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At least 667 records · Page 37

Utilizing Shape Memory Alloys for Novel, Non-Pneumatic Tire Design - Designing for the Best of Both Worlds

Materials are a fundamental building block that often get overlooked as a critical component that shapes our world. Numerous products that impact our lives are enabled by the materials from which they are made. With regard to Martian and lunar rover applications, conventional mobility elements, such as pneumatic tires, suffer from a number of issues related to reliability. Two of the more prevalent problems are the high likelihood of single point failure owing to puncture (i.e. flat tire), and loss of efficiency due to reduction in tire pressure over time. Solid, rigid wheels suffer from the inability to handle the high, localized loads while encountering rugged terrain and also produce relatively poor traction and operating efficiency. In an effort to overcome these problems, non-pneumatic, compliant tire designs are being developed, using Nickel-Titanium (NiTi), a thermally activated shape memory alloy (SMA), that is less sensitive to temperature and exhibits much greater plastic deformation than do conventional vulcanized rubber pneumatic tires.

Padula, Santo, II↗

Utilizing Shape Memory Alloys for Novel, Non-Pneumatic Tire Design - Designing for the Best of Both Worlds

Materials are a fundamental building block that often get overlooked as a critical component that shapes our world. Numerous products that impact our lives are enabled by the materials from which they are made. With regard to Martian and lunar rover applications, conventional mobility elements, such as pneumatic tires, suffer from a number of issues related to reliability. Two of the more prevalent problems are the high likelihood of single point failure owing to puncture (i.e. flat tire), and loss of efficiency due to reduction in tire pressure over time. Solid, rigid wheels suffer from the inability to handle the high, localized loads while encountering rugged terrain and also produce relatively poor traction and operating efficiency. In an effort to overcome these problems, non-pneumatic, compliant tire designs are being developed, using Nickel-Titanium (NiTi), a thermally activated shape memory alloy (SMA), that is less sensitive to temperature and exhibits much greater plastic deformation than do conventional vulcanized rubber pneumatic tires.

Padula, Santo, II↗

Developing an ELM Ecosystem Dynamics Model on GPU with OpenACC

Porting a complex scientific code, such as the E3SM land model (ELM), onto a new computing architecture is challenging. The paper presents design strategies and technical approaches to develop an ELM ecosystem dynamics model with compiler directives (OpenACC) on NVIDIA GPUs. The code has been refactored with advanced OpenACC features (such as deepcopy and routine directives) to reduce memory consumption and to increase the levels of parallelism through parallel loop reconstruction and new data structures. As a result, the optimized parallel implementation achieved more than a 140-time speedup (50 ms vs 7600 ms), compared to a naive implementation that uses OpenACC routine directive and parallelizes the code across existing loops on a single NVIDIA V100. On a fully loaded computing node with 44 CPUs and 6 GPUs, the code achieved over a 3.0-times speedup, compared to the original code on the CPU. Furthermore, the memory footprint of the optimized parallel implementation is 300 MB, which is around 15% of the 2.15 GB of memory consumed by a naive implementation. This study is the first effort to develop the ELM component on GPUs efficiently to support ultra-high-resolution land simulations at continental scales.

Schwartz, Peter↗

Improvements to a class of hybrid methods for radiation transport: Nyström reconstruction and defect correction methods

In this study, two modifications are introduced for improving the accuracy, versatility, and robustness of a class of hybrid methods for radiation transport. In general, such methods are constructed by splitting the radiative flux into collided and uncollided components to which low- and high-resolution angular approximations are applied, respectively. In this work we focus on discrete ordinates discretizations of high and low order. The first modification we introduce changes the way in which the collided component is mapped into the uncollided component at the end of each time step in a simulation. The new mapping is a Nyström-type reconstruction that is applicable to arbitrary discrete ordinates quadratures, is guaranteed to preserve positivity of the solution provided that all ordinate weights are positive, is significantly more accurate than previous methods, and can be readily extended to other discretizations such as moment methods, finite element methods, and diffusion approximations. The second modification leverages integral deferred correction (IDC) to iteratively correct for the splitting error introduced by the inconsistency in angular discretization between the collided and uncollided components, in addition to improving the accuracy of the low-order temporal error that is treated by traditional IDC methods. Numerical tests in one- and two-dimensional geometries are used to demonstrate the increased accuracy and efficiency of the proposed modifications. It is found that the two techniques combined yield methods with solution accuracy and memory requirements comparable to that of monolithic discrete ordinates methods while reducing runtime by as much as a factor of between two and ten, depending on the problem.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Estimating Higher-Order Moments Using Symmetric Tensor Decomposition

In this paper, we consider the problem of decomposing higher-order moment tensors, i.e., the sum of symmetric outer products of data vectors. Such a decomposition can be used to estimate the means in a Gaussian mixture model and for other applications in machine learning. The dth-order empirical moment tensor of a set of p observations of n variables is a symmetric d-way tensor. Our goal is to nd a low-rank tensor approximation comprising r $\ll$ p symmetric outer products. The challenge is that forming the empirical moment tensor costs O(pn d ) operations and O(n d ) storage, which may be prohibitively expensive; additionally, the algorithm to compute the low-rank approximation costs O(n d ) per iteration. Our contribution is avoiding formation of the moment tensor, computing the low-rank tensor approximation of the moment tensor implicitly using O(pnr) operations per iteration and no extra memory. This advance opens the door to more applications of higher-order moments since they can now be efficiently computed. We present numerical evidence of the computational savings and show an example of estimating the means for higher-order moments.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Toward Large-Scale Image Segmentation on Summit

Semantic segmentation of images is an important computer vision task that emerges in a variety of application domains such as medical imaging, robotic vision and autonomous vehicles to name a few. While these domain-specific image analysis tasks involve relatively small image sizes (~ 10 2 × 10 2 ), there are many applications that need to train machine learning models on image data with extents that are orders of magnitude larger (~10 4 × 10 4 ). Training deep neural network (DNN) models on large extent images is extremely memory-intensive and often exceeds the memory limitations of a single graphical processing unit, a hardware accelerator of choice for computer vision workloads. Here, an efficient, sample parallel approach to train U-Net models on large extent image data sets is presented. Its advantages and limitations are analyzed and near-linear strong-scaling speedup demonstrated on 256 nodes (1536 GPUs) of the Summit supercomputer. Using a single node of the Summit supercomputer, an early evaluation of a recently released model parallel framework called GPipe is demonstrated to deliver ~ 2X speedup in executing a U-Net model with an order of magnitude larger number of trainable parameters than reported before. Performance bottlenecks for pipelined training of U-Net models are identified and mitigation strategies to improve the speedups are discussed. Together, these results open up the possibility of combining both approaches into a unified scalable pipelined and data parallel algorithm to efficiently train U-Net models with very large receptive fields on data sets of ultra-large extent images.

Seal, Sudip↗

Streaming Data Reorganization at Scale with DeltaFS Indexed Massive Directories

We report complex storage stacks providing data compression, indexing, and analytics help leverage the massive amounts of data generated today to derive insights. It is challenging to perform this computation, however, while fully utilizing the underlying storage media. This is because, while storage servers with large core counts are widely available, single-core performance and memory bandwidth per core grow slower than the core count per die. Computational storage offers a promising solution to this problem by utilizing dedicated compute resources along the storage processing path. We present DeltaFS Indexed Massive Directories (IMDs), a new approach to computational storage. DeltaFS IMDs harvest available (i.e., not dedicated) compute, memory, and network resources on the compute nodes of an application to perform computation on data. We demonstrate the efficiency of DeltaFS IMDs by using them to dynamically reorganize the output of a real-world simulation application across 131,072 CPU cores. DeltaFS IMDs speed up reads by 1,740x while only slightly slowing down the writing of data during simulation I/O for in situ data processing.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Thermal Radiation Transport with Tensor Trains

We present a novel tensor network algorithm to solve the time-dependent, gray thermal radiation transport equation. The method invokes a tensor train (TT) decomposition for the specific intensity. The efficiency of this approach is dictated by the rank of the decomposition. When the solution is “low rank,” the memory footprint of the specific intensity solution vector may be significantly compressed. The algorithm, following a step-then-truncate approach of a traditional discrete ordinates method, operates directly on the compressed state vector, thereby enabling large speedups for low-rank solutions. To achieve these speedups, we rely on a recently developed rounding approach based on the Gram-SVD. We detail how familiar S N algorithms for (gray) thermal transport can be mapped to this TT framework and present several numerical examples testing both the optically thick and thin regimes. The TT framework finds low-rank structure and supplies up to ≃60× speedups and ≃1000× compressions for problems demanding large angle counts, thereby enabling previously intractable SN calculations and supplying a promising avenue to mitigate ray effects.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Navier-Stokes calculations for unsteady three-dimensional vortical flows in unbounded domains

Finite-difference Navier-Stokes calculations for unsteady, three-dimensional, incompressible, viscous flows induced by initial vorticity distributions are presented and discussed in this paper. The initial vorticity distributions are assumed to be embedded in a flow field of infinite extent that is quiescent at infinity. These vorticity distributions are typical of vortex rings and other closed vortical tubes or structures. Such structures are important elements in fluid flows such as jets, atmospheric convection and the far-field wakes of aircraft; studies of their interaction may aid in an understanding of complex fluid flows. The calculations employ a method recently proposed by Ting to approximate the infinite-domain boundary value problem with a finite boundary computational domain, and this method is shown to yield accurate three-dimensional results for reasonable expenditures of computer time. Because of the efficiency of the boundary condition technique and the resulting Navier-Stokes code, a 16-bit minicomputer with virtual memory was capable of performing the calculations for the unsteady motion of two obliquely colliding vortex rings. The results of these calculations are presented in the paper.

Chamberlain, J. P.↗

Finite element computation on nearest neighbor connected machines

Research aimed at faster, more cost effective parallel machines and algorithms for improving designer productivity with finite element computations is discussed. A set of 8 boards, containing 4 nearest neighbor connected arrays of commercially available floating point chips and substantial memory, are inserted into a commercially available machine. One-tenth Mflop (64 bit operation) processors provide an 89% efficiency when solving the equations arising in a finite element problem for a single variable regular grid of size 40 by 40 by 40. This is approximately 15 to 20 times faster than a much more expensive machine such as a VAX 11/780 used in double precision. The efficiency falls off as faster or more processors are envisaged because communication times become dominant. A novel successive overrelaxation algorithm which uses cyclic reduction in order to permit data transfer and computation to overlap in time is proposed.

Mcaulay, A. D.↗

A three-dimensional incompressible flow simulation method and its application to the Space Shuttle main engine. II Turbulent flow

An implicit finite difference code cast in general curvilinear coordinates is further developed for three-dimensional incompressible turbulent flows. The code is based on the method of pseudocompressibility and utilizes the Beam and Warming implicit approximate factorization algorithm to achieve computational efficiency. A multiple-zone method is further extended to include composite-grids to overcome the excessive computer memory required for solving turbulent flows in complex three-dimensional geometries. A simple turbulence model is proposed for internal flows. The code is being used for the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) internal flow analyses.

Chang, J. L. C.↗

Numerical simulation of the flow field around a complete aircraft

The present effort represents a first attempt of numerical simulation of the flow field around a complete aircraft-like, lifting configuration utilizing the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations. The numerical solution generated for the experimental aircraft concept X24C-10D at a Mach number of 5.95 not only exhibited accurate prediction of detailed flow properties but also of the integrated aerodynamic coefficients. In addition, the present analysis demonstrated that a page structure of data collected into cyclic blocks is an efficient and viable means for processing the Navier-Stokes equations on the CRAY XMP-22 computer with external memory device.

Shang, J. S.↗

Navier-Stokes calculations for DFVLR F5-wing in wind tunnel using Runge-Kutta time-stepping scheme

A three-dimensional Navier-Stokes code using an explicit multistage Runge-Kutta type of time-stepping scheme is used for solving the transonic flow past a finite wing mounted inside a wind tunnel. Flow past the same wing in free air was also computed to assess the effect of wind-tunnel walls on such flows. Numerical efficiency is enhanced through vectorization of the computer code. A Cyber 205 computer with 32 million words of internal memory was used for these computations.

Vatsa, V. N.↗

A scheme for supporting automatic data migration on multicomputers

A data migration mechanism is proposed that allows an explicit and controlled mapping of data to memory. While read or write copies of each data element can be assigned to any processor's memory, longer term storage of each data element is assigned to a specific location in the memory of a particular processor. Data is presented that suggests that the scheme may be a practical method for efficiently supporting data migration.

Mirchandaney, Seema↗

A manual for PARTI runtime primitives

Primitives are presented that are designed to help users efficiently program irregular problems (e.g., unstructured mesh sweeps, sparse matrix codes, adaptive mesh partial differential equations solvers) on distributed memory machines. These primitives are also designed for use in compilers for distributed memory multiprocessors. Communications patterns are captured at runtime, and the appropriate send and receive messages are automatically generated.

Berryman, Harry↗

A manual for PARTI runtime primitives, revision 1

Primitives are presented that are designed to help users efficiently program irregular problems (e.g., unstructured mesh sweeps, sparse matrix codes, adaptive mesh partial differential equations solvers) on distributed memory machines. These primitives are also designed for use in compilers for distributed memory multiprocessors. Communications patterns are captured at runtime, and the appropriate send and receive messages are automatically generated.

Das, Raja↗

Improved algorithms for mapping pipelined and parallel computations

Recent work on the problem of mapping pipelined or parallel computations onto linear array, shared memory, and host-satellite systems is extended. It is shown how these problems can be solved even more efficiently when computation module execution times are bounded from below, intermodule communication times are bounded from above, and the processors satisfy certain homogeneity constraints. The improved algorithms have significantly lower time and space complexities than the more general algorithms: in one case, an O(nm3) time algorithm for mapping m modules onto n processors is replaced with an O(nm log m) time algorithm, and the space requirements are reduced from O(nm2) to O(m). Run-time complexity is reduced further with parallel mapping algorithms based on these improvements, which run on the architectures for which they create mappings.

Nicol, David M.↗

Job Management Requirements for NAS Parallel Systems and Clusters

A job management system is a critical component of a production supercomputing environment, permitting oversubscribed resources to be shared fairly and efficiently. Job management systems that were originally designed for traditional vector supercomputers are not appropriate for the distributed-memory parallel supercomputers that are becoming increasingly important in the high performance computing industry. Newer job management systems offer new functionality but do not solve fundamental problems. We address some of the main issues in resource allocation and job scheduling we have encountered on two parallel computers - a 160-node IBM SP2 and a cluster of 20 high performance workstations located at the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation facility. We describe the requirements for resource allocation and job management that are necessary to provide a production supercomputing environment on these machines, prioritizing according to difficulty and importance, and advocating a return to fundamental issues.

Saphir, William↗