINPACK benchmark

The LINPACK benchmark reports the performance of a computer for solving a system of linear equations with dense random matrices. Although this task was not designed with a real application directly in mind, the LINPACK benchmark has been used to define the list of TOP500 supercomputers since the debut of the list in 1993. We propose that a similar benchmark, called the quantum LINPACK benchmark, could be used to measure the whole machine performance of quantum computers. The success of the quantum LINPACK benchmark should be viewed as the minimal requirement for a quantum computer to perform a useful task of solving linear algebra problems, such as linear systems of equations. We propose an input model called the Random Circuit Block-Encoded Matrix (RACBEM), which is a proper generalization of a dense random matrix in the quantum setting. The RACBEM model is efficient to be implemented on a quantum computer and can be designed to optimally adapt to any given quantum architecture, with relying on a black-box quantum compiler. Besides solving linear systems, the RACBEM model can be used to perform a variety of linear algebra tasks relevant to many physical applications, such as computing spectral measures, time series generated by a Hamiltonian simulation, and thermal averages of the energy. We implement these linear algebra operations on IBM Q quantum devices as well as quantum virtual machines, and demonstrate their performance in solving scientific computing problems.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Cloud-Based Numerical Weather Prediction for Near Real-Time Forecasting and Disaster Response

The use of cloud computing resources continues to grow within the public and private sector components of the weather enterprise as users become more familiar with cloud‐computing concepts, and competition among service providers continues to reduce costs and other barriers to entry. Cloud resources can also provide capabilities similar to high‐performance computing environments, supporting multi‐node systems required for near real‐time, regional weather predictions. Referred to as "Infrastructure as a Service", or IaaS, the use of cloud-based computing hardware in an on‐demand payment system allows for rapid deployment of a modeling system in environments lacking access to a large, supercomputing infrastructure. Use of IaaS capabilities to support regional weather prediction may be of particular interest to developing countries that have not yet established large supercomputing resources, but would otherwise benefit from a regional weather forecasting capability. Recently, collaborators from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and Ames Research Center have developed a scripted, on‐demand capability for launching the NOAA/NWS Science and Training Resource Center (STRC) Environmental Modeling System (EMS), which includes pre‐compiled binaries of the latest version of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The WRF‐EMS provides scripting for downloading appropriate initial and boundary conditions from global models, along with higher‐resolution vegetation, land surface, and sea surface temperature data sets provided by the NASA Short‐term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center. This presentation will provide an overview of the modeling system capabilities and benchmarks performed on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. In addition, the presentation will discuss future opportunities to deploy the system in support of weather prediction in developing countries supported by NASA's SERVIR Project, which provides capacity building activities in environmental monitoring and prediction across a growing number of regional hubs throughout the world. Capacity‐building applications that extend numerical weather prediction to developing countries are intended to provide near real‐time applications to benefit public health, safety, and economic interests, but may have a greater impact during disaster events by providing a source for local predictions of weather‐related hazards, or impacts that local weather events may have during the recovery phase.

Molthan, Andrew↗

Computers for real time flight simulation: A market survey

An extensive computer market survey was made to determine those available systems suitable for current and future flight simulation studies at Ames Research Center. The primary requirement is for the computation of relatively high frequency content (5 Hz) math models representing powered lift flight vehicles. The Rotor Systems Research Aircraft (RSRA) was used as a benchmark vehicle for computation comparison studies. The general nature of helicopter simulations and a description of the benchmark model are presented, and some of the sources of simulation difficulties are examined. A description of various applicable computer architectures is presented, along with detailed discussions of leading candidate systems and comparisons between them.

Bekey, G. A.↗

Immortal rays: Rethinking random ray neutron transport on GPU architectures

The Random Ray Method (TRRM) is a recently developed adaptation of the Method of Characteristics for neutral particle transport simulations. TRRM has demonstrated excellent performance on 3D nuclear reactor benchmark problems using CPU-based compute systems. When porting to GPU-based systems, however, new performance challenges arise that are unique to processors targeting massive fine-grained parallelism. For smaller problems, or for large problems that are domain decomposed across many computational nodes, the problem size per node has insufficient parallelism to saturate GPU node resources, thus greatly limiting speedup. In this study, we report on a newly developed “immortal ray” variant of TRRM. Here, the immortal ray technique exposes significantly more fine-grained parallelism by fundamentally reformulating the numerical details of ray discretization, resulting in performance tradeoffs with significant overall benefit on GPUs. For very small 2D simulation problems we found the new immortal ray variant allowed for up to a 4.4x speedup when run on a single GPU. For larger 3D simulation problems we found the new variant improved strong scaling by 3x when run on the Summit supercomputer.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Experimental program for real gas flow code validation at NASA Ames Research Center

The experimental program for validating real gas hypersonic flow codes at NASA Ames is described. Ground based test facilities used include ballistic ranges, shock tubes and shock tunnels, arcjet facilities and heated air hypersonic wind tunnels. Also included are large scale computer systems for kinetic theory simulations and benchmark code solutions. Flight tests consist of the Aeroassist Flight Experiment, the Space Shuttle, Project Fire 2, and planetary probes such as Galileo, Pioneer Venus and PAET.

