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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 469 records · Page 26

A Petascale Non-Hydrostatic Atmospheric Dynamical Core in the HOMME Framework

The High-Order Method Modeling Environment (HOMME) is a framework for building scalable, conserva- tive atmospheric models for climate simulation and general atmospheric-modeling applications. Its spatial discretizations are based on Spectral-Element (SE) and Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods. These are local methods employing high-order accurate spectral basis-functions that have been shown to perform well on massively parallel supercomputers at any resolution and scale particularly well at high resolutions. HOMME provides the framework upon which the CAM-SE community atmosphere model dynamical-core is constructed. In its current incarnation, CAM-SE employs the hydrostatic primitive-equations (PE) of motion, which limits its resolution to simulations coarser than 0.1 per grid cell. The primary objective of this project is to remove this resolution limitation by providing HOMME with the capabilities needed to build nonhydrostatic models that solve the compressible Euler/Navier-Stokes equations.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Simulation of dilute polymeric fluids in a three-dimensional contraction using a multiscale FENE model

The multiscale FENE model is applied to a 3D square-square contraction flow problem. For this purpose, the stochastic Brownian configuration field method (BCF) has been coupled with our fully parallelized three-dimensional Navier-Stokes solver NaSt3DGPF. The robustness of the BCF method enables the numerical simulation of high Deborah number flows for which most macroscopic methods suffer from stability issues. The results of our simulations are compared with that of experimental measurements from literature and show a very good agreement. In particular, flow phenomena such as a strong vortex enhancement, streamline divergence and a flow inversion for highly elastic flows are reproduced. Due to their computational complexity, our simulations require massively parallel computations. Using a domain decomposition approach with MPI, the implementation achieves excellent scale-up results for up to 128 processors.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Radiative signatures of the relativistic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability

We present a particle-in-cell simulation of the relativistic Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability (KHI) that for the first time delivers angularly resolved radiation spectra of the particle dynamics during the formation of the KHI. This enables studying the formation of the KHI with unprecedented spatial, angular and spectral resolution. Our results are of great importance for understanding astrophysical jet formation and comparable plasma phenomena by relating the particle motion observed in the KHI to its radiation signature. The innovative methods presented here on the implementation of the particle-in-cell algorithm on graphic processing units can be directly adapted to any many-core parallelization of the particle-mesh method. With these methods we see a peak performance of 7.176 PFLOP/s (double-precision) plus 1.449 PFLOP/s (single-precision), an efficiency of 96% when weakly scaling from 1 to 18432 nodes, an efficiency of 68.92% and a speed up of 794 (ideal: 1152) when strongly scaling from 16 to 18432 nodes.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Compressed basis GMRES on high-performance graphics processing units

Krylov methods provide a fast and highly parallel numerical tool for the iterative solution of many large-scale sparse linear systems. To a large extent, the performance of practical realizations of these methods is constrained by the communication bandwidth in current computer architectures, motivating the investigation of sophisticated techniques to avoid, reduce, and/or hide the message-passing costs (in distributed platforms) and the memory accesses (in all architectures). This article leverages Ginkgo’s memory accessor in order to integrate a communication-reduction strategy into the (Krylov) GMRES solver that decouples the storage format (i.e., the data representation in memory) of the orthogonal basis from the arithmetic precision that is employed during the operations with that basis. Given that the execution time of the GMRES solver is largely determined by the memory accesses, the cost of the datatype transforms can be mostly hidden, resulting in the acceleration of the iterative step via a decrease in the volume of bits being retrieved from memory. Together with the special properties of the orthonormal basis (whose elements are all bounded by 1), this paves the road toward the aggressive customization of the storage format, which includes some floating-point as well as fixed-point formats with mild impact on the convergence of the iterative process. We develop a high-performance implementation of the “compressed basis GMRES” solver in the Ginkgo sparse linear algebra library using a large set of test problems from the SuiteSparse Matrix Collection. We demonstrate robustness and performance advantages on a modern NVIDIA V100 graphics processing unit (GPU) of up to 50% over the standard GMRES solver that stores all data in IEEE double-precision.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

