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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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The key capability established through the research funded by this award are erasure coded computations for linear systems, in serial and in parallel. This capability enables powerful efficient and scalable alternatives to existing linear system solvers in fault-prone computational systems.
In a study of cosmic ray propagation in interstellar and interplanetary space, a perturbed orbit resonant scattering theory for pitch angle diffusion in a slab model of magnetostatic turbulence is slightly generalized and used to compute the diffusion coefficient for spatial propagation parallel to the mean magnetic field. This diffusion coefficient has been useful for describing the solar modulation of the galactic cosmic rays, and for explaining the diffusive phase in solar flares in which the initial anisotropy of the particle distribution decays to isotropy.
The Information Power Grid (IPG) concept developed by NASA is aimed to provide a metacomputing platform for large-scale distributed computations, by hiding the intricacies of highly heterogeneous environment and yet maintaining adequate security. In this paper, we propose a latency-tolerant partitioning scheme that dynamically balances processor workloads on the.IPG, and minimizes data movement and runtime communication. By simulating an unsteady adaptive mesh application on a wide area network, we study the performance of our load balancer under the Globus environment. The number of IPG nodes, the number of processors per node, and the interconnected speeds are parameterized to derive conditions under which the IPG would be suitable for parallel distributed processing of such applications. Experimental results demonstrate that effective solution are achieved when the IPG nodes are connected by a high-speed asynchronous interconnection network.
High-performance computing relies on ever finer threading. Advances in processor technology include ever greater numbers of cores, hyperthreading, accelerators with integrated blocks of cores, and special vectorized instructions, all of which require more software parallelism to achieve peak performance. Traditional visualization solutions cannot support this extreme level of concurrency. Extreme scale systems require a new programming model and a fundamental change in how we design algorithms. To address these issues we created VTK-m: the visualization toolkit for multi-/many-core architectures. VTK-m supports a number of algorithms and the ability to design further algorithms through a top-down design with an emphasis on extreme parallelism. VTK-m also provides support for finding and building links across topologies, making it possible to perform operations that determine manifold surfaces, interpolate generated values, and find adjacencies. Although VTK-m provides a simplified high-level interface for programming, its template-based code removes the overhead of abstraction. VTK-m simplifies the development of parallel scientific visualization algorithms by providing a framework of supporting functionality that allows developers to focus on visualization operations. Consider the listings in Figure 1.1 that compares the size of the implementation for the Marching Cubes algorithm in VTK-m with the equivalent reference implementation in the CUDA software development kit. Because VTK-m internally manages the parallel distribution of work and data, the VTK-m implementation is shorter and easier to maintain. Additionally, VTK-m provides data abstractions not provided by other libraries that make code written in VTK-m more versatile.
This study explores progress achieved with 2DOF, 3DOF, and MDOF acoustic liners constructed with mesh caps embedded within a honeycomb core. These liner configurations offer potential for broadband noise reduction, and are suitable for conventional aircraft implementation. Samples for each configuration are tested in the NASA normal incidence tube and grazing flow impedance tube, with and without a wire mesh facesheet. Impedances based on these measured data compare favorably with those predicted using a transmission line impedance prediction model. Predicted impedances are then used as input for an aeroacoustic propagation code to compute axial acoustic pressure distributions in the grazing flow tube. These predicted distributions compare favorably with the corresponding measured distributions at frequencies away from the frequency of peak attenuation, but suffer slight degradation for frequencies very near the peak attenuation frequency, where the predicted results are sensitive to input impedance changes. As expected, the noise reduction frequency range increases as more degrees of freedom are included. Although the specific results achieved herein may differ from those that would be achieved with other 2DOF, 3DOF, and MDOF liners, this comparison highlights some of the key features that can be exploited in the design of parallel-element, embedded mesh-cap liners.
Space flight offers the opportunity to study linear bioaccelerometers (vestibular maculas) in the virtual absence of a primary stimulus, gravitational acceleration. Macular research in space is particularly important to NASA because the bioaccelerometers are proving to be weighted neural networks in which information is distributed for parallel processing. Neural networks are plastic and highly adaptive to new environments. Combined morphological-physiological studies of maculas fixed in space and following flight should reveal macular adaptive responses to microgravity, and their time-course. Ground-based research, already begun, using computer-assisted, 3-dimensional reconstruction of macular terminal fields will lead to development of computer models of functioning maculas. This research should continue in conjunction with physiological studies, including work with multichannel electrodes. The results of such a combined effort could usher in a new era in understanding vestibular function on Earth and in space. They can also provide a rational basis for counter-measures to space motion sickness, which may prove troublesome as space voyager encounter new gravitational fields on planets, or must re-adapt to 1 g upon return to earth.