Deiwert, George S.↗

Experimental program for real gas flow code validation at NASA Ames Research Center

The experimental program for validating real gas hypersonic flow codes at NASA Ames Rsearch Center is described. Ground-based test facilities used include ballistic ranges, shock tubes and shock tunnels, arc jet facilities and heated-air hypersonic wind tunnels. Also included are large-scale computer systems for kinetic theory simulations and benchmark code solutions. Flight tests consist of the Aeroassist Flight Experiment, the Space Shuttle, Project Fire 2, and planetary probes such as Galileo, Pioneer Venus, and PAET.

Deiwert, George S.↗

Climbing the Summit and Pushing the Frontier of Mixed Precision Benchmarks at Extreme Scale

The rise of machine learning (ML) applications and their use of mixed precision to perform interesting science are driving forces behind AI for science on HPC. The convergence of ML and HPC with mixed precision offers the possibility of transformational changes in computational science. The HPL-AI benchmark is designed to measure the performance of mixed precision arithmetic as opposed to the HPL benchmark which measures double precision performance. Pushing the limits of systems at extreme scale is nontrivial -little public literature explores optimization of mixed precision computations at this scale. In this work, we demonstrate how to scale up the HPL-AI benchmark on the pre-exascale Summit and exascale Frontier systems at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) with a cross-platform design. We present the implementation, performance results, and a guideline of optimization strategies employed for delivering portable performance on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs at extreme scale.

Lu, Hao↗

Scalable Risk Assessment of Rare Events in Power Systems With Uncertain Wind Generation and Loads

Risk assessment of rare events has become increasingly important in power system planning and operation with the increasing integration of renewable energy and the presence of system uncertainties. However, quantifying the risk posed by rare events via the traditional method, i.e., Monte Carlo sampling (MCS), incurs substantial computational expense stemming from the vast ensemble of power flow simulations. To accelerate the assessment, this paper proposes a Deep Neural Network (DNN)-kernelized vector-valued Gaussian Process (VVGP) approach with excellent computational efficiency while maintaining high accuracy. Consequently, serving as a surrogate model for the power flow solver, the DNN-kernelized VVGP enables significantly faster but accurate risk assessment compared to the power flow solver. The developed surrogate model evaluates low-order N - k events that contain more than 90% instances by adeptly capturing the topological features while the high-order N - k events are assessed via a power flow solver, thereby striking a balance between computational efficiency and uncertainty quantification accuracy. Moreover, the model incorporates a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to resample concerning low-probability tail events to counteract the biases potentially introduced during the DNN-kernelized VVGP evaluations. Simulations conducted on the modified IEEE 24-bus, 118-bus, and European 1354-bus systems demonstrate that the proposed method maintains the accuracy benchmark set by MCS while significantly reducing computational demands in large-scale power systems as compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

SCALE 6.3 Validation: Radiation Shielding

Safe and reliable use of scientific and engineering computer codes requires validation for the types of applications in which they will be used. An example in the nuclear reactor engineering and licensing field is radiation transport employed in shielding analyses. The validity of computer codes for shielding applications is demonstrated in this report for SCALE version 6.3.0. Representative benchmarks corresponding to shielding analyses are selected for the validation study. Typical measurement results analyzed from these benchmarks include neutron fluxes, detector count rates, detector energy response functions, neutron and gamma dose rates, neutron activation rates and activities, neutron leakage fluxes, and skyshine dose rates. Thousands of points of comparison between measurement and calculation are presented in this work. Other than rare outliers typically explained by either a lack of information or large uncertainties in the experiment conditions, material, or dimensions, the Monaco with Automated Variance Reduction using Importance Calculations (MAVRIC) radiation transport computer code with built-in variance reduction methods distributed with the SCALE computer code system agrees well with the measurement results. In selected benchmarks, MAVRIC is also compared to Monte Carlo N- Particle® (MCNP® ) 1 calculations. Both computer codes generally agree well within the estimated uncertainties. With the release of SCALE 6.3.0, Shift was integrated as an alternative transport solver in MAVRIC, denoted MAVRIC-Shift. Although the traditional MAVRIC using Monaco was used primarily in this validation study, many results have also been generated using MAVRIC-Shift. Agreement between MAVRIC-Monaco and MAVRIC-Shift is generally very good. The benchmarks presented in this report were obtained from reliable sources such as the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project Handbook, the Shielding Integral Benchmark Archive & Database, and other shielding validation work found in the literature. Additional datapoints and benchmarks will be added to future versions of this report to expand the shielding validation suite.

