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At least 865 records · Page 48

NAS Parallel Benchmark. Results 11-96: Performance Comparison of HPF and MPI Based NAS Parallel Benchmarks

High Performance Fortran (HPF), the high-level language for parallel Fortran programming, is based on Fortran 90. HALF was defined by an informal standards committee known as the High Performance Fortran Forum (HPFF) in 1993, and modeled on TMC's CM Fortran language. Several HPF features have since been incorporated into the draft ANSI/ISO Fortran 95, the next formal revision of the Fortran standard. HPF allows users to write a single parallel program that can execute on a serial machine, a shared-memory parallel machine, or a distributed-memory parallel machine. HPF eliminates the complex, error-prone task of explicitly specifying how, where, and when to pass messages between processors on distributed-memory machines, or when to synchronize processors on shared-memory machines. HPF is designed in a way that allows the programmer to code an application at a high level, and then selectively optimize portions of the code by dropping into message-passing or calling tuned library routines as 'extrinsics'. Compilers supporting High Performance Fortran features first appeared in late 1994 and early 1995 from Applied Parallel Research (APR) Digital Equipment Corporation, and The Portland Group (PGI). IBM introduced an HPF compiler for the IBM RS/6000 SP/2 in April of 1996. Over the past two years, these implementations have shown steady improvement in terms of both features and performance. The performance of various hardware/ programming model (HPF and MPI (message passing interface)) combinations will be compared, based on latest NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) Parallel Benchmark (NPB) results, thus providing a cross-machine and cross-model comparison. Specifically, HPF based NPB results will be compared with MPI based NPB results to provide perspective on performance currently obtainable using HPF versus MPI or versus hand-tuned implementations such as those supplied by the hardware vendors. In addition we would also present NPB (Version 1.0) performance results for the following systems: DEC Alpha Server 8400 5/440, Fujitsu VPP Series (VX, VPP300, and VPP700), HP/Convex Exemplar SPP2000, IBM RS/6000 SP P2SC node (120 MHz) NEC SX-4/32, SGI/CRAY T3E, SGI Origin2000.

Saini, Subash↗

Optimizing Error-Bounded Lossy Compression for Scientific Data by Dynamic Spline Interpolation

Today's scientific simulations are producing vast volumes of data that cannot be stored and transferred efficiently because of limited storage capacity, parallel I/O bandwidth, and network bandwidth. The situation is getting worse over time because of the ever-increasing gap between relatively slow data transfer speed and fast-growing computation power in modern supercomputers. Error-bounded lossy compression is becoming one of the most critical techniques for resolving the big scientific data issue, in that it can significantly reduce the scientific data volume while guaranteeing that the reconstructed data is valid for users because of its compression-error-bounding feature. In this paper, we present a novel error-bounded lossy compressor based on a state-of-the-art prediction-based compression framework. Our solution exhibits substantially better compression quality than all of the existing error-bounded lossy compressors, with comparable compression speed. Specifically, our contribution is threefold. (1) We provide an in-depth analysis of why the best-existing prediction-based lossy compressor can only minimally improve the compression quality. (2) We propose a dynamic spline interpolation approach with a series of optimization strategies that can significantly improve the data prediction accuracy, substantially improving the compression quality in turn. (3) We perform a thorough evaluation using six real-world scientific simulation datasets across different science domains to evaluate our solution vs. all other related works. Experiments show that the compression ratio of our solution is higher than that of the second-best lossy compressor by 20%similar to 460% with the same error bound in most of the cases.