Algorithms for direct volume rendering on parallel and vector processors are investigated. Volumes are transformed efficiently on parallel processors by dividing the data into slices and beams of voxels. Equal sized sets of slices along one axis are distributed to processors. Parallelism is achieved at two levels. Because each slice can be transformed independently of others, processors transform their assigned slices with no communication, thus providing maximum possible parallelism at the first level. Within each slice, consecutive beams are incrementally transformed using coherency in the transformation computation. Also, coherency across slices can be exploited to further enhance performance. This coherency yields the second level of parallelism through the use of the vector processing or pipelining. Other ongoing efforts include investigations into image reconstruction techniques, load balancing strategies, and improving performance.
Study of montages, tracings and reconstructions prepared from a series of 570 consecutive ultrathin sections shows that rat maculas are morphologically organized for parallel processing of linear acceleratory information. Type II cells of one terminal field distribute information to neighboring terminals as well. The findings are examined in light of physiological data which indicate that macular receptor fields have a preferred directional vector, and are interpreted by analogy to a computer technology known as an information network.
With the increase in the development and implementation of distributed energy resources, application of parallel connected inverters is increasing and as a result having accurate modeling and simulation tools that can help in the design, analysis and stability assessment of the grid is of great importance. Development of fundamental methods that can achieve accurate, reliable, and computationally efficient results can be very beneficial. Application of Dynamic phasor (DP) modeling method has been limited to study of limited harmonics and small combination of interconnected converters due to the complexity associated with developing models that describe larger systems. In this paper, application of DP modeling method is expanded to model any number of parallel connected three phase voltage source inverter (VSI) with inclusion of a wider harmonic content including fundamental, subharmonics, inter-harmonics, switching frequency and their sidebands. Results achieved from this modeling method is compared with conventional average model as well as detailed switching model and the effect of inclusion of wider harmonic content on accuracy of DP modeling method is demonstrated.
A high-resolution numerical study on parallel systems is reported on three-dimensional, time-dependent, thermal convective flows. A parallel implentation on the finite volume method with a multigrid scheme is discussed, and a parallel visualization systemm is developed on distributed systems for visualizing the flow.
The Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will deliver a 2.4 MW muon neutrino beam from Fermilab to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), requiring unprecedented precision in beamline alignment to achieve DUNE's neutrino oscillation measurement goals. Vertical misalignments of beamline components as small as 0.5 mm can contribute 6-7\% uncertainty in predicted neutrino flux, necessitating sub-0.1 mm alignment monitoring capabilities. The Horn Location Sensor (HLS) system employs frequency sweep interferometry (FSI) in a distributed hydrostatic leveling network to achieve the required precision under harsh radiation conditions up to 5000 kRad/year. Traditional FSI implementations suffer from laser sweep nonlinearities that degrade resolution and require computationally intensive post-processing corrections using gas reference cells. This work presents a real-time FPGA-based implementation of the HLS data acquisition and processing system using a sweep tracker interferometer for dynamic sweep linearization. The system utilizes a PYNQ-Z2 FPGA with programmable logic implementing parallel 16k-point FFT processing across four channels, synchronized by the sweep tracker signal to eliminate post-processing requirements. Spectral performance testing demonstrates significant improvements in peak sharpness compared to traditional fixed-frequency digitization. The FPGA implementation enables real-time displacement monitoring with processing speeds orders of magnitude faster than software-based approaches, essential for the operational requirements of LBNF's eventual distributed sensor network. This advancement in real-time FSI processing directly supports DUNE's precision neutrino physics program by providing the rapid feedback necessary for maintaining stringent beamline alignment tolerances during high-power beam operations.
The Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will deliver a 2.4 MW muon neutrino beam from Fermilab to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), requiring unprecedented precision in beamline alignment to achieve DUNE's neutrino oscillation measurement goals. Vertical misalignments of beamline components as small as 0.5 mm can contribute 6-7\% uncertainty in predicted neutrino flux, necessitating sub-0.1 mm alignment monitoring capabilities. The Horn Location Sensor (HLS) system employs frequency sweep interferometry (FSI) in a distributed hydrostatic leveling network to achieve the required precision under harsh radiation conditions up to 5000 kRad/year. Traditional FSI implementations suffer from laser sweep nonlinearities that degrade resolution and require computationally intensive post-processing corrections using gas reference cells. This work presents a real-time FPGA-based implementation of the HLS data acquisition and processing system using a sweep tracker interferometer for dynamic sweep linearization. The system utilizes a PYNQ-Z2 FPGA with programmable logic implementing parallel 16k-point FFT processing across four channels, synchronized by the sweep tracker signal to eliminate post-processing requirements. Spectral performance testing demonstrates significant improvements in peak sharpness compared to traditional fixed-frequency digitization. The FPGA implementation enables real-time displacement monitoring with processing speeds orders of magnitude faster than software-based approaches, essential for the operational requirements of LBNF's eventual distributed sensor network. This advancement in real-time FSI processing directly supports DUNE's precision neutrino physics program by providing the rapid feedback necessary for maintaining stringent beamline alignment tolerances during high-power beam operations.