61 RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY↗

OpenMxP-Opensource Mixed Precision Computing

This is an opensource library for benchmarking the system's GPU mixed precision capabilities. The software calculates solution of the system of linear equation in 64bit accuracy using mixed precision techniques and iterative refinement. Original benchmark designed is done by ICL, and it is name HPL-MxP (HPL-AI)

Lu, Hao↗

Practical Implementation of GPU-based Computing at the Grid Edge for Resilience Scenarios

This paper presents a practical implementation of GPU-accelerated computing at the grid edge to enhance power system resilience through next-generation smart meters. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) systems rely predominantly on centralized processing architectures, which limit real-time response capabilities during grid disturbances. This work proposes the integration of GPU-enabled computational platforms directly within smart meter to enable local execution support for power system analytics, fault detection algorithms, and optimization routines. The proposed framework uses the Julia programming language to leverage highperformance parallel computing capabilities while maintaining code portability and development efficiency. We use two experimental scenarios to benchmark the computational feasibility of this approach: sparse linear system solutions representative of power flow analyses, and multi-stage production cost simulations incorporating unit commitment and economic dispatch operations. Results demonstrate that computationally intensive power system algorithms, such as those supporting resilience scenario calculations, can be effectively executed at the distribution edge using commercially available embedded GPU hardware. Keywords—GPU acceleration, edge computing, smart meters, grid resilience, AMI, resilience.

De Souza, Reubun [School of Electrical Engineering↗

Practical Scalability of LuGo: Benchmarking the HHL Algorithm Using an Enhanced QPE Algorithm

The HHL algorithm is a prominent quantum algorithm that offers exponential speedup over its classical counterparts for solving a system of linear equations. However, synthesizing and executing HHL circuits demand significant computational resources from both classical and quantum systems. In this paper, we benchmark the HHL algorithm using the optimized Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) generation algorithm, LuGo \cite{lu2025lugo}, to enhance its scalability and efficiency. We leverage the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's (NERSC) Perlmutter supercomputer to evaluate the scalability of generating HHL circuits and to measure the time to simulate the generated circuits. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the algorithm's performance on various state-of-the-art superconducting and trapped-ion quantum devices, including studies on qubit connectivity, fidelity comparisons, and hardware compatibility and robustness. Our results offer preliminary insights into potential practical applications of the HHL algorithm enabled by LuGo and the performance of various types of quantum hardware.

Lu, Chao [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000179346933)↗

Comparison of 250 MHz R10K Origin 2000 and 400 MHz Origin 2000 Using NAS Parallel Benchmarks

This report describes results of benchmark tests on Steger, a 250 MHz Origin 2000 system with R10K processors, currently installed at the NASA Ames National Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility. For comparison purposes, the tests were also run on Lomax, a 400 MHz Origin 2000 with R12K processors. The BT, LU, and SP application benchmarks in the NAS Parallel Benchmark Suite and the kernel benchmark FT were chosen to measure system performance. Having been written to measure performance on Computational Fluid Dynamics applications, these benchmarks are assumed appropriate to represent the NAS workload. Since the NAS runs both message passing (MPI) and shared-memory, compiler directive type codes, both MPI and OpenMP versions of the benchmarks were used. The MPI versions used were the latest official release of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, version 2.3. The OpenMP versions used were PBN3b2, a beta version that is in the process of being released. NPB 2.3 and PBN3b2 are technically different benchmarks, and NPB results are not directly comparable to PBN results.

Turney, Raymond D.↗

High-Resolution Simulations of Geological CO 2 Injection: Application to the SPE11 Benchmark

Geological carbon sequestration (GCS) will play a critical role in decarbonization and in facilitating the transition to clean energy systems. Because CO 2 is highly mobile, ensuring its safe and permanent injection into subsurface geological formations involves monitoring over larger spatial domains and longer time periods than is typical for hydrocarbon reservoirs. This can benefit from simulation tools capable of modeling key CO 2 trapping mechanisms, particularly those optimized for speed and scalability on high-performance computing systems. Using isothermal versions of the SPE11B and SPE11C benchmark cases, we conduct a mesh refinement study simulating CO 2 injection into kilometer-scale rock formations at centimeter resolution with the GEOS open-source simulation framework. We focus on how mesh refinement improves the accuracy of convective mixing in both 2D and 3D simulations. The computational costs associated with achieving a converged solution highlight the need for predictive upscaling techniques. A systematic performance scaling analysis—including both central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) architectures—complements the “Results” section.

Geosciences↗

Benchmarking hypercube hardware and software

It was long a truism in computer systems design that balanced systems achieve the best performance. Message passing parallel processors are no different. To quantify the balance of a hypercube design, an experimental methodology was developed and the associated suite of benchmarks was applied to several existing hypercubes. The benchmark suite includes tests of both processor speed in the absence of internode communication and message transmission speed as a function of communication patterns.

Grunwald, Dirk C.↗