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At least 361 records · Page 20

Abstract for CRADA between National Energy Technology Laboratory and TOPTICA Photonics, Inc.

The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and Toptica Photonics (Participant) will collaborate to demonstrate the application of a frequency-comb laser (dual-comb spectroscopy) in an optically accessible rotating detonation engine (RDE). RDEs are a next-generation energy conversion technology which are well-suited to hydrogen usage and have the potential to significantly increase the efficiency of gas turbine engine power cycles. However, critical information is needed about the high temperature and pressure detonation wave, which represents an extremely challenging diagnostic environment. Dual-comb spectroscopy can be used to characterize the pressure-broadened IR absorption features at MHz rates, providing information not possible with conventional tunable diode laser (TDL) technologies. This collaboration will, for the first time, demonstrate application of dual-comb spectroscopy within the combustion annulus of a hydrogen-air RDE. If successful, the data generated will help to accelerate commercialization of RDE technologies in support of decarbonizing our nation’s energy sector.

08 HYDROGEN↗

Report on technical development in ANL for innovative creep testing and measurement

This report summarizes a research effort undertaken by Argonne National Laboratory to accelerate the development of creep data package for ASME code qualification. Progress on the fabrication of a 3-sample load train and the application of a direct current potential drop (DCPD) technique to measure large creep strains are reported. Specifically: (1) The 3-sample load train, with three sets of Linear Variable Differential Transformers (LVDT), has been fabricated and assembled. (2) A DCPD method for creep-strain measurement up to 50% has been demonstrated. The DCPD data matches very well to LVDT results, suggesting its potential application in future creep testing. The technical developments contribute towards shortening the time needed to generate a creep data package for an ASME code case of the laser powder bed fusion 316H stainless steel, an effort under the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies (AMMT) program.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Evaluating a Commercial Dynamic Line Rating Software with the National PMU Dataset

To accelerate the development of data-driven applications for power systems, the Department of Energy (DOE) supported the collection and curation of a synchrophasor dataset spanning two years of observations from transmission utilities across the US. This National PMU Dataset (NPDS) was anonymized and distributed to awardees of a DOE research grant under nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) but has also been retained at PNNL to enable further research. Agreements with data contributors prevent the data from being shared outside the organization. However, establishing a blind research validation methodology is envisioned to maximize the value proposition of the NPDS. In this validation strategy, researchers may share algorithms/software (potentially as executables to protect intellectual property) with PNNL, and PNNL will share feedback about the software’s performance on subsets of the NPDS. Such a blind methodology ensures that sensitive information about critical infrastructure remains protected, but the value of the NPDS can be extended to research beyond PNNL. Through iterative feedback, the algorithms may be tweaked to address real-world artifacts. As the NPDS data is temporally and geographically diverse, it may capture features absent in smaller datasets used during the development of the algorithm under test. This report presents lessons learned from applying the blind validation methodology to LineID™, a synchrophasor-based dynamic line rating software developed by Topolonet Corporation. Improvements made to the software through iterative feedback, limitations of the validation methodology, as well as how the limitations of the NPDS affected the evaluation process are discussed. Observations indicate that the proposed validation methodology can be valuable for evaluating other tools in the future.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Enabling real-time adaptation of machine learning models at x-ray Free Electron Laser facilities with high-speed training optimized computational hardware

The emergence of novel computational hardware is enabling a new paradigm for rapid machine learning model training. For the Department of Energy’s major research facilities, this developing technology will enable a highly adaptive approach to experimental sciences. In this manuscript we present the per-epoch and end-to-end training times for an example of a streaming diagnostic that is planned for the upcoming high-repetition rate x-ray Free Electron Laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source-II. We explore the parameter space of batch size and data parallel training across multiple Graphics Processing Units and Reconfigurable Dataflow Units. We show the landscape of training times with a goal of full model retraining in under 15 min. Although a full from scratch retraining of a model may not be required in all cases, we nevertheless present an example of the application of emerging computational hardware for adapting machine learning models to changing environments in real-time, during streaming data acquisition, at the rates expected for the data fire hoses of accelerator-based user facilities.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Evaluating Portable Parallelization Strategies for Heterogeneous Architectures in High Energy Physics