Zhao, Kai↗

The hTERT core promoter forms three parallel G-quadruplexes

The structure of the 68 nt sequence with G-quadruplex forming potential within the hTERT promoter is disputed. One model features a structure with three stacked parallel G-quadruplex units, while another features an unusual duplex hairpin structure adjoined to two stacked parallel and antiparallel quadruplexes. We report here the results of an integrated structural biology study designed to distinguish between these possibilities. As part of our study, we designed a sequence with an optimized hairpin structure and show that its biophysical and biochemical properties are inconsistent with the structure formed by the hTERT wild-type sequence. By using circular dichroism, thermal denaturation, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, analytical ultracentrifugation, small-angle X-ray scattering, molecular dynamics simulations and a DNase I cleavage assay we found that the wild type hTERT core promoter folds into a stacked, three-parallel G-quadruplex structure. The hairpin structure is inconsistent with all of our experimental data obtained with the wild-type sequence. All-atom models for both structures were constructed using molecular dynamics simulations. These models accurately predicted the experimental hydrodynamic properties measured for each structure. We found with certainty that the wild-type hTERT promoter sequence does not form a hairpin structure in solution, but rather folds into a compact stacked three-G-quadruplex conformation.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Image gathering, coding, and processing: End-to-end optimization for efficient and robust acquisition of visual information

Researchers are concerned with the end-to-end performance of image gathering, coding, and processing. The applications range from high-resolution television to vision-based robotics, wherever the resolution, efficiency and robustness of visual information acquisition and processing are critical. For the presentation at this workshop, it is convenient to divide research activities into the following two overlapping areas: The first is the development of focal-plane processing techniques and technology to effectively combine image gathering with coding, with an emphasis on low-level vision processing akin to the retinal processing in human vision. The approach includes the familiar Laplacian pyramid, the new intensity-dependent spatial summation, and parallel sensing/processing networks. Three-dimensional image gathering is attained by combining laser ranging with sensor-array imaging. The second is the rigorous extension of information theory and optimal filtering to visual information acquisition and processing. The goal is to provide a comprehensive methodology for quantitatively assessing the end-to-end performance of image gathering, coding, and processing.

Huck, Friedrich O.↗

Further discrete variable results for a panel flutter optimization problem

Numerical solutions are presented for the problem of minimum weight design of a thin one-dimensional, simply supported, solid panel in compression, with one side exposed to a parallel high supersonic air flow. The flutter speed is held fixed and a minimum thickness constraint is imposed.

Pierson, B. L.↗

Massively parallel modeling and inversion of electrical resistivity tomography data using PFLOTRAN

Abstract. Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) is a broadly accepted geophysical method for subsurface investigations. Interpretation of field ERT data usually requires the application of computationally intensive forward modeling and inversion algorithms. For large-scale ERT data, the efficiency of these algorithms depends on the robustness, accuracy, and scalability on high-performance computing resources. In this regard, we present a robust and highly scalable implementation of forward modeling and inversion algorithms for ERT data. The implementation is publicly available and developed within the framework of PFLOTRAN, an open-source, state-of-the-art massively parallel subsurface flow and transport simulation code. The forward modeling is based on a finite-volume discretization of the governing differential equations, and the inversion uses a Gauss–Newton optimization scheme. To evaluate the accuracy of the forward modeling, two examples are first presented by considering layered (1D) and 3D earth conductivity models. The computed numerical results show good agreement with the analytical solutions for the layered earth model and results from a well-established code for the 3D model. Inversion of ERT data, simulated for a 3D model, is then performed to demonstrate the inversion capability by recovering the conductivity of the model. To demonstrate the parallel performance of PFLOTRAN's ERT process model and inversion capabilities, large-scale scalability tests are performed by using up to 131 072 processes on a leadership class supercomputer. These tests are performed for the two most computationally intensive steps of the ERT inversion: forward modeling and Jacobian computation. For the forward modeling, we consider models with up to 122 ×106 degrees of freedom (DOFs) in the resulting system of linear equations and demonstrate that the code exhibits almost linear scalability on up to 10 000 DOFs per process. On the other hand, the code shows superlinear scalability for the Jacobian computation, mainly because all computations are fairly evenly distributed over each process with no parallel communication.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

HPC for optimizing process parameters to control material evolution in seamless induction hardening of wind turbine main shaft bearings