PASTA: A Parallel Sparse Tensor Algorithm Benchmark Suite

Tensor methods have gained increasingly attention from various applications, including machine learning, quantum chemistry, healthcare analytics, social network analysis, data mining, and signal processing, to name a few. Sparse tensors and their algorithms become critical to further improve the performance of these methods and enhance the interpretability of their output. This work presents a sparse tensor algorithm benchmark suite (PASTA) for single- and multi-core CPUs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark suite for sparse tensor world. PASTA targets on: 1) helping application users to evaluate different computer systems using its representative computational workloads; 2) providing insights to better utilize existed computer architecture and systems and inspiration for the future design. This benchmark suite will be publicly released.

HPC, sparse tensor, benchmark↗

Scaling Semantic Graph Databases in Size and Performance

In this paper we present SGEM, a full software system for accelerating large-scale semantic graph databases on commodity clusters. Unlike current approaches, SGEM addresses semantic graph databases by only employing graph methods at all the levels of the stack. On one hand, this allows exploiting the space efficiency of graph data structures and the inherent parallelism of graph algorithms. These features adapt well to the increasing system memory and core counts of modern commodity clusters. On the other hand, however, these systems are optimized for regular computation and batched data transfers, while graph methods usually are irregular and generate fine-grained data accesses with poor spatial and temporal locality. Our framework comprises a SPARQL to data parallel C compiler, a library of parallel graph methods and a custom, multithreaded runtime system. We introduce our stack, motivate its advantages with respect to other solutions and show how we solved the challenges posed by irregular behaviors. We present the result of our software stack on the Berlin SPARQL benchmarks with datasets up to 10 billion triples (a triple corresponds to a graph edge), demonstrating scaling in dataset size and in performance as more nodes are added to the cluster.

Aggregation↗

Theoretical Plasma Physics

Lattice Boltzmann algorithms are a mesoscopic method to solve problems in nonlinear physics which are highly parallelized – unlike the direction solution of the original problem. These methods are applied to both fluid and magnetohydrodynamic turbulence. By introducing entropic constraints one can enforce the positive definiteness of the distribution functions and so be able to simulate fluids at high Reynolds numbers without numerical instabilities. By introducing a vector distribution function for the magnetic field one can enforce the divergence free condition on the magnetic field automatically, without the need of divergence cleaning as needed in most direct numerical solutions of the resistive magnetohydrodynamic equations. The principal reason for the high parallelization of lattice Boltzmann codes is that they consist of a kinetic collisional relaxation step (which is purely local) followed by a simple shift of the relaxed data to neighboring lattice sites. In large eddy simulations, the closure schemes are highly nonlocal – the most famous of these schemes is that due to Smagorinsky. Under a lattice Boltzmann representation the Smagorinsky closure is purely local – being simply a particular moment on the perturbed distribution fucntions. After nonlocal fluid moment models were discovered to represent Landau damping, it was found possible to model these fluid models using an appropriate lattice Boltzmann algorithm. The close to ideal parallelization of the lattice Boltzmann codes permitted us to be Gordon Bell finalists on using the Earth Simulation in Japan. We have also been involved in the radio frequency propagation of waves into a tokamak and into a spherical overdense tokamak plasma. Initially we investigated the use of a quasi-optical grill for the launching of lower hybrid waves into a tokamak. It was found that the conducting walls do not prevent the rods from being properly irradiated, the overloading of the quasi-optical grill is not severe with the electric field only being about three times higher than in the ideal case. Moreover, the quasi-optical grill was significantly fewer structural elements that the multijunction grill. Nevertheless there has not been much interest from experimental fusion groups to implementing these structures. Hence we have returned to optimizing the multijunction grill so that the large number of coupling matrix elements can be efficiently evaluated using symmetry arguments. In overdense plasmas, the standard electromagnetic waves cannot propagate into the plasma center, but are reflected at the plasma edge. By optimizing mode conversion processes (in particular, the O-X-B wave propagation of Ordinary Mode converting to an Extraordinary mode which then converts into an electrostatic Bernstein wave) one can excite within the plasma an electrostatic Bernstein wave that does not suffer density cutoffs and is absorbed on the electron cyclotron harmonics. Finally we have started looking at other mesoscopic lattice algorithms that involve unitary collision and streaming steps. Because these algorithms are unitary they can be run on quantum computers when they become available – unlike their computational cousin of lattice Boltzmann which is a purely classical code. These quantum lattice gas algorithms have been tested successfully on exact analytic soliton collision solution. These calculations are hoped to be able to study Bose Einstein condensed atomic gases and their ground states in an optical lattice.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Shock waves simulated using the dual domain material point method combined with molecular dynamics

