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At least 667 records · Page 37

FireWorks: a Dynamic Workflow System Designed for High-Throughput Applications

This work introduces FireWorks, a workflow software for running high-throughput calculation workflows at supercomputing centers. FireWorks has been used to complete over 50 million CPU-hours worth of computational chemistry and materials science calculations at the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center. It has been designed to serve the demanding high-throughput computing needs of these applications, with extensive support for (i) concurrent execution through job packing, (ii) failure detection and correction, (iii) provenance and reporting for long-running projects, (iv) automated duplicate detection, and (v) dynamic workflows (i.e., modifying the workflow graph during runtime). We have found that these features are highly relevant to enabling modern data-driven and high-throughput science applications, and we discuss our implementation strategy that rests on Python and NoSQL databases (MongoDB). Finally, we present performance data and limitations of our approach along with planned future work.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Application-level regression testing framework using Jenkins

Monitoring and testing for regression of large-scale systems such as the NCSA's Blue Waters supercomputer are challenging tasks. In this paper, we describe the solution we came up with to perform those tasks. The goal was to find an automated solution for running user-level regression tests to evaluate system usability and performance. Jenkins, an automation server software, was chosen for its versatility, large user base, and multitude of plugins including collecting data and plotting test results over time. We also describe our Jenkins deployment to launch and monitor jobs on remote HPC system, perform authentication with one-time password, and integrate with our LDAP server for its authorization. We show some use cases and describe our best practices for successfully using Jenkins as a user-level system-wide regression testing and monitoring framework for large supercomputer systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Application health monitoring for extreme-scale resiliency using cooperative fault management

Resiliency is and will be a critical factor in determining scientific productivity on current and exascale supercomputers, and beyond. Applications oblivious to and incapable of handling transient soft and hard errors could waste supercomputing resources or, worse, yield misleading scientific insights. In this work, we introduce a novel application-driven silent error detection and recovery strategy based on application health monitoring. Our methodology uses application output that follows known patterns, as indicators of an application's health and knowledge that violation of these patterns could be indication of faults. Information from system monitors that report hardware and software health status is used to corroborate faults. Collectively, this information is used by a fault coordinator agent to take preventive and corrective measures by applying computational steering to an application between checkpoints. This cooperative fault management system uses the Fault Tolerance Backplane as a communication channel. The benefits of this framework are demonstrated with two real application case studies, molecular dynamics, and quantum chemistry simulations, on scalable clusters with simulated memory and I/O corruptions. Lastly, the developed approach is general and can be easily applied to other applications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Ready for the Frontier: Preparing Applications for the World’s First Exascale System

Frontier, a supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), debuted atop the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers in June 2022 as the very first computer to produce exascale performance. Making sure scientific applications are optimized on this architecture is the critical link necessary to translate the newly available computational power into scientific insight and solutions. To that goal, the OLCF developed the Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program to ensure that a suite of highly optimized applications is ready for scientific runs at the onset of production operations for Frontier. This paper describes our experience in porting and optimizing such suite of applications in the OLCF’s CAAR program.

Budiardja, Reuben↗

Multi-task Parallelism for Robust Pre-training of Graph Foundation Models on Multi-source, Multi-fidelity Atomistic Modeling Data

Graph foundation models using graph neural networks promise sustainable, efficient atomistic modeling. To tackle challenges of processing multi-source, multi-fidelity data during pre-training, recent studies employ multi-task learning, in which shared message passing layers initially process input atomistic structures regardless of source, then route them to multiple decoding heads that predict data-specific outputs. This approach stabilizes pre-training and enhances a model’s transferability to unexplored chemical regions. Preliminary results on approximately four million structures are encouraging, yet questions remain about generalizability to larger, more diverse datasets and scalability on supercomputers. We propose a multi-task parallelism method that distributes each head across computing resources with GPU acceleration. Implemented in the open-source HydraGNN architecture, our method was trained on over 24 million structures from five datasets and tested on the Perlmutter, Aurora, and Frontier supercomputers, demonstrating efficient scaling on all three highly heterogeneous super-computing architectures.