Work proposed in this project focused on understanding the effect of martensitic transformation in the steel on the potential for cracking during seamless induction hardening (SIH) as a function of process conditions to allow the process to optimally scale up. Large-scale, three-dimensional phase-field simulations of martensitic transformation were performed using MEUMAPPS-SS (Microstructure Evolution Using Massively Parallel Phase-field Simulations – Solid State) code developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The simulations were guided by location-specific thermal history generated by experimental measurements of time-temperature history generated at The Timken Company. The simulations were able to capture the morphological evolution of the martensite variants in an Fe-1.0C-1.5Cr steel based on the Nishiyama-Wasserman (NW) orientation relationship. The simulations were also able to quantify the stress-state at the interface between impinging martensite variants. The simulations indicated that the magnitude of the various stress and strain components were dependent on the sizes of the impinging plates with a reduction in these quantities with reduced plate size in agreement with experimental findings. The results obtained from the simulations will be used to guide the optimization of the alloy thermal conditions to eliminate quench cracking during SIH of bearing steels.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DyG-DPCD: A Distributed Parallel Community Detection Algorithm for Large-Scale Dynamic Graphs

Dynamic (Temporal) graphs capture the valuable evolution of real-world systems, from the continuously evolving patterns of social interactions and genetic pathways to the dynamic fluctuations of economic forces. Detecting communities for such evolving networks poses unique challenges. Detecting and analyzing the evolution of communities within dynamic graphs unlocks valuable insights into the underlying structural and temporal patterns of real-world systems. However, the sheer volume of modern graph data and the inherent complexity of the temporal dimension pose significant challenges to scalable community detection algorithms. Addressing this gap, our work explores the limited landscape of scalable distributed-memory parallel methods specifically designed for dynamic network community detection. We propose a novel parallel algorithm, DyG-DPCD (Dynamic Graph Distributed Parallel Community Detection), to detect communities in dynamic networks using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) framework. We present a vertex-centric approach, allowing us to detect communities through local optimization. Furthermore, we enhance our baseline algorithm by incorporating three heuristics, which improve the algorithm’s performance significantly while maintaining the quality of the solutions. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm by experimenting on several real-world large-scale networks with hundreds of millions of edges spanning diverse domains. Notably, DyG-DPCD achieves speedups between 25× and 30× for large networks that we experimented on using NERSC compute nodes. In conclusion, our algorithm outperforms the STINGER parallel re-agglomeration algorithm by 30×.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Plastic Parallel Pathways Platform - 4P Model

Global momentum is building towards a circular economy capable of keeping plastics in use and out of waste streams. Given that 79% of all plastic produced since 1950 has accumulated in landfills or the natural environment,rapid implementation of various end-of-life (EoL) management technologies will be needed to reach this target. However, it can be challenging to develop an effective plastic EoL strategy when the available options - chemical or molecular recycling, energy recovery, upcycling, downcycling, closed-loop (plastic-to-plastic) or open-loop (plastic-to-x) recycling, among others - can generate products ranging from low-grade to virgin-quality plastic and from fuels to value-added chemicals. We present a flexible material flow model capable of analyzing the effects of both plastic-to-plastic and plastic-to-x EoL management strategies on the U.S. PET economy. This Plastic Parallel Pathways Platform (4P) assesses the environmental impacts, costs, and circularity of a PET system in which waste is managed through six potential EoL pathways: landfill, incineration with energy recovery, pyrolysis to fuel oil, upcycling to glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP), mechanical recycling to low-grade PET, and chemical recycling (glycolysis) to bottle-grade PET. We compare the pathways across multiple metrics using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and then use a brute force algorithm to predict an optimal combination of EoL pathways to minimize greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and costs and maximize circularity. This work highlights the need to implement a diverse portfolio of EoL strategies in parallel to enable a PET economy that meets environmental, economic, and circularity requirements simultaneously.

downcycling↗

LATTE: open-source, high-performance traveltime computation, tomography and source location in acoustic and elastic media

Traveltime-based tomography and source location are fundamental approaches for imaging subsurface structures and understanding the spatiotemporal distribution of seismicity from local to global scales. We present an open-source, high-performance framework integrating eikonal equation solvers and adjoint-state theory for traveltime computation, velocity tomography, source location and joint tomography-location in 2-D/3-D acoustic and elastic media. We introduce novel regularization schemes based on total generalized p-variation, structural similarity and multitask machine learning to enhance the fidelity and interpretability of inverted models and source locations. Key features of our implementation also include the ability to leverage both absolute-difference and double-difference traveltime misfits for high-fidelity velocity tomography and source parameter estimation; support for traveltime computation and inversion in diverse 2-D/3-D scenarios with arbitrary source and receiver distributions; and a perturbation-based optimal step-size estimation method to reduce computational costs. In addition, our implementation employs shared-memory and distributed-memory parallelization to provide an efficient solution for traveltime computation, tomography, and source location. In conclusion, we validate the efficacy and accuracy of our approach through multiple synthetic data examples.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