Here in this work we combine the dual domain material point method with molecular dynamics in an attempt to create a multiscale numerical method to simulate materials undergoing large deformations with high strain rates. In these types of problems, the material is often in a thermodynamically nonequilibrium state, and conventional constitutive relations or equations of state are often not available. In this method, the closure quantities, such as stress, at each material point are calculated from a molecular dynamics simulation of a group of atoms surrounding the material point. Rather than restricting the multiscale simulation in a small spatial region, such as phase interfaces, or crack tips, this multiscale method can be used to consider nonequilibrium thermodynamic effects in a macroscopic domain. This method takes the advantage that the material points only communicate with mesh nodes, not among themselves; therefore molecular dynamics simulations for material points can be performed independently in parallel. The dual domain material point method is chosen for this multiscale method because it can be used in history dependent problems with large deformation without generating numerical noise as material points move across cells, and also because of its convergence and conservation properties. In conclusion, to demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of this method, we compare the results of a shock wave propagation in a cerium crystal calculated using the direct molecular dynamics simulation with the results from this combined multiscale calculation.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Electron‐Scale Reconnection in Three‐Dimensional Shock Turbulence

Abstract Magnetic reconnection has been observed in the transition region of quasi‐parallel shocks. In this work, the particle‐in‐cell method is used to simulate three‐dimensional reconnection in a quasi‐parallel shock. The shock transition region is turbulent, leading to the formation of reconnecting current sheets with various orientations. Two reconnection sites with weak and strong guide fields are studied, and it is shown that reconnection is fast and transient. Reconnection sites are characterized using diagnostics including electron flows and magnetic flux transport. In contrast to two‐dimensional simulations, weak guide field reconnection is realized. Furthermore, the current sheets in these events form in a direction almost perpendicular to those found in two‐dimensional simulations, where the reconnection geometry is constrained.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Introduction to Numerical Methods [Slides]

These are slides for a lecture for the Parallel Computing Summer Research Internship at the National Security Education Center. This gives an introduction to numerical methods. Repetitive algorithms are used to obtain approximate solutions to mathematical problems, using sorting, searching, root finding, optimization, interpolation, extrapolation, least squares regression, Eigenvalue problems, ordinary differential equations, and partial differential equations. Many equations are shown. Discretizations allow us to approximate solutions to mathematical models of physical systems using a repetitive algorithm and introduce errors that can lead to numerical instabilities if we are not careful.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Pole EXpansion and Selected Inversion (PEXSI)

The Pole EXpansion and Selected Inversion method (PEXSI) is a fast method for evaluating certain selected elements of a matrix function. PEXSI is highly scalable on distributed memory parallel machines. For sparse matrices, the PEXSI method can be more efficient than the widely used diagonalization method for evaluating matrix functions, especially when a relatively large number of eigenpairs are needed to be computed in the diagonalization methond

Source record↗

Modern gyrokinetic particle-in-cell simulation of fusion plasmas on top supercomputers

The Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code at Princeton (GTC-P) is a highly scalable and portable particle-in-cell (PIC) code. It solves the 5D Vlasov-Poisson equation featuring efficient utilization of modern parallel computer architectures at the petascale and beyond. Motivated by the goal of developing a modern code capable of dealing with the physics challenge of increasing problem size with sufficient resolution, new thread-level optimizations have been introduced as well as a key additional domain decomposition. GTC-P's multiple levels of parallelism, including inter-node 2D domain decomposition and particle decomposition, as well as intra-node shared memory partition and vectorization have enabled pushing the scalability of the PIC method to extreme computational scales. In this paper, we describe the methods developed to build a highly parallelized PIC code across a broad range of supercomputer designs. This particularly includes implementations on heterogeneous systems using NVIDIA GPU accelerators and Intel Xeon Phi (MIC) co-processors and performance comparisons with state-of-the-art homogeneous HPC systems such as Blue Gene/Q. New discovery science capabilities in the magnetic fusion energy application domain are enabled, including investigations of Ion-Temperature-Gradient (ITG) driven turbulence simulations with unprecedented spatial resolution and long temporal duration. Performance studies with realistic fusion experimental parameters are carried out on multiple supercomputing systems spanning a wide range of cache capacities, cache-sharing configurations, memory bandwidth, interconnects and network topologies. Furthermore, these performance comparisons using a realistic discovery-science-capable domain application code provide valuable insights on optimization techniques across one of the broadest sets of current high-end computing platforms worldwide.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Massively-parallel Lagrangian particle code and applications

Massively-parallel, distributed-memory algorithms for the Lagrangian particle hydrodynamic method (Samulyak et al., 2018) have been developed, verified, and implemented. The key component of parallel algorithms is a particle management module that includes a parallel construction of octree databases, dynamic adaptation and refinement of octrees, and particle migration between parallel subdomains. The particle management module is based on the p4est (parallel forest of k-trees) library. The massively-parallel Lagrangian particle code has been applied to a variety of fundamental science and applied problems. A summary of Lagrangian particle code applications to the injection of impurities into thermonuclear fusion devices and to the simulation of supersonic hydrogen jets in support of laser-plasma wakefield acceleration research has also been presented.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A semi-local spectral/hp element solver for linear elasticity problems:

We develop an efficient semi-local method for speeding up the solution of linear systems arising in spectral/hp element discretization of the linear elasticity equations. The main idea is to approximate the element-wise residual distribution with a localization operator we introduce in this paper, and subsequently solve the local linear system. Additionally, we decouple the three directions of displacement in the localization operator, hence enabling the use of an efficient low energy preconditioner for the conjugate gradient solver. This approach is effective for both nodal and modal bases in the spectral/hp element method, but here, we focus on the modal hierarchical basis. In numerical tests, we verify that there is no loss of accuracy in the semi-local method, and we obtain good parallel scalability and substantial speed-up compared to the original formulation. In particular, our tests include both structure-only and fluid-structure interaction problems, with the latter modeling a 3D patient-specific brain aneurysm. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Engineering↗

Improved solar-driven photocatalytic performance of Ag{sub 2}CO{sub 3}/(BiO){sub 2}CO{sub 3} prepared in-situ

Highlights: • Ag{sub 2}CO{sub 3}/(BiO){sub 2}CO{sub 3} photocatalysts were prepared in-situ. • The photo-induced charge separation rate has been greatly increased. • The photocatalytic activity has been greatly promoted. - Abstract: Ag{sub 2}CO{sub 3}/(BiO){sub 2}CO{sub 3} composites have been fabricated in-situ via a facile parallel flaw co-precipitation method. The specific surface area, structure, morphology, and the separation rate of photo-induced charge pairs of the photocatalysts were characterized by Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) method, X-ray diffraction (XRD), UV–vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy(DRS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), and surface photovoltage (SPV) spectroscopy, respectively. XRD patterns and DRS demonstrated that Ag{sub 2}CO{sub 3} has no effect on the crystal phase and bandgap of (BiO){sub 2}CO{sub 3}. The existence of Ag{sub 2}CO{sub 3} in the composites enhances the separation rate of photo-induced charge pairs of the photocatalysts. The photocatalytic performance of Ag{sub 2}CO{sub 3}/(BiO){sub 2}CO{sub 3} was evaluated by the decolorization of methyl orange (MO) aqueous solution under simulated solar irradiation. It was found that the simulated solar-induced photocatalytic activity of Ag{sub 2}CO{sub 3}/(BiO){sub 2}CO{sub 3} copmposites was significantly improved, which was mainly attributed to the enhanced surface area and the separation rate of photo-induced charge pairs.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

OvAd1, a Novel, Potent, and Selective Chimeric Oncolytic Virus Developed for Ovarian Cancer by 3D-Directed Evolution