Lupo Pasini, Massimiliano [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000249↗

Portable SHMEMCache: A High-Performance Key-Value Store on OpenSHMEM and MPI

The integration of Big Data frameworks and HPC capabilities has drawn enormous interests in recent years. SHMEMCache is a distributed key-value store built on the OpenSHMEM global address space. It has solved several practical issues in leveraging OpenSHMEM’s one-sided operations for a distributed key-value store and providing efficient key-value operations on both commodity machines and supercomputers. However, being based solely on OpenSHMEM, SHMEMCache cannot leverage one-sided operations from a variety of software packages. This results in several limitations for SHMEMCache. First, we cannot make SHMEMCache available to a wider range of platforms. Second, an opportunity for potential performance improvement is missed. Third, there is a lack of deep understanding about how different one-sided operations can fit in with SHMEMCache and other distributed key-values in general. For example, the one-sided operations in OpenSHMEM and MPI have many differences in their interfaces, memory semantics and synchronization methods, all of which can have distinct implications and also increase the complexity in supporting both OpenSHMEM and MPI for SHMEMCache. Therefore, we have taken on an effort on leveraging different one-sided operations for SHMEMCache and proposed a design of portable SHMEMCache. Based on this new framework, we have supported both OpenSHMEM and MPI for SHMEMCache. We have also conducted an extensive set of experiments to compare the performance of the two versions on both commodity machines and the Titan supercomputer.

Computer Science↗

Pore-scale and Continuum Simulations of Solute Transport Micromodel Benchmark Experiments

Four sets of micromodel nonreactive solute transport experiments were conducted with flow velocity, grain diameter, pore-aspect ratio, and flow focusing heterogeneity as the variables. The data sets were offered to pore-scale modeling groups to test their simulators. Each set consisted of two learning experiments, for which all results was made available, and a challenge experiment, for which only the experimental description and base input parameters were provided. The experimental results showed a nonlinear dependence of the dispersion coefficient on the Peclet number, a negligible effect of the pore-aspect ratio on transverse mixing, and considerably enhanced mixing due to flow focusing. Five pore-scale models and one continuum-scale model were used to simulate the experiments. Of the pore-scale models, two used a pore-network (PN) method, two others are based on a lattice-Boltzmann (LB) approach, and one employed a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique. The learning experiments were used by the PN models to modify the standard perfect mixing approach in pore bodies into approaches to simulate the observed incomplete mixing. The LB and CFD models used these experiments to appropriately discretize the grid representations. The continuum model use published non-linear relations between transverse dispersion coefficients and Peclet numbers to compute the required dispersivity input values. Comparisons between experimental and numerical results for the four challenge experiments show that all pore-scale models were all able to satisfactorily simulate the experiments. The continuum model underestimated the required dispersivity values and, resulting in less dispersion. The PN models were able to complete the simulations in a few minutes, whereas the direct models needed up to several days on supercomputers to resolve the more complex problems.

benchmark↗

Designing Energy Efficient Communication Runtime Systems: A View from PGAS Models

As the march to the Exascale computing gains momentum, energy consumption of supercomputers has emerged to be the critical roadblock. While architectural innovations are imperative in achieving computing of this scale, it is largely dependent on the systems software to leverage the architectural innovations. Parallel applications in many computationally intensive domains have been designed to leverage these supercomputers, with legacy two-sided communication semantics using Message Passing Interface. At the same time, Partitioned Global Address Space Models are being designed which provide global address space abstractions and one-sided communication for exploiting data locality and communication optimizations. PGAS models rely on one-sided communication runtime systems for leveraging high-speed networks to achieve best possible performance. In this paper, we present a design for Power Aware One-Sided Communication Library - PASCoL. The proposed design detects communication slack, leverages Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and Interrupt driven execution to exploit the detected slack for energy efficiency. We implement our design and evaluate it using synthetic benchmarks for one-sided communication primitives, Put, Get and Accumulate and uniformly non-contiguous data transfers. Our performance evaluation indicates that we can achieve significant reduction in energy consumption without performance loss on multiple one-sided communication primitives. The achieved results are close to the theoretical peak available with the experimental test bed.

