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At least 775 records · Page 43

Strangers in a foreign land: ‘Yeastizing’ plant enzymes

Abstract Expressing plant metabolic pathways in microbial platforms is an efficient, cost‐effective solution for producing many desired plant compounds. As eukaryotic organisms, yeasts are often the preferred platform. However, expression of plant enzymes in a yeast frequently leads to failure because the enzymes are poorly adapted to the foreign yeast cellular environment. Here, we first summarize the current engineering approaches for optimizing performance of plant enzymes in yeast. A critical limitation of these approaches is that they are labour‐intensive and must be customized for each individual enzyme, which significantly hinders the establishment of plant pathways in cellular factories. In response to this challenge, we propose the development of a cost‐effective computational pipeline to redesign plant enzymes for better adaptation to the yeast cellular milieu. This proposition is underpinned by compelling evidence that plant and yeast enzymes exhibit distinct sequence features that are generalizable across enzyme families. Consequently, we introduce a data‐driven machine learning framework designed to extract ‘yeastizing’ rules from natural protein sequence variations, which can be broadly applied to all enzymes. Additionally, we discuss the potential to integrate the machine learning model into a full design‐build‐test cycle.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

SOMAS: a platform for data-driven material discovery in redox flow battery development

Abstract Aqueous organic redox flow batteries offer an environmentally benign, tunable, and safe route to large-scale energy storage. The energy density is one of the key performance parameters of organic redox flow batteries, which critically depends on the solubility of the redox-active molecule in water. Prediction of aqueous solubility remains a challenge in chemistry. Recently, machine learning models have been developed for molecular properties prediction in chemistry and material science. The fidelity of a machine learning model critically depends on the diversity, accuracy, and abundancy of the training datasets. We build a comprehensive open access organic molecular database “Solubility of Organic Molecules in Aqueous Solution” (SOMAS) containing about 12,000 molecules that covers wider chemical and solubility regimes suitable for aqueous organic redox flow battery development efforts. In addition to experimental solubility, we also provide eight distinctive quantum descriptors including optimized geometry derived from high-throughput density functional theory calculations along with six molecular descriptors for each molecule. SOMAS builds a critical foundation for future efforts in artificial intelligence-based solubility prediction models.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Non-averaged single-molecule tertiary structures reveal RNA self-folding through individual-particle cryo-electron tomography

Large-scale and continuous conformational changes in the RNA self-folding process present significant challenges for structural studies, often requiring trade-offs between resolution and observational scope. Here, we utilize individual-particle cryo-electron tomography (IPET) to examine the post-transcriptional self-folding process of designed RNA origami 6-helix bundle with a clasp helix (6HBC). By avoiding selection, classification, averaging, or chemical fixation and optimizing cryo-ET data acquisition parameters, we reconstruct 120 three-dimensional (3D) density maps from 120 individual particles at an electron dose of no more than 168 e - Å -2 , achieving averaged resolutions ranging from 23 to 35 Å, as estimated by Fourier shell correlation (FSC) at 0.5. Each map allows us to identify distinct RNA helices and determine a unique tertiary structure. Statistical analysis of these 120 structures confirms two reported conformations and reveals a range of kinetically trapped, intermediate, and highly compacted states, demonstrating a maturation folding landscape likely driven by helix-helix compaction interactions.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Exploring the Frontiers of Energy Efficiency using Power Management at System Scale

In the face of surging power demands for exascale HPC systems, this work tackles the critical challenge of understanding the impact of software-driven power management techniques like Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and Power Capping. These techniques have been actively developed over the past few decades. By combining insights from GPU benchmarking to understand application power profiles, we present a telemetry data-driven approach for deriving energy savings projections. This approach has been demonstrably applied to the Frontier supercomputer at scale. Our findings based on three months of telemetry data indicate that, for certain resource-constrained jobs, significant energy savings (up to 8.5%) can be achieved without compromising performance. This translates to a substantial cost reduction, equivalent to 1438 MWh of energy saved. The key contribution of this work lies in the methodology for establishing an upper limit for these best-case scenarios and its successful application. This work enables HPC professionals to optimize the power-performance trade-off within constrained power budgets, not only for the exascale era but also beyond.