Effective therapeutics for ovarian cancer continue to be urgently needed, particularly for chemotherapy-resistant cases. Here we present both a 3D-Matrigel culture-based expansion of our directed evolution method for generation of oncolytic virotherapies and two promising ovarian-cancer targeted oncolytic viruses, OvAd1 and OvAd2. OvAd1 was developed using Matrigel cell cultures, whereas OvAd2 was developed in parallel using traditional monolayer tissue culture methods. Both viruses are potent against a panel of platinum-resistant ovarian cancer cell lines and are attenuated on normal cells in vitro, resulting in therapeutic windows of ~200-fold. We observed two benefits of the use of Matrigel-based cultures for directed evolution of these oncolytics: (1) use of Matrigel generated a bioselected pool that was more strongly attenuated on normal cells while retaining its potency against ovarian cancer cells, and (2) in an ovarian carcinomatosis model, the Matrigel-derived virus OvAd1 suppressed all tumor growth while the non-Matrigelderived virus was 50% effective. Neither virus stimulated formation of peritoneal adhesions as seen for Ad5-based therapies. Consequently, these viruses are novel candidates for development as new effective treatments for aggressive ovarian cancer.

3D cell culture↗

Adaptively Compressed Exchange Operator for Large-Scale Hybrid Density Functional Calculations with Applications to the Adsorption of Water on Silicene

Density functional theory (DFT) calculations using hybrid exchange-correlation functionals have been shown to provide an accurate description of the electronic structures of nanosystems. However, such calculations are often limited to small system sizes due to the high computational cost associated with the construction and application of the Hartree-Fock (HF) exchange operator. Here, we demonstrate that the recently developed adaptively compressed exchange (ACE) operator formulation [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2016, 12, 2242-2249] can enable hybrid functional DFT calculations for nanosystems with thousands of atoms. The cost of constructing the ACE operator is the same as that of applying the exchange operator to the occupied orbitals once, while the cost of applying the Hamiltonian operator with a hybrid functional (after construction of the ACE operator) is only marginally higher than that associated with applying a Hamiltonian constructed from local and semilocal exchange-correlation functionals. Therefore, this new development significantly lowers the computational barrier for using hybrid functionals in large-scale DFT calculations. We demonstrate that a parallel planewave implementation of this method can be used to compute the ground-state electronic structure of a 1000-atom bulk silicon system in less than 30 wall clock minutes and that this method scales beyond 8000 computational cores for a bulk silicon system containing about 4000 atoms. The efficiency of the present methodology in treating large systems enables us to investigate adsorption properties of water molecules on Ag-supported two-dimensional silicene. Our computational results show that water monomer, dimer, and trimer configurations exhibit distinct adsorption behaviors on silicene. In particular, the presence of additional water molecules in the dimer and trimer configurations induces a transition from physisorption to chemisorption, followed by dissociation on Ag-supported silicene. This is caused by the enhanced effect of hydrogen bonds on charge transfer and proton transfer processes. Lastly, such a hydrogen bond autocatalytic effect is expected to have broad applications for silicene as an efficient surface catalyst for oxygen reduction reactions and water dissociation.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

The effects of cation–anion clustering on defect migration in MgAl 2 O 4

Magnesium aluminate spinel (MgAl 2 O 4 ), like many other ceramic materials, offers a range of technological applications, from nuclear reactor materials to military body armor. For many of these applications, it is critical to understand both the formation and evolution of lattice defects throughout the lifetime of the material. We use the Speculatively Parallel Temperature Accelerated Dynamics (SpecTAD) method to investigate the effects of di-vacancy and di-interstitial formation on the mobility of the component defects. From long-time trajectories of the state-to-state dynamics, we characterize the migration pathways of defect clusters, and calculate their self-diffusion constants across a range of temperatures. We find that the clustering of Al and O vacancies drastically reduces the mobility of both defects, while the clustering of Mg and O vacancies completely immobilizes them. For interstitials, we find that the clustering of Mg and O defects greatly reduces O interstitial mobility, but has only a weak effect on Mg. Lastly, these findings illuminate important new details regarding defect kinetics relevant to the application of MgAl 2 O 4 in extreme environments.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