High-energy physics (HEP) experiments have developed millions of lines of code over decades that are optimized to run on traditional x86 CPU systems. However, we are seeing a rapidly increasing fraction of floating point computing power in leadership-class computing facilities and traditional data centers coming from new accelerator architectures, such as GPUs. HEP experiments are now faced with the untenable prospect of rewriting millions of lines of x86 CPU code, for the increasingly dominant architectures found in these computational accelerators. This task is made more challenging by the architecture-specific languages and APIs promoted by manufacturers such as NVIDIA, Intel and AMD. Producing multiple, architecture-specific implementations is not a viable scenario, given the available person power and code maintenance issues. The Portable Parallelization Strategies team of the HEP Center for Computational Excellence is investigating the use of Kokkos, SYCL, OpenMP, std::execution::parallel and alpaka as potential portability solutions that promise to execute on multiple architectures from the same source code, using representative use cases from major HEP experiments, including the DUNE experiment of the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility, and the ATLAS and CMS experiments of the Large Hadron Collider. This cross-cutting evaluation of portability solutions using real applications will help inform and guide the HEP community when choosing their software and hardware suites for the next generation of experimental frameworks. We present the outcomes of our studies, including performance metrics, porting challenges, API evaluations, and build system integration.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Measurements of differential charged-current cross sections on argon for electron neutrinos with final-state protons in MicroBooNE

This work presents single-differential electron-neutrino charged-current cross sections on argon measured using the MicroBooNE detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The analysis uses data recorded when the Neutrinos at the Main Injector beam was operating in both neutrino and antineutrino modes, with exposures of $2 \times 10^{20}$ and $5 \times 10^{20}$ protons on target, respectively. A selection algorithm targeting electron-neutrino charged-current interactions with at least one proton, one electron, and no pions in the final topology is used to measure differential cross sections as a function of outgoing electron energy, total visible energy, and opening angle between the electron and the most energetic proton. The interaction rate as a function of proton multiplicity is also reported. The total cross section is measured as [4.1 $\pm$ 0.4 (stat.) $\pm$ 1.2 (syst.)]$ $$\times 10^{-39} \mathrm{cm}^{2}/ \mathrm{nucleon}$. The unfolded cross-section measurements are compared to predictions from neutrino event generators commonly employed in the field. Good agreement is seen across all variables within uncertainties.