Karimi, Ahmad Maroof↗

Future Physics Programme of BESIII

There has recently been a dramatic renewal of interest in hadron spectroscopy and charm physics. This renaissance has been driven in part by the discovery of a plethora of charmonium-like XYZ states at BESIII and B factories, and the observation of an intriguing proton-antiproton threshold enhancement and the possibly related X(1835) meson state at BESIII, as well as the threshold measurements of charm mesons and charm baryons. We present a detailed survey of the important topics in tau-charm physics and hadron physics that can be further explored at BESIII during the remaining operation period of BEPCII. This survey will help in the optimization of the data-taking plan over the coming years, and provides physics motivation for the possible upgrade of BEPCII to higher luminosity.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Mastering HPC Runtime Prediction: From Observing Patterns to a Methodological Approach

The continual expansion of high-performance computing (HPC) brings with it an increasing need for efficiency. Heavy investment in energy, hardware, and software infrastructure to support peta- and exascale computing requires the optimization of existing systems and, wherever possible, the discernment and adoption of best-practices towards these goals. Such is the case for runtime prediction. When a job is submitted to an HPC system, an estimate of its runtime is provided by the user in the form of "requested wallclock". Error in this user-provided estimate can lead to jobs being prematurely killed by the scheduler, increased wait time on the queue, and decreased system utilization. More than fifteen years of research has been directed at mitigating these effects by using data-driven runtime predictions. Codified here is a set of commonalities and insights emerging from this body of work, which we present as recommendations and best practices. These practices are combined into a methodological approach described and evaluated on an 11-million-job dataset from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's petascale HPC system, Eagle. This dataset and the accompanying codebase have been released to the public domain for the benefit of the wider HPC research community.

high performance computing↗

NDE and SHM Simulation for CFRP Composites

Ultrasound-based nondestructive evaluation (NDE) is a common technique for damage detection in composite materials. There is a need for advanced NDE that goes beyond damage detection to damage quantification and characterization in order to enable data driven prognostics. The damage types that exist in carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites include microcracking and delaminations, and can be initiated and grown via impact forces (due to ground vehicles, tool drops, bird strikes, etc), fatigue, and extreme environmental changes. X-ray microfocus computed tomography data, among other methods, have shown that these damage types often result in voids/discontinuities of a complex volumetric shape. The specific damage geometry and location within ply layers affect damage growth. Realistic threedimensional NDE and structural health monitoring (SHM) simulations can aid in the development and optimization of damage quantification and characterization techniques. This paper is an overview of ongoing work towards realistic NDE and SHM simulation tools for composites, and also discusses NASA's need for such simulation tools in aeronautics and spaceflight. The paper describes the development and implementation of a custom ultrasound simulation tool that is used to model ultrasonic wave interaction with realistic 3-dimensional damage in CFRP composites. The custom code uses elastodynamic finite integration technique and is parallelized to run efficiently on computing cluster or multicore machines.

Leckey, Cara A. C.↗

Mastering HPC Runtime Prediction: From Observing Patterns to a Methodological Approach: Preprint

The continual expansion of high-performance computing (HPC) brings with it an increasing need for efficiency. Heavy investment in energy, hardware, and software infrastructure to support peta- and exascale computing requires the optimization of existing systems and, wherever possible, the discernment and adoption of best-practices towards these goals. Such is the case for runtime prediction. When a job is submitted to an HPC system, an estimate of its runtime is provided by the user in the form of "requested wallclock''. Error in this user-provided estimate can lead to jobs being prematurely killed by the scheduler, increased wait time on the queue, and decreased system utilization. More than fifteen years of research has been directed at mitigating these effects by using data-driven runtime predictions. Codified here is a set of commonalities and insights emerging from this body of work, which we present as recommendations and best practices. These practices are combined into a methodological approach described and evaluated on an 11-million-job dataset from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's petascale HPC system, Eagle. This dataset and the accompanying codebase have been released to the public domain for the benefit of the wider HPC research community.

high performance computing↗

Quantifying uncertainty for deep learning based forecasting and flow-reconstruction using neural architecture search ensembles

Classical problems in computational physics such as data-driven forecasting and signal reconstruction from sparse sensors have recently seen an explosion in deep neural network (DNN) based algorithmic approaches. However, most DNN models do not provide uncertainty estimates, which are crucial for establishing the trustworthiness of these techniques in downstream decision making tasks and scenarios. In recent years, ensemble-based methods have achieved significant success for the uncertainty quantification in DNNs on a number of benchmark problems. However, their performance on real-world applications remains under-explored. In this work, we present an automated approach to DNN discovery and demonstrate how this may also be utilized for ensemble-based uncertainty quantification. Specifically, we propose the use of a scalable neural and hyperparameter architecture search for discovering an ensemble of DNN models for complex dynamical systems. We highlight how the proposed method not only discovers high-performing neural network ensembles for our tasks, but also quantifies uncertainty seamlessly. This is achieved by using genetic algorithms and Bayesian optimization for sampling the search space of neural network architectures and hyperparameters. Subsequently, a model selection approach is used to identify candidate models for an ensemble set construction. Afterwards, a variance decomposition approach is used to estimate the uncertainty of the predictions from the ensemble. We demonstrate the feasibility of this framework for two tasks — forecasting from historical data and flow reconstruction from sparse sensors for the sea-surface temperature. In conclusion, we demonstrate superior performance from the ensemble in contrast with individual high-performing models and other benchmarks.

Deep ensembles↗

ALPS: A Linear Program Solver

ALPS is a computer program which can be used to solve general linear program (optimization) problems. ALPS was designed for those who have minimal linear programming (LP) knowledge and features a menu-driven scheme to guide the user through the process of creating and solving LP formulations. Once created, the problems can be edited and stored in standard DOS ASCII files to provide portability to various word processors or even other linear programming packages. Unlike many math-oriented LP solvers, ALPS contains an LP parser that reads through the LP formulation and reports several types of errors to the user. ALPS provides a large amount of solution data which is often useful in problem solving. In addition to pure linear programs, ALPS can solve for integer, mixed integer, and binary type problems. Pure linear programs are solved with the revised simplex method. Integer or mixed integer programs are solved initially with the revised simplex, and the completed using the branch-and-bound technique. Binary programs are solved with the method of implicit enumeration. This manual describes how to use ALPS to create, edit, and solve linear programming problems. Instructions for installing ALPS on a PC compatible computer are included in the appendices along with a general introduction to linear programming. A programmers guide is also included for assistance in modifying and maintaining the program.

Ferencz, Donald C.↗

Prediction of Distributed River Sediment Respiration Rates Using Community-Generated Data and Machine Learning

River sediment microbial respiration is a key indicator of ecosystem functioning and the biogeochemical fluxes across this critical zone link surface and subsurface waters. As such, there is tremendous interest in measuring and mapping these respiration rates. Respiration observations are expensive and labor intensive; there is limited data available to the community. An open science, collaborative initiative is collecting samples for respiration rate analysis and multi-scale metadata; this evolving data set is being used for making machine learning (ML) predictions at unsampled sites to help inform continued community engagement. However, it is a challenge to find an optimum configuration for ML models to work with this feature-rich (i.e., 100+ possible input variables) data set. Here, we present results from a two-tiered approach to managing the analysis of this complex data set: (a) a stacked ensemble of models that automatically optimizes hyperparameters and manages the training of many models and (b) feature permutation importance to detect the most important features in the models. The major elements of this workflow are modular, portable, open, and cloud-based thus making this implementation a potential template for other applications. The models developed here predict that sediment organic matter chemistry is one of the most important features for predicting sediment respiration rate. Other larger-scale, important features fall into the categories of climatic, ecological, geological, and fluvial settings. Leveraging these larger-scale features to generate data-driven estimates of river sediment respiration rates reveals spatially consistent but heterogeneous patterns across the river network of the Columbia River Basin.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Advancing Additive Manufacturing Through Artificial Intelligence–Powered, High-Throughput, Nondestructive Characterization and Process Optimization

This Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and ZEISS Industrial Metrology has demonstrated the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled x-ray computed tomography (XCT) to accelerate the qualification and certification of additively manufactured (AM) parts. At the core of this effort is Simurgh, an AI-powered XCT reconstruction framework jointly advanced by ORNL and ZEISS that integrates computer-aided design (CAD) models, physics-based simulations, and deep learning to overcome the long-standing challenges of metal artifact correction, long scan durations, and limited flaw detectability in dense and geometrically complex components. Simurgh enables high-throughput, high-quality 3D reconstruction from sparse and fast scans, which reduces XCT acquisition times by more than an order of magnitude and simultaneously improves defect detection limits by up to fourfold compared with industry-standard approaches. This capability reduces scan costs by more than 50%, lowers labor overhead, and makes XCT characterization economically viable for routine industrial use. By enabling reliable flaw detection in minutes rather than hours, Simurgh facilitates real-time feedback loops for process parameter optimization, which was highlighted in a recent npj Computational Materials (a Nature journal) issue. In the published study, more than 100 alloy coupons were characterized within a single day. This work represents a tenfold acceleration in the development of novel AM alloys and processes compared with conventional workflows. The ZEISS collaboration has also demonstrated the scalability of Simurgh to diverse application domains, including aerospace, nuclear, automotive, and biomedical components; in these applications, ensuring structural integrity is paramount. By drastically reducing barriers to XCT adoption, this partnership has laid the foundation for digital twins and data-driven certification pipelines and directly addressed bottlenecks in qualifying new materials and designs. Together, ORNL and ZEISS have shown that Simurgh advances the state of the art in nondestructive evaluation and aligns with the broader mission of enabling Industry 4.0 manufacturing ecosystems, in which intelligent, cost-effective, rapid quality assurance is integral to accelerating innovation and ensuring safety in critical applications.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Advancing Additive Manufacturing Through Artificial Intelligence–Powered, High-Throughput, Nondestructive Characterization and Process Optimization

This Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and ZEISS Industrial Metrology has demonstrated the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled x-ray computed tomography (XCT) to accelerate the qualification and certification of additively manufactured (AM) parts. At the core of this effort is Simurgh, an AI-powered XCT reconstruction framework jointly advanced by ORNL and ZEISS that integrates computer-aided design (CAD) models, physics-based simulations, and deep learning to overcome the long-standing challenges of metal artifact correction, long scan durations, and limited flaw detectability in dense and geometrically complex components. Simurgh enables high-throughput, high-quality 3D reconstruction from sparse and fast scans, which reduces XCT acquisition times by more than an order of magnitude and simultaneously improves defect detection limits by up to fourfold compared with industry-standard approaches. This capability reduces scan costs by more than 50%, lowers labor overhead, and makes XCT characterization economically viable for routine industrial use. By enabling reliable flaw detection in minutes rather than hours, Simurgh facilitates real-time feedback loops for process parameter optimization, which was highlighted in a recent npj Computational Materials (a Nature journal) issue. In the published study, more than 100 alloy coupons were characterized within a single day. This work represents a tenfold acceleration in the development of novel AM alloys and processes compared with conventional workflows. The ZEISS collaboration has also demonstrated the scalability of Simurgh to diverse application domains, including aerospace, nuclear, automotive, and biomedical components; in these applications, ensuring structural integrity is paramount. By drastically reducing barriers to XCT adoption, this partnership has laid the foundation for digital twins and data-driven certification pipelines and directly addressed bottlenecks in qualifying new materials and designs. Together, ORNL and ZEISS have shown that Simurgh advances the state of the art in nondestructive evaluation and aligns with the broader mission of enabling Industry 4.0 manufacturing ecosystems, in which intelligent, cost-effective, rapid quality assurance is integral to accelerating innovation and ensuring safety in critical applications.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Combustion Sensors: Gas Turbine Applications

This report documents efforts to survey the current research directions in sensor technology for gas turbine systems. The work is driven by the current and future requirements on system performance and optimization. Accurate real time measurements of velocities, pressure, temperatures, and species concentrations will be required for objectives such as combustion instability attenuation, pollutant reduction, engine health management, exhaust profile control via active control, etc. Changing combustor conditions - engine aging, flow path slagging, or rapid maneuvering - will require adaptive responses; the effectiveness of such will be only as good as the dynamic information available for processing. All of these issues point toward the importance of continued sensor development. For adequate control of the combustion process, sensor data must include information about the above mentioned quantities along with equivalence ratios and radical concentrations, and also include both temporal and spatial velocity resolution. Ultimately these devices must transfer from the laboratory to field installations, and thus must become low weight and cost, reliable and maintainable. A primary conclusion from this study is that the optics-based sensor science will be the primary diagnostic in future gas turbine technologies.

Human, Mel↗

Application-driven Privacy-preserving Data Publishing with Correlated Attributes

Recent advances in computing have allowed for the possibility to collect large amounts of data on personal activities and private living spaces. To address the privacy concerns of users in this environment, we propose a novel framework called PR-GAN that offers privacy-preserving mechanism using generative adversarial networks. Given a target application, PR-GAN automatically modifies the data to hide sensitive attributes - which may be hidden and can be inferred by machine learning algorithms - while preserving the data utility in the target application. Unlike prior works, the public's possible knowledge of the correlation between the target application and sensitive attributes is built into our modeling. We formulate our problem as an optimization problem, show that an optimal solution exists and use generative adversarial networks (GAN) to create perturbations. We further show that our method provides privacy guarantees under the Pufferfish framework, an elegant generalization of the differential privacy that allows for the modeling of prior knowledge on data and correlations. Through experiments, we show that our method outperforms conventional methods in effectively hiding the sensitive attributes while guaranteeing high performance in the target application, for both property inference and training purposes. Finally, we demonstrate through further experiments that once our model learns a privacy-preserving task, such as hiding subjects' identity, on a group of individuals, it can perform the same task on a separate group with minimal performance drops.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Strategies for concurrent processing of complex algorithms in data driven architectures

The results of ongoing research directed at developing a graph theoretical model for describing data and control flow associated with the execution of large grained algorithms in a spatial distributed computer environment is presented. This model is identified by the acronym ATAMM (Algorithm/Architecture Mapping Model). The purpose of such a model is to provide a basis for establishing rules for relating an algorithm to its execution in a multiprocessor environment. Specifications derived from the model lead directly to the description of a data flow architecture which is a consequence of the inherent behavior of the data and control flow described by the model. The purpose of the ATAMM based architecture is to optimize computational concurrency in the multiprocessor environment and to provide an analytical basis for performance evaluation. The ATAMM model and architecture specifications are demonstrated on a prototype system for concept validation.

Stoughton, John W.↗

Continuous Emulation and Multiscale Visualization of Traffic Flow Using Stationary Roadside Sensor Data

With the advent of the next-generation traffic monitoring systems, there has been a significant increase in the spatial-temporal resolution of vehicle mobility data in many cities. Effective analysis and visualization of such data can provide transportation planners with data-driven insights, which can facilitate the understanding of multiscale traffic dynamics. In this paper, we present a web-based traffic emulator for emulating and visualizing near-real-time and historical traffic flows on highways using data from road-side sensors. To construct a continuous traffic flow, the emulator adopts an analytical pipeline that can (a) integrate traffic data collected from discrete road-side radar detection sensors, (b) interpolate traffic conditions (vehicle speed and volume) on unmeasured road segments based on traffic flow theory, and (c) generate lane-specific vehicle trajectories and movements using a mathematically optimized representation of the road network. Our app also provides an integrated visual workflow that allows users to explore the interconnected traffic dynamics using an appropriate traffic flow visualization selected based on the level of detail. We devise two innovative geo-visualization techniques that utilize an animated strips-network representation and a lane usage matrix to visualize lane performances. To ensure a smooth emulation of large-scale traffic flow in an easy-to-access web environment, we implement the emulator using client-side GPU-accelerated techniques. Lastly, we close with a case study that visualizes traffic dynamics of two scenarios - an afternoon peak hour and a traffic accident - in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Our app visualizes the responses of traffic dynamics during different traffic conditions, and to the presence of the traffic accident at different spatial scales.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Computer architecture for efficient algorithmic executions in real-time systems: New technology for avionics systems and advanced space vehicles

Improvements and advances in the development of computer architecture now provide innovative technology for the recasting of traditional sequential solutions into high-performance, low-cost, parallel system to increase system performance. Research conducted in development of specialized computer architecture for the algorithmic execution of an avionics system, guidance and control problem in real time is described. A comprehensive treatment of both the hardware and software structures of a customized computer which performs real-time computation of guidance commands with updated estimates of target motion and time-to-go is presented. An optimal, real-time allocation algorithm was developed which maps the algorithmic tasks onto the processing elements. This allocation is based on the critical path analysis. The final stage is the design and development of the hardware structures suitable for the efficient execution of the allocated task graph. The processing element is designed for rapid execution of the allocated tasks. Fault tolerance is a key feature of the overall architecture. Parallel numerical integration techniques, tasks definitions, and allocation algorithms are discussed. The parallel implementation is analytically verified and the experimental results are presented. The design of the data-driven computer architecture, customized for the execution of the particular algorithm, is discussed.

Carroll, Chester C.↗