The P/POD project: Programmable/Pilot Oriented Display

A pilot orientated display system was developed for general aviation aircraft in order to reduce cockpit workloads. Emphasis was placed on the optimization of flight procedural aspects (i.e., interpretation of Loran data). Low cost hardware/software were utilized in the system to reduce developmental costs. Parallel development and testing were conducted on the ground (simulator) and in the air using the same hardware.

Littlefield, J. A.↗

Lewis Structures Technology, 1988. Volume 1: Structural Dynamics

The specific purpose of the symposium was to familiarize the engineering structures community with the depth and range of research performed by the Structures Division of the Lewis Research Center and its academic and industrial partners. Sessions covered vibration control, fracture mechanics, ceramic component reliability, parallel computing, nondestructive testing, dynamical systems, fatigue and damage, wind turbines, hot section technology, structural mechanics codes, computational methods for dynamics, structural optimization, and applications of structural dynamics.

Source record↗

NASA Tech Briefs, March 2004

Topics covered include: 1) Advanced Signal Conditioners for Data-Acquisition Systems; 2) Downlink Data Multiplexer; 3) Viewing ISS Data in Real Time via the Internet; 4) Autonomous Environment-Monitoring Networks; 5) Readout of DSN Monitor Data; 6) Parallel-Processing Equalizers for Multi-Gbps Communications; 7) AIN-Based Packaging for SiC High-Temperature Electronics; 8) Software for Optimizing Quality Assurance of Other Software; 9) The TechSat 21 Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment; 10) Software for Analyzing Laminar-to-Turbulent Flow Transitions; 11) Elastomer Filled With Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes; 12) Modifying Ship Air-Wake Vortices for Aircraft Operations; 13) Strain-Gauge Measurement of Weight of Fluid in a Tank; 14) Advanced Docking System With Magnetic Initial Capture; 15) Blade-Pitch Control for Quieting Tilt-Rotor Aircraft; 16) Solar Array Panels With Dust-Removal Capability; 17) Aligning Arrays of Lenses and Single-Mode Optical Fibers; 18) Automatic Control of Arc Process for Making Carbon Nanotubes; 19) Curved-Focal-Plane Arrays Using Deformed-Membrane Photodetectors; 20) Role of Meteorology in Flights of a Solar-Powered Airplane; 21) Model of Mixing Layer With Multicomponent Evaporating Drops; 22) Solution-Assisted Optical Contacting; 23) Improved Discrete Approximation of Laplacian of Gaussian; 24) Utilizing Expert Knowledge in Estimating Future STS Costs; 25) Study of Rapid-Regression Liquefying Hybrid Rocket Fuels; and 26) More About the Phase-Synchronized Enhancement Method.

Source record↗

Culture-Independent Fungal Profiling for the International Space Station using Nanopore Sequencing: Method Development

Microbial monitoring of the International Space Station (ISS) environment is a crew health requirement that encompasses both bacterial and fungal identification. To achieve this currently, culture-based methods are used for sample collection, and these samples must be returned to the laboratory for analysis. The use of culture and the need for sample return to Earth results in a bias toward culturable organisms and causes a significant delay between sample collection and delivery of final data (weeks to months), respectively. Recently, advancements in molecular technology have aided a broad range of applications, including medical, industrial, and basic sciences. Additionally, increases in portability and ease-of-use of molecular platforms have provided point-of-use capabilities demonstrated by the miniPCR thermal cycler (miniPCR bio) and the MinION sequencer (Oxford Nanopore Technologies). Together, these devices have been applied to, and validated for, the identification of bacteria onboard the ISS. Building on this work, we have developed a spaceflight-compatible fungal workflow. Molecular-based fungal analysis is complicated by low biomass, difficult-to-lyse spores, debate regarding the region for taxonomic assignment, and the lack of bioinformatic pipelines and reference databases. To overcome these difficulties, primers yielding an ~ 2 Kb amplicon were validated against a wide range of ISS fungal isolates. The current spaceflight library preparation was substantially optimized, a bioinformatic pipeline was created, and refinements to the UNITE database were implemented. To compare this optimized method to the current culture-based standard, 30 sample sets (60 total swabs, two swabs held in tandem) were evaluated. Parallel fungal profiles were obtained between the two methods, with the culture-independent method revealing increased diversity. The addition of this method to the already established bacterial process fulfills the crew health identification requirement. Moreover, the implementation of this method onboard ISS will enhance our understanding of its unique fungal microbiome.

Hang N. Nguyen↗

Locality-Aware Scheduling for Scalable Heterogeneous Environments

Heterogeneous computing promise boost performance of scientific applications by allowing massively parallel execution of computational tasks. However, manually managing extremely heterogeneous, multi-device systems is complicated and may result in sub-optimal performance. Specifically, data management is an extremely challenging problem on multi-device systems. In this work, we introduce two locality-aware schedulers for the Minos Computing Library (MCL), an asynchronous, task-based programming model and runtime for extremely heterogeneous systems. The first scheduler implements a pure locality-aware algorithm to maximize data reuse, though it might incur in ”hot-spots” that limit system utilization. The second scheduler mitigates this drawback by dynamically targeting between locality-awareness and system utilization based on the current workload and available computing devices. Our results show that locality-awareness greatly benefit applications that exhibit data reuse, providing up to 6.9x and 7.9x over the original MCL scheduler and equivalent OpenCL implementations, respectively. Moreover, our schedulers introduce negligible overhead compared with the original MCL scheduler and achieve similar performance for applications that don’t benefit from data locality.

Architecture, co-design, Task-based programming mo↗

FLEET: Flexible Efficient Ensemble Training for Heterogeneous Deep Neural Networks

Parallel training of an ensemble of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) on a cluster of nodes is an effective approach to shorten the process of neural network architecture search and hyper-parameter tuning for a given learning task. Prior efforts have shown that data sharing, where the common preprocessing operation is shared across the DNN training pipelines, saves computational resources and improves pipeline efficiency. Data sharing strategy, however, performs poorly for a heterogeneous set of DNNs where each DNN has varying computational needs and thus different training rate and convergence speed. This paper proposes FLEET, a flexible ensemble DNN training framework for efficiently training a heterogeneous set of DNNs. We build FLEET via several technical innovations. We theoretically prove that an optimal resource allocation is NP-hard and propose a greedy algorithm to efficiently allocate resources for training each DNN with data sharing. We integrate data-parallel DNN training into ensemble training to mitigate the differences in training rates and introduce checkpointing into this context to address the issue of different convergence speeds. Experiments show that FLEET significantly improves the training efficiency of DNN ensembles without compromising the quality of the result.

Guan, Hui↗

Instability Issue of Paralleled Dies in an SiC Power Module in Solid-State Circuit Breaker Applications

Paralleled dies in a power module could have instability issues during high current switching transients. Here, the instability is caused by the differential-mode oscillation among paralleled MOSFETs. Conventional analyses of paralleled MOSFETs’ stability are normally limited to a single operating point, which ignores the influences of the switching trajectory and nonlinear device parameters on stability. This article reveals that the switching trajectory can significantly influence parallel stability. The analysis is improved by solving eigenvalues of state-space modeling system matrices of all operating points that the switching trajectory goes through considering nonlinear device parameters. Higher voltage and current stresses result in greater real parts of complex eigenvalues, which explains why the paralleled MOSFETs are more unstable with higher voltage and current stresses. To improve stability in solid-state circuit breaker applications, we propose a method to manipulate the switching trajectory to avoid the unstable region where the conventional hard switching trajectory normally goes through. Experimental results show that the turn- off current capability can be increased from ~five times of rated current with the gate oscillation using the conventional turn- off trajectory to ~ten times of rated current without the gate oscillation using the optimal turn- off trajectory.

42 ENGINEERING↗