Abratenko, P. [Tufts U. (main)]↗

Evaluation of the Effect of Burnup Acceleration on UO 2 Microstructure Evolution

Accelerated fuel qualification (AFQ) is a methodology by which new nuclear fuels are developed in an accelerated time frame compared with historical fuel qualification approaches. AFQ generally relies on high-fidelity physics-based modeling and simulation tools to adequately describe fuel performance as well as on revolutionary methods to accelerate burnup accumulation and collect relevant data more quickly. This report summarizes the use of advanced fuel modeling and simulation tools to evaluate microstructures from commercially irradiated fuel and microstructures from proposed MiniFuel irradiations, in which burnup accumulation is accelerated while prototypic temperature conditions are maintained. In this milestone, we used the mesoscale fuel performance code MARMOT to model the evolution of irradiated UO 2 microstructures and their potential restructuring at high burnup. The simulation conditions were informed by BISON models of both commercially irradiated fuel and MiniFuel. A first set of simulations investigated the recrystallization behavior of fully dense microstructures and showed full recrystallization at burnups as low as 52 MWd/kgU at 950°C. However, these simulations did not account for the presence of fission gas bubbles (predicted by BISON). Therefore, a second set of simulations including fission gas bubbles was performed and indicated that at the lowest temperature considered (650°C), the porous UO 2 microstructures have the highest total Gibbs free energies and are likely to recrystallize earlier than higher temperature cases (800 and 950°C), which agrees with high-burnup fuel characterization data. The results also showed that at lower temperature (650°C), the total free energies of the PWR fuel and MiniFuel microstructures are not significantly different. However, at the highest temperature (950°C), MiniFuel microstructures have a lower free energy than that of the PWR fuel microstructure. The competing effects between the temperature-dependent grain nucleation rate and the reduction of the free energy of the microstructure at higher temperature as a result of diffusion indicated that restructuring may occur at even higher temperatures than those considered in this study. In addition to the microstructure evolution modeling efforts, the burnup gradient across a single fuel specimen was also considered. This evaluation was for the VXF-15 position of the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) using the code suite HFIRCON, which was developed to automate the workflow for evaluating targets and fuel as they are irradiated in HFIR. The burnup gradient evaluation showed a dependence on both the axial and radial locations within the specimen, with a maximum difference of 1.7 between the inner and outermost radial layers. This relationship was further supported by considering the fission product speciation with respect to location within the specimen, which showed a higher concentration of 239 Pu, 240 Pu, and 241 Pu on the outer radial locations of the specimen than the center. The findings of the burnup and speciation evaluation show that some amount of self-shielding is occurring in the specimen when irradiated in the high-flux environment of HFIR; however, this impact is more pronounced for natural uranium when compared to 6% enrichment due to the higher ratio of 238 U in the specimen. Further analyses are required to understand the sensitivity of this gradient to spatial mesh and enrichment of the specimen.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

AI-Ready Semantic Infrastructure for CEBAF: From CED to PALS Knowledge Graphs

JLab and PNNL are jointly developing an AI-ready data ecosystem that exposes the Continuous Electron Beam Acceleration Facility’s (CEBAF’s) operational configuration, lattice description, and control-system channels to agentic optimization frameworks through a standards-based semantic layer. The effort integrates the existing facility-specific CEBAF Element Database (CED) with extensions of the emerging facility-agnostic Particle Accelerator Lattice Standard (PALS) to produce a knowledge graph (KG) containing coherent, machine-interpretable views of devices, signals, and regions. With this KG, CEBAF’s setpoints, readbacks, and device hierarchies become queryable using a uniform declarative graph query language (e.g., Neo4j Cypher), providing intents and inspectable semantics suitable for agentic control. The resulting graph-backed interfaces will allow autonomous agents to retrieve authoritative machine configurations, reason over device- and signal-level relationships, and execute tuning and diagnostic workflows without bespoke CEBAF-specific logic, thereby delivering a scalable pathway from operational data to trustworthy agentic accelerator tuning frameworks.

Zhang, He [Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator F↗

Multiscale Modeling of Radiation Damage in UO 2 under Accelerated Burnup Conditions

Accelerated fuel qualification (AFQ) is a methodology by which new nuclear fuels are developed in an accelerated time frame compared with historical fuel qualification approaches. AFQ generally relies on high-fidelity physics-based modeling and simulation tools to adequately describe fuel performance as well as on revolutionary methods to accelerate burnup accumulation and collect relevant data more quickly. This report summarizes the use of advanced fuel modeling and simulation tools to evaluate microstructures from commercially irradiated fuel and microstructures from proposed MiniFuel irradiations, in which burnup accumulation is accelerated while prototypic temperature conditions are maintained. In this milestone, we used the mesoscale fuel performance code MARMOT to model the evolution of irradiated UO 2 microstructures and their potential restructuring at high burnup. The simulation conditions were informed by BISON models of both commercially irradiated fuel and MiniFuel.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

American Heart Association Protein Atlas Portal for Accelerated Drug Discovery

The American Heart Association's Protein Atlas Data Portal is a cutting-edge, open-source atlas of the structural determinants of the binding of drugs to (all of) their target proteins as an unbiased means to accelerate drug discovery. The portal will provide researchers with access to comprehensive data that can help increase the selection of effective drugs and cut the time-to-market of new drugs by half.

drug targets↗

Reconstruction of beam parameters and betatron radiation spectra measured with a Compton spectrometer

The photon flux resulting from high-energy electron beam interactions with high-field systems, such as those found in the upcoming FACET-II experiments at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, yields deep insight into the electron beam’s underlying dynamics during the interaction. However, extracting this information is an intricate process. To demonstrate how to approach this challenge using modern methods, this paper utilizes simulated data that models plasma wakefield acceleration-derived betatron radiation in experiments to determine reliable methods of reconstructing key beam and beam-plasma interaction properties. For betatron radiation measurements, translating the observed 200⁢ keV to 30⁢ MeV photon double-differential energy-angle spectra obtained from an advanced Compton spectrometer requires testing multiple methods to optimize the pipeline from its response to incident electron beam information. The paper compares maximum likelihood estimation and machine learning to refine the translation of photon spectra into precise electron beam metrics, such as spot size, energy, and emittance, enhancing the understanding of beam behavior within these dense, high-field environments. We also introduce machine learning and the expected maximization algorithm to reconstruct the primary photon spectrum, employing a multilayer neural network for regression analysis of the energy and angle spectra. With appropriate modifications, the advanced methods reproduce relevant incident beam parameters with high accuracy, even for beam sizes in the <10 μ⁢m range. This capacity is critical to understanding intense beam propagation and its optimization in plasma.

Beam code development & simulation techniques↗

Refining HPCToolkit for application performance analysis at exascale

As part of the US Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP), Rice University has been refining its HPCToolkit performance tools to better support measurement and analysis of applications executing on exascale supercomputers. To efficiently collect performance measurements of GPU-accelerated applications, HPCToolkit employs novel non-blocking data structures to communicate performance measurements between tool threads and application threads. To attribute performance information in detail to source lines, loop nests, and inlined call chains, HPCToolkit performs parallel analysis of large CPU and GPU binaries involved in the execution of an exascale application to rapidly recover mappings between machine instructions and source code. To analyze terabytes of performance measurements gathered during executions at exascale, HPCToolkit employs distributed-memory parallelism, multithreading, sparse data structures, and out-of-core streaming analysis algorithms. To support interactive exploration of profiles up to terabytes in size, HPCToolkit’s hpcviewer graphical user interface uses out-of-core methods to visualize performance data. The result of these efforts is that HPCToolkit now supports collection, analysis, and presentation of profiles and traces of GPU-accelerated applications at exascale. These improvements have enabled HPCToolkit to efficiently measure, analyze and explore terabytes of performance data for executions using as many as 64K MPI ranks and 64K GPU tiles on ORNL’s Frontier supercomputer. HPCToolkit’s support for measurement and analysis of GPU-accelerated applications has been employed to study a collection of open-science applications developed as part of ECP. This paper reports on these experiences, which provided insight into opportunities for tuning applications, strengths and weaknesses of HPCToolkit itself, as well as unexpected behaviors in executions at exascale.

Adhianto, Laksono↗

Accelerating End-to-End Deep Learning for Particle Reconstruction using CMS open data

Machine learning algorithms are gaining ground in high energy physics for applications in particle and event identification, physics analysis, detector reconstruction, simulation and trigger. Currently, most data-analysis tasks at LHC experiments benefit from the use of machine learning. Incorporating these computational tools in the experimental framework presents new challenges. This paper reports on the implementation of the end-to-end deep learning with the CMS software framework and the scaling of the end-to-end deep learning with multiple GPUs. The end-to-end deep learning technique combines deep learning algorithms and low-level detector representation for particle and event identification. We demonstrate the end-to-end implementation on a top quark benchmark and perform studies with various hardware architectures including single and multiple GPUs and Google TPU.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Extending Component Lifetime And Improving Inverter Reliability (ECLAIIR)