We describe the architecture, implementation, use of a scalable, high performance, distributed-parallel data storage system developed in the ARPA funded MAGIC gigabit testbed. A collection of wide area distributed disk servers operate in parallel to provide logical block level access to large data sets. Operated primarily as a network-based cache, the architecture supports cooperation among independently owned resources to provide fast, large-scale, on-demand storage to support data handling, simulation, and computation.
We present results from several projects in the new field of computational astrobiology, which is devoted to advancing our understanding of the origin, evolution and distribution of life in the Universe using theoretical and computational tools. We have developed a procedure for calculating long-range effects in molecular dynamics using a plane wave expansion of the electrostatic potential. This method is expected to be highly efficient for simulating biological systems on massively parallel supercomputers. We have perform genomics analysis on a family of actin binding proteins. We have performed quantum mechanical calculations on carbon nanotubes and nucleic acids, which simulations will allow us to investigate possible sources of organic material on the early earth. Finally, we have developed a model of protobiological chemistry using neural networks.
An Integrated Science Data Analytics Platform is an environment that enables the confluence of resources for scientific investigation. It harmonizes data, tools and computational resources which subsequently enable the research community to focus on the investigation rather than spending time on security, data preparation, management, etc. OceanWorks is a NASA technology integration project to establish a cloud-based Integrated Ocean Science Data Analytics Platform at NASA’s Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) for big ocean science. It focuses on advancement and maturity by bringing together several NASA open-source, big data projects for parallel analytics, anomaly detection, in-situ to satellite data matchup, quality-screened data subsetting, search relevancy, and data discovery. Our communities are relying on data distributed through data centers such as the PO.DAAC, COAPS, NCAR, and many others to conduct their research. In typical investigations, scientists would engage in: search for data, evaluate the relevance of that data, download it, and then apply algorithms to identify trends. Such workflow cannot scale if the research involves a massive amount of data or multi-variate measurements. NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is expected to produce massive amount of observational data during its 3-year nominal mission. Collections like SWOT challenges all existing Earth Science data archival, distribution and analysis paradigms. In this paper, we will discuss how OceanWorks enhances the analysis of physical ocean data where the computation is done on an elastic cloud platform next to the archive to deliver fast, web-accessible services for working with oceanographic measurements.
FastCaloSim is a parameterized simulation of the particle energy response and of the energy distribution in the ATLAS calorimeter. It is a relatively small and self-contained package with massive inherent parallelism and captures the essence of GPU offloading via important operations like data transfer, memory initialization, floating point operations, and reduction. It was identified by the High Energy Physics Center for Computational Excellence project as a good testbed for evaluating the performance and ease of portability of programming models. In this paper, we will discuss the results of our evaluation of the porting process to Kokkos, SYCL, Alpaka, OpenMP and std::par (nvc++), and compare performance on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs, as well as multicore CPUs.
Model atmospheres for the late-type active-chromosphere dwarf stars 70 Oph A and Epsilon Eri are computed from high-resolution Ca II K line profiles as well as Mg II h and k line fluxes. A method is used which determines a plane-parallel homogeneous hydrostatic-equilibrium model of the upper photosphere and chromosphere which differs from theoretical models by lacking the constraint of radiative equilibrium (RE). The determinations of surface gravities, metallicities, and effective temperatures are discussed, and the computational methods, model atoms, atomic data, and observations are described. Temperature distributions for the two stars are plotted and compared with RE models for the adopted effective temperatures and gravities. The previously investigated T min/T eff vs. T eff relation is extended to Epsilon Eri and 70 Oph A, observed and computed Ca II K and Mg II h and k integrated emission fluxes are compared, and full tabulations are given for the proposed models. It is suggested that if less than half the observed Mg II flux for the two stars is lost in noise, the difference between an active-chromosphere star and a quiet-chromosphere star lies in the lower-chromospheric temperature gradient.
A fast, implicit approximate factorization algorithm for the solution of the conservative full-potential equation for transonic flow in two and three dimensions is presented. Stability in supersonic regions is maintained by the use of an upwind evaluation of the density coefficient along all coordinate directions, providing an effective upwind difference of the streamwise terms for any orientation of the velocity vector and thereby enhancing the reliability of the algorithm. The algorithm is shown to provide rapid convergence for the computation of certain difficult two-dimensional test cases, including cases with fishtail shock patterns, demonstrating the reliability and efficiency of the procedure. Surface pressure coefficient distributions obtained by the present method are also found to be in good agreement with those computed by successive-line overrelaxation and a hybrid direct-solver/successive-line overrelaxation scheme, with significant reductions in CPU time required. A three-dimensional solution for a swept wing mounted between parallel walls is also presented which demonstrates the high convergence rate of the algorithm in three dimensions as well as two.