Vishnu, Abhinav↗

Scalable multiscale modeling of platelets with 100 million particles

Here, we developed the core components of the AI-aided multiple time stepping algorithm for multiscale modeling of cell dynamics. This algorithm was implemented and analyzed on two supercomputer architectures with an application of simulating the aggregation of 250 platelets, or 102 million particles. To scale on these computers with complex memory and network architectures with GPUs, we devised a biomechanics-informed task mapping scheme to optimize load imbalance, communications, and memory utilization. Our simulations, scaling well up to 192 nodes on a Summit-like supercomputer with a peak speed of 11 petaflops, achieved a rate of 423 μs/day which is 500 times faster than the conventional algorithm using static time step and this has enabled studies of record size blood clots at record spatial–temporal resolutions. Additionally, we discovered the sensitive dependence of the scalability and execution time on the methods of decomposition, CPU–GPU coupling, and task mapping.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Hydrocode Development on the Ncube and the Connection Machine Hypercubes [Book Chapter]

Hydrocode simulations constitute an important tool at Sandia National Laboratories and elsewhere for analyzing complex two- and three-dimensional systems. However, current vector supercomputers do not provide a growth path to enable fast, routine, and cost-effective simulations of large problems. Future, massively-parallel computers will provide a solution. Sandia has already developed simplified versions of the production hydrocode CTH for the Connection Machine and the nCUBE massively-parallel supercomputers. The parallel versions solve problems in two-dimensional, multi-fluid, shock-wave physics. Code development strategy, coding methodology, visualization techniques and performance results for this work are described.

640410 -- Fluid Physics-- General Fluid Dynamics↗

Annual Reports in Computational Chemistry, Chapter 3: GronOR Nonorthogonal Configuration Interaction Calculations at Exascale

This chapter describes the implementation and benchmarking of a new software code for nonorthogonal configuration interaction calculations. GronOR is named after the University of Groningen and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the two institutions that are collaborating on the development of this code for the largest massively parallel supercomputers for open science. The basic implementation approach is described and preliminary benchmarking results are given as obtained from early access to Summit, the next Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's supercomputer with 200 PFlop.

Chemistry↗

Computational complexity of the landscape II—Cosmological considerations

We propose a new approach for multiverse analysis based on computational complexity, which leads to a new family of “computational” measure factors. By defining a cosmology as a space–time containing a vacuum with specified properties (for example small cosmological constant) together with rules for how time evolution will produce the vacuum, we can associate global time in a multiverse with clock time on a supercomputer which simulates it. We argue for a principle of “limited computational complexity” governing early universe dynamics as simulated by this supercomputer, which translates to a global measure for regulating the infinities of eternal inflation. The rules for time evolution can be thought of as a search algorithm, whose details should be constrained by a stronger principle of “minimal computational complexity”. Unlike previously studied global measures, ours avoids standard equilibrium considerations and the well-known problems of Boltzmann Brains and the youngness paradox. We also give various definitions of the computational complexity of a cosmology, and argue that there are only a few natural complexity classes.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Sassena — X-ray and neutron scattering calculated from molecular dynamics trajectories using massively parallel computers

Massively parallel computers now permit the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of multi-million atom systems on time scales up to the microsecond. However, the subsequent analysis of the resulting simulation trajectories has now become a high performance computing problem in itself. Here, we present software for calculating X-ray and neutron scattering intensities from MD simulation data that scales well on massively parallel supercomputers. The calculation and data staging schemes used maximize the degree of parallelism and minimize the IO bandwidth requirements. The strong scaling tested on the Jaguar Petaflop Cray XT5 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory exhibits virtually linear scaling up to 7000 cores for most benchmark systems. Since both MPI and thread parallelism is supported, the software is flexible enough to cover scaling demands for different types of scattering calculations. The result is a high performance tool capable of unifying large-scale supercomputing and a wide variety of neutron/synchrotron technology.

Computer Science↗

Accelerating nuclear configuration interaction calculations through a preconditioned block iterative eigensolver

We describe a number of recently developed techniques for improving the performance of large-scalenuclear configuration interaction calculations on high performance parallel computers. We show thebenefit of using a preconditioned block iterative method to replace the Lanczos algorithm that hastraditionally been used to perform this type of computation. The rapid convergence of the block iterativemethod is achieved by a proper choice of starting guesses of the eigenvectors and the construction of aneffective preconditioner. These acceleration techniques take advantage of special structure of the nuclearconfiguration interaction problem which we discuss in detail. The use of a block method also allows usto improve the concurrency of the computation, and take advantage of the memory hierarchy of modernmicroprocessors to increase the arithmetic intensity of the computation relative to data movement. Wealso discuss the implementation details that are critical to achieving high performance on massivelyparallel multi-core supercomputers, and demonstrate that the new block iterative solver is two to threetimes faster than the Lanczos based algorithm for problems of moderate sizes on a Cray XC30 system.

Shao, Meiyue↗

Ultrahigh-order Maxwell solver with extreme scalability for electromagnetic PIC simulations of plasmas

The advent of massively parallel supercomputers, with their distributed-memory technology using many processing units, has favored the development of highly-scalable local low-order solvers at the expense of harder-to-scale global very high-order spectral methods. Indeed, FFT-based methods, which were very popular on shared memory computers, have been largely replaced by finite-difference (FD) methods for the solution of many problems, including plasmas simulations with electromagnetic Particle-In-Cell methods. For some problems, such as the modeling of so-called “plasma mirrors” for the generation of high-energy particles and ultra-short radiations, we have shown that the inaccuracies of standard FD-based PIC methods prevent the modeling on present supercomputers at sufficient accuracy. Here, we demonstrate here that a new method, based on the use of local FFTs, enables ultrahigh-order accuracy with unprecedented scalability, and thus for the first time the accurate modeling of plasma mirrors in 3D.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

A high-order discontinuous Galerkin method for wave propagation through coupled elastic-acoustic media

We introduce a high-order discontinuous Galerkin (dG) scheme for the numerical solution of three-dimensional (3D) wave propagation problems in coupled elastic-acoustic media. A velocity-strain formulation is used, which allows for the solution of the acoustic and elastic wave equations within the same unified framework. Careful attention is directed at the derivation of a numerical flux that preserves high-order accuracy in the presence of material discontinuities, including elastic-acoustic interfaces. Explicit expressions for the 3D upwind numerical flux, derived as an exact solution for the relevant Riemann problem, are provided. The method supports h-non-conforming meshes, which are particularly effective at allowing local adaptation of the mesh size to resolve strong contrasts in the local wavelength, as well as dynamic adaptivity to track solution features. The use of high-order elements controls numerical dispersion, enabling propagation over many wave periods. We prove consistency and stability of the proposed dG scheme. To study the numerical accuracy and convergence of the proposed method, we compare against analytical solutions for wave propagation problems with interfaces, including Rayleigh, Lamb, Scholte, and Stoneley waves as well as plane waves impinging on an elastic-acoustic interface. Spectral rates of convergence are demonstrated for these problems, which include a non-conforming mesh case. Finally, we present scalability results for a parallel implementation of the proposed high-order dG scheme for large-scale seismic wave propagation in a simplified earth model, demonstrating high parallel efficiency for strong scaling to the full size of the Jaguar Cray XT5 supercomputer.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Implementation, capabilities, and benchmarking of Shift, a massively parallel Monte Carlo radiation transport code

This paper discusses the implementation, capabilities, and validation of Shift, a massively parallel Monte Carlo radiation transport package developed and maintained at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It has been developed to scale well from laptop to small computing clusters to advanced supercomputers. Special features of Shift include hybrid capabilities for variance reduction such as CADIS and FW-CADIS, and advanced parallel decomposition and tally methods optimized for scalability on supercomputing architectures. Shift has been validated and verified against various reactor physics benchmarks and compares well to other state-of-the-art Monte Carlo radiation transport codes such as MCNP5, CE KENO-VI, and OpenMC. Some specific benchmarks used for verification and validation include the CASL VERA criticality test suite and several Westinghouse AP1000 ® problems. These benchmark and scaling studies show promising results.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