Inverter reliability remains one of the most persistent challenges limiting the performance, availability, and economic viability of utility‑scale photovoltaic (PV) plants. Industry data consistently show that inverters account for the highest share of corrective maintenance events and unplanned outages across PV fleets. These failures result in energy losses, increased O&M costs, and reduced confidence in long‑term solar asset performance. Motivated by these challenges, this project—Extending Component Lifetime and Improving Inverter Reliability (ECLAIIR)—was undertaken to systematically investigate inverter degradation and failure mechanisms, develop predictive maintenance capabilities, and establish data‑driven pathways to improve service life and reduce the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) for large‑scale PV systems. The primary goal of the project was to identify pre‑failure signatures in string inverters using both lab‑based accelerated lifetime testing and field‑based data and to develop predictive maintenance algorithms that can anticipate inverter faults before they occur. Through collaboration with inverter testing laboratory, solar PV plant owner, and failure‑analysis experts, the project advanced the technical understanding of inverter reliability. By instrumenting inverters with thermistors, humidity sensors, power‑quality meters, and acoustic sensors, the research established how multiple sensing modalities can reliably detect deviations from normal behavior hours to days before failure. These findings substantially enhance scientific understanding of inverter failure kinetics and provide the PV industry with the most comprehensive cross‑OEM characterization of early‑stage failure indicators reported to date. Technically, the project demonstrated the effectiveness of predictive maintenance by developing and validating the PreDICT (Predictive Diagnostics of PV Inverters Using Condition Monitoring and Trend Analysis) framework—a multi‑layer diagnostic architecture combining peer‑to‑peer analytics, historical trend modeling, and advanced machine‑learning techniques such as the Sequential Conditional Variational Autoencoder (SCVAE). This predictive model achieved more than 90% accuracy in detecting pre‑failure conditions and provided up to four days of lead time before inverter failure in field scenarios. Economically, the project’s LCOE analysis showed that predictive maintenance can reduce lifetime energy losses and minimize corrective maintenance interventions. Modeling indicated that, depending on inverter failure rates and replacement timelines, predictive maintenance can significantly reduce LCOE impacts associated with inverter downtime: from as high as 19.4% under conventional maintenance strategies to 0.1%–10.17% when predictive analytics are adopted. These results confirm that predictive maintenance is both technically feasible and economically advantageous for utilities and plant operators. The project’s findings also have broad public benefit. By improving inverter reliability and reducing downtime, predictive maintenance directly increases electricity generation from existing PV assets. Enhanced reliability lowers operational costs for utilities, which can translate over time into lower energy costs for consumers. Furthermore, the project’s technical publications, conference presentations, and industry workshops ensure that knowledge gained is shared broadly across the solar industry, supporting workforce development and enabling utilities of all sizes to adopt modern asset‑health monitoring practices. The retrofitting case study and service‑life prediction framework further support informed decision‑making for aging PV fleets, helping operators extend system life and reduce electronic waste. In summary, the ECLAIIR project significantly advanced the state of knowledge on inverter degradation, demonstrated the technical and economic value of predictive maintenance, and delivered actionable tools and insights that support more reliable, cost‑effective, and sustainable PV plant operation. The outcomes of this project will continue to inform utility practices, guide inverter design improvements, and strengthen the long‑term performance of solar assets nationwide.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Artificial Intelligence for Multiphysics Nuclear Design Optimization with Additive Manufacturing

The geometric flexibility of additively manufactured metals and ceramics generates a very large and open design space that requires advanced modeling and simulation tools for physics simulations and the rigorous definition of design problems. This effort deploys artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to understand the design space, evaluate potential designs, and more efficiently generate optimized results. The Transformational Challenge Reactor (TCR) program is leveraging advances in several scientific areas—including materials, manufacturing, sensors and control systems, data analytics, and high-fidelity modeling and simulation—to accelerate the design, manufacturing, qualification, and deployment of advanced nuclear energy systems. Through a manufacturing-informed design approach, the TCR program seeks to integrate digital data for rapid nuclear innovation; accelerate the adoption of advances in manufacturing, materials, and computational sciences for nuclear applications; and dramatically reduce deployment costs and timelines for new nuclear reactor technologies. This report documents efforts under the TCR program to leverage advanced modeling and simulation techniques driven by AI/ML algorithms on high-performance computing (HPC) systems to yield more optimized TCR core designs. A multiphysics ML surrogate model was developed to run on the HPC architectures. The surrogate model is trained on high-fidelity simulation data of coupled neutronics and thermofluidics and is used to quickly evaluate thousands of candidate core designs in parallel, which drives the evolution of the cooling channel shapes to minimize temperature peaking and material stress. Outcomes from these activities provide design information and feedback into the core design efforts.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Evaluating Spatial Accelerator Architectures with Tiled Matrix-Matrix Multiplication.

There is a growing interest in custom spatial accelerators for machine learning applications. These accelerators employ a spatial array of processing elements (PEs) interacting via custom buffer hierarchies and networks-on-chip. The efficiency of these accelerators comes from employing optimized dataflow (i.e., spatial/temporal partitioning of data across the PEs and fine-grained scheduling) strategies to optimize data reuse. The focus of this work is to evaluate these accelerator architectures using a tiled general matrix-matrix multiplication (GEMM) kernel. To do so, we develop a framework that finds optimized mappings (dataflow and tile sizes) for a tiled GEMM for a given spatial accelerator and workload combination, leveraging an analytical cost model for runtime and energy. Finally, our evaluations over five spatial accelerators demonstrate that the tiled GEMM mappings systematically generated by our framework achieve high performance on various GEMM workloads and accelerators.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Evaluating Spatial Accelerator Architectures with Tiled Matrix-Matrix Multiplication

There is a growing interest in custom spatial accelerators for machine learning applications. These accelerators employ a spatial array of processing elements (PEs) interacting via custom buffer hierarchies and networks-on-chip. The efficiency of these accelerators comes from employing optimized dataflow (i.e., spatial/temporal partitioning of data across the PEs and fine-grained scheduling) strategies to optimize data reuse. The focus of this work is to evaluate these accelerator architectures using a tiled general matrix-matrix multiplication (GEMM) kernel. To do so, we develop a framework that finds optimized mappings (dataflow and tile sizes) for a tiled GEMM for a given spatial accelerator and workload combination, leveraging an analytical cost model for runtime and energy. Our evaluations over five spatial accelerators demonstrate that the tiled GEMM mappings systematically generated by our framework achieve high performance on various GEMM workloads and accelerators.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Digging a little deeper: characterizing three new extreme ULX candidates

ABSTRACT A prime motivation for compiling catalogues of any celestial X-ray source is to increase our numbers of rare subclasses. In this work, we take a recent multimission catalogue of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) and look for hitherto poorly-studied ULX candidates that are luminous ($L_{\rm X} \ge 10^{40}\,{\rm erg\,s}^{-1}$), bright ($f_{\rm X} \ge 5 \times 10^{-13}\,{\rm erg\,cm}^{-2}\,{\rm s}^{-1}$), and have archival XMM–Newton data. We speculate that this luminosity regime may be ideal for identifying new pulsating ULXs (PULXs), given that the majority of known PULXs reach similar high luminosities. We find three sources that match our criteria and study them using archival data. We find 4XMM J165251.5−591503 to possess a bright and variable Galactic optical/IR counterpart, and so conclude it is very likely to be a foreground interloper. 4XMM J091948.8−121429 does appear to be an excellent ULX candidate associated with the dwarf irregular galaxy PGC 26378, but has only one detection to date with low data quality. The best data set belongs to 4XMM J112054.3+531040 which we find to be a moderately variable, spectrally hard (Γ ≈ 1.4) X-ray source located in a spiral arm of NGC 3631. Its spectral hardness is similar to known PULXs, but no pulsations are detected by accelerated pulsation searches in the available data. We discuss whether other missions provide objects for similar studies and compare this method to others suggested for identifying good PULX candidates.

Roberts, T. P. (ORCID:0000000182526337)↗