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At least 901 records · Page 50

Transient local secondary structure in the intrinsically disordered C‐term of the Albino3 insertase

Albino3 (Alb3) is an integral membrane protein fundamental to the targeting and insertion of light‐harvesting complex (LHC) proteins into the thylakoid membrane. Alb3 contains a stroma‐exposed C‐terminus (Alb3‐Cterm) that is responsible for binding the LHC‐loaded transit complex before LHC membrane insertion. Alb3‐Cterm has been reported to be intrinsically disordered, but precise mechanistic details underlying how it recognizes and binds to the transit complex are lacking, and the functional roles of its four different motifs have been debated. Using a novel combination of experimental and computational techniques such as single‐molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer, circular dichroism with deconvolution analysis, site‐directed mutagenesis, trypsin digestion assays, and all‐atom molecular dynamics simulations in conjunction with enhanced sampling techniques, we show that Alb3‐Cterm contains transient secondary structure in motifs I and II. The excellent agreement between the experimental and computational data provides a quantitatively consistent picture and allows us to identify a heterogeneous structural ensemble that highlights the local and transient nature of the secondary structure. This structural ensemble was used to predict both the inter‐residue distance distributions of single molecules and the apparent unfolding free energy of the transient secondary structure, which were both in excellent agreement with those determined experimentally. We hypothesize that this transient local secondary structure may play an important role in the recognition of Alb3‐Cterm for the LHC‐loaded transit complex, and these results should provide a framework to better understand protein targeting by the Alb3‐Oxa1‐YidC family of insertases.

Okoto, Patience S.↗

High-resolution coupled physics solvers for analysing fine-scale nuclear reactor design problems

An integrated multi-physics simulation capability for the design and analysis of current and future nuclear reactor models is being investigated, to tightly couple neutron transport and thermal-hydraulics physics under the SHARP framework. Over several years, high-fidelity, validated mono-physics solvers with proven scalability on petascale architectures have been developed independently. Based on a unified component-based architecture, these existing codes can be coupled with a mesh-data backplane and a flexible coupling-strategy-based driver suite to produce a viable tool for analysts. The goal of the SHARP framework is to perform fully resolved coupled physics analysis of a reactor on heterogeneous geometry, in order to reduce the overall numerical uncertainty while leveraging available computational resources. Finally, the coupling methodology and software interfaces of the framework are presented, along with verification studies on two representative fast sodium-cooled reactor demonstration problems to prove the usability of the SHARP framework.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

A Nonlocal Peridynamic Plasticity Model for the Dynamic Flow and Fracture of Concrete.

A nonlocal, ordinary peridynamic constitutive model is formulated to numerically simulate the pressure-dependent flow and fracture of heterogeneous, quasi-brittle ma- terials, such as concrete. Classical mechanics and traditional computational modeling methods do not accurately model the distributed fracture observed within this family of materials. The peridynamic horizon, or range of influence, provides a characteristic length to the continuum and limits localization of fracture. Scaling laws are derived to relate the parameters of peridynamic constitutive model to the parameters of the classical Drucker-Prager plasticity model. Thermodynamic analysis of associated and non-associated plastic flow is performed. An implicit integration algorithm is formu- lated to calculate the accumulated plastic bond extension and force state. The gov- erning equations are linearized and the simulation of the quasi-static compression of a cylinder is compared to the classical theory. A dissipation-based peridynamic bond failure criteria is implemented to model fracture and the splitting of a concrete cylinder is numerically simulated. Finally, calculation of the impact and spallation of a con- crete structure is performed to assess the suitability of the material and failure models for simulating concrete during dynamic loadings. The peridynamic model is found to accurately simulate the inelastic deformation and fracture behavior of concrete during compression, splitting, and dynamically induced spall. The work expands the types of materials that can be modeled using peridynamics. A multi-scale methodology for simulating concrete to be used in conjunction with the plasticity model is presented. The work was funded by LDRD 158806.

Vogler, Tracy↗

CompLaB v1.0: a scalable pore-scale model for flow, biogeochemistry, microbial metabolism, and biofilm dynamics

Abstract. Microbial activity and chemical reactions in porous media depend on the local conditions at the pore scale and can involve complex feedback with fluid flow and mass transport. We present a modeling framework that quantitatively accounts for the interactions between the bio(geo)chemical and physical processes and that can integrate genome-scale microbial metabolic information into a dynamically changing, spatially explicit representation of environmental conditions. The model couples a lattice Boltzmann implementation of Navier–Stokes (flow) and advection–diffusion-reaction (mass conservation) equations. Reaction formulations can include both kinetic rate expressions and flux balance analysis, thereby integrating reactive transport modeling and systems biology. We also show that the use of surrogate models such as neural network representations of in silico cell models can speed up computations significantly, facilitating applications to complex environmental systems. Parallelization enables simulations that resolve heterogeneity at multiple scales, and a cellular automaton module provides additional capabilities to simulate biofilm dynamics. The code thus constitutes a platform suitable for a range of environmental, engineering and – potentially – medical applications, in particular ones that involve the simulation of microbial dynamics.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Traleika Glacier: A hardware-software co-designed approach to exascale computing

The move from current petascale machines to future exascale machines will need both hardware improvements and software changes. Hardware will need to evolve to focus primarily on features that lower energy consumption: near-threshold voltage operation, fine-grained power and clock management and heterogeneity. Software will also need to evolve and be able to express more parallelism, become more dynamic and adaptable in order to be able to operate on a much more variable hardware. Here, we present Traleika Glacier, an effort that seeks to evaluate radical design changes to meet the constraints, both in terms of power and cost, of exascale computing. The salient features of the hardware design presented in the work include a) a use of heterogeneous cores, b) a redesign of the memory system that centers around hierarchical scratchpads and a global address space, c) the hardware acceleration of certain memory and network operations through specialized engines and, d) very fine-grained control and monitoring capabilities. On the software side, we describe a task-based runtime system, the Open Community Runtime (OCR) which aims to express a wide range of higher-level programming models with a very limited set of core concepts: event-driven tasks for computation, events for synchronization and relocatable data-blocks for data management.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Correcting implicit solvation at metal/water interfaces through the incorporation of competitive water adsorption

Conventional continuum solvation models are ubiquitous in computational catalysis, including for describing metal/water interfaces, which are relevant to both solution-phase heterogeneous catalysis and electrocatalysis. Nonetheless, we find that such continuum models qualitatively fail to describe both the adsorption free energy and conformational preference for many organic molecules at such interfaces, largely due to the failure of continuum models to incorporate the role of competitive water adsorption. We develop a simple phenomenological model that accounts for competitive water adsorption and show that the model, when used in conjunction with continuum solvation, provides a dramatic improvement in the description of both adsorption and conformational preference. The model is also extended to additionally incorporate the influence of applied potential at the electrode surface, thus facilitating computationally efficient applications to scenarios including electrocatalysis.

Chemistry↗

A practical approach to the sensitivity analysis for kinetic Monte Carlo simulation of heterogeneous catalysis

Lattice kinetic Monte Carlo simulations have become a vital tool for predictive quality atomistic understanding of complex surface chemical reaction kinetics over a wide range of reaction conditions. In order to expand their practical value in terms of giving guidelines for atomic level design of catalytic systems, it is very desirable to readily evaluate a sensitivity analysis for a given model. The result of such a sensitivity analysis quantitatively expresses the dependency of the turnover frequency, being the main output variable, on the rate constants entering the model. In the past the application of sensitivity analysis, such as Degree of Rate Control, has been hampered by its exuberant computational effort required to accurately sample numerical derivatives of a property that is obtained from a stochastic simulation method. Here in this study we present an efficient and robust three stage approach that is capable of reliably evaluating the sensitivity measures for stiff microkinetic models as we demonstrate using CO oxidation on RuO 2 (110) as a prototypical reaction. In a first step, we utilize the Fisher Information Matrix for filtering out elementary processes which only yield negligible sensitivity. Then we employ an estimator based on linear response theory for calculating the sensitivity measure for non-critical conditions which covers the majority of cases. Finally we adopt a method for sampling coupled finite differences for evaluating the sensitivity measure of lattice based models. This allows efficient evaluation even in critical regions near a second order phase transition that are hitherto difficult to control. The combined approach leads to significant computational savings over straightforward numerical derivatives and should aid in accelerating the nano scale design of heterogeneous catalysts.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Celeritas: Accelerating Geant4 with GPUs

Celeritas [1] is a new Monte Carlo (MC) detector simulation code designed for computationally intensive applications (specifically, High Lumi- nosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) simulation) on high-performance heterogeneous architectures. In the past two years Celeritas has advanced from prototyping a GPU-based single physics model in infinite medium to implementing a full set of electromagnetic (EM) physics processes in complex geometries. The current release of Celeritas, version 0.3, has incorporated full device-based navigation, an event loop in the presence of magnetic fields, and detector hit scoring. New functionality incorporates a scheduler to offload electromagnetic physics to the GPU within a Geant4-driven simulation, enabling integration of Celeritas into high energy physics (HEP) experimental frameworks such as CMSSW. On the Summit supercomputer, Celeritas performs EM physics between 6 and 32 faster using the machine’s Nvidia GPUs compared to using only CPUs. When running a multithreaded Geant4 ATLAS test beam application with full hadronic physics, using Celeritas to accelerate the EM physics results in an overall simulation speedup of 1.8–2.3× on GPU and 1.2× on CPU.

Johnson, Seth R.↗

Scalability Tests of a Finite Element Code on Hundreds of Thousands Cores and Heterogeneous Architecture

A multi-scale finite element method code, msFEM, is tested on Jaguar and Nebulae, two petaflops computers that were listed as #1 and #2 on the Top500 list of June 2010 at the time of the tests. The flat MPI version of msFEM is scaled from 20K up to 200K CPU cores on Jaguar, delivering 70% parallel efficiency at the 200K cores with a finite element model of eight millions of degrees of freedom. GPU versions, in both double precision and mixed precision coded through MPI+OpenMP+CUDA hybrid programming, 900 GPU nodes on Jaguar and 1500 GPU nodes on Nebulae, achieving remarkable 90 + % parallel efficiency on the systems. The mixed-precision GPU version delivers further 1.5 times of speedup over the fully double precision version with no significant implementational cost. The large-scale tests support that the msFEM runs efficiently on petaflops computers and is highly potential for domain applications at extreme-scale.

finite element method↗

Energy Efficient Material Processing through Automated Process Monitoring and Controls

Smart manufacturing is bound to play a crucial role in reducing global energy consumption while accelerating economic development. This phenomenon is evident in advanced sensing technology developments, data analytics and machine learning/AI, automated controls, cloud computing, etc. The immediate opportunity for smart manufacturing is to improve the energy efficiency of manufacturing operations through innovations in processes and controls. The manufacturing industry still consumes about 30% of total global energy production, which is significant. This program focused on the recommendation of heterogeneous sensors to monitor the Chemical Vapor Infiltration (CVI) process parameters, states, and key performance indices and utilize cloud computing to sort and analyze the real-time data. Learning through data analytics helps guide the control parameters affecting energy usage. The target process in the program is the CVI process at the Honeywell South Bend facility, which is one of the most energy-intensive manufacturing industries.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

SU-E-T-587: Monte Carlo Versus Ray-Tracing for Treatment Planning Involving CNS Tumors On the MultiPlan System for CyberKnife Radiosurgery

Purpose: MultiPlan, the treatment planning system for the CyberKnife Robotic Radiosurgery system offers two approaches to dose computation, namely Ray-Tracing (RT), the default technique and Monte Carlo (MC), an option. RT is deterministic, however it accounts for primary heterogeneity only. MC on the other hand has an uncertainty associated with the calculation results. The advantage is that in addition, it accounts for heterogeneity effects on the scattered dose. Not all sites will benefit from MC. The goal of this work was to focus on central nervous system (CNS) tumors and compare dosimetrically, treatment plans computed with RT versus MC. Methods: Treatment plans were computed using both RT and MC for sites covering (a) the brain (b) C-spine (c) upper T-spine (d) lower T-spine (e) L-spine and (f) sacrum. RT was first used to compute clinically valid treatment plans. Then the same treatment parameters, monitor units, beam weights, etc., were used in the MC algorithm to compute the dose distribution. The plans were then compared for tumor coverage to illustrate the difference if any. All MC calculations were performed at a 1% uncertainty. Results: Using the RT technique, the tumor coverage for the brain, C-spine (C3–C7), upper T-spine (T4–T6), lower T-spine (T10), Lspine (L2) and sacrum were 96.8%, 93.1%, 97.2%, 87.3%, 91.1%, and 95.3%. The corresponding tumor coverage based on the MC approach was 98.2%, 95.3%, 87.55%, 88.2%, 92.5%, and 95.3%. It should be noted that the acceptable planning target coverage for our clinical practice is >95%. The coverage can be compromised for spine tumors to spare normal tissues such as the spinal cord. Conclusion: For treatment planning involving the CNS, RT and MC appear to be similar for most sites but for the T-spine area where most of the beams traverse lung tissue. In this case, MC is highly recommended.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Towards Use of Mixed Precision in ECP Math Libraries [Exascale Computing Project]

The use of multiple types of precision in mathematical software has the potential to increase its performance on new heterogeneous architectures. The xSDK project focuses both on the investigation and development of multiprecision algorithms as well as their inclusion into xSDK member libraries. This report summarizes current efforts on including and/or using mixed precision capabilities in the math libraries Ginkgo, heFFTe, hypre, MAGMA, PETSc/TAO, SLATE, SuperLU, and Trilinos, including KokkosKernels. It contains both numerical results from libraries that already provide mixed precision capabilities, as well as descriptions of the strategies to incorporate multiprecision into established libraries.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Multiscale Investigation on Biofilm Distribution and Its Impact on Macroscopic Biogeochemical Reaction Rates

Biofilms are critical locations for biogeochemical reactions in the subsurface environment. The occurrence and distribution of biofilms at microscale as well as their impacts on macroscopic biogeochemical reaction rates are still poorly understood. This paper investigated the formation and distributions of biofilms in heterogeneous sediments using multiscale models, and evaluated the effects of biofilm heterogeneity on local and macroscopic biogeochemical reaction rates. Sediment pore structures derived from X-ray computed tomography were used to simulate the microscale flow dynamics and biofilm distribution in the sediment column. The response of biofilm formation and distribution to the variations in hydraulic and chemical properties was first examined. One representative biofilm distribution was then utilized to evaluate its effects on macroscopic reaction rates using nitrate reduction as an example. The results revealed that microorganisms primarily grew on the surfaces of grains and aggregates near preferential flow paths where both electron donor and acceptor were readily accessible, leading to the heterogeneous distribution of biofilms in the sediments. Furthermore, the heterogeneous biofilm distribution decreased the macroscopic rate of biogeochemical reactions as compared with those in homogeneous cases. Operationally considering the heterogeneous biofilm distribution in macroscopic reactive transport models such as using dual porosity domain concept can significantly improve the prediction of biogeochemical reaction rates. Overall, this study provided important insights into the biofilm formation and distribution in soils and sediments as well as their impacts on the macroscopic manifestation of reaction rates.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Identification of earth-abundant materials for selective dehydrogenation of light alkanes to olefins

Catalytic alkane dehydrogenation is of considerable importance in the synthesis of olefins industrially. However, discovery of highly active, selective, and stable heterogeneous catalysts to replace noble metal Pt remains challenging. By combining descriptor-based microkinetic modeling, high-throughput computations, machine-learning concepts, and experiments, we efficiently evaluated 1,998 bimetallic alloys and successfully identified Ni 3 Mo as one of the most promising catalysts in selective ethane dehydrogenation. This work will open new possibilities of using earth-abundant materials as catalysts for essential heterogeneous catalytic reactions.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Combining Hadoop with MPI to Solve Metagenomics Problems that are both Data- and Compute-intensive

Metagenomics, the study of all microbial species cohabitants in an environment, usually produces large amount of sequence data varying from several GBs to a few TBs. Analyzing metagenomics data includes both data-intensive and compute-intensive steps, making the entire process hard to scale. Here we aim to optimize a metagenomics application that partitions the shortgun metagenomics sequences based on their species of origin. Our solution combines MapReduce-based BioPig analytic toolkit with MPI to provide scalability in respective to both data and compute. We also made some improvements to the existing BioPig toolkit by using simplified data types and compressed k-mer storage. These optimizations leads up to 193× speedup for the computing-intensive step and 9.6× speedup over the entire pipeline. Our optimized application is also capable of processing datasets that are 16 times larger on the same hardware platform. These conclusions indicate integrating heterogeneous technologies such as Hadoop and MPI is quite efficient to solve large genomics problems that are both data-intensive and compute-intensive.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

2013 Gordon Research Conference, Inorganic reaction mechanisms, Galveston, TX, March 3-8 2013

The 2013 Gordon Conference on Inorganic Reaction Mechanisms will present cutting-edge research on the molecular aspects of inorganic reactions involving elements from throughout the periodic table and state-of-the art techniques that are used in the elucidation of reaction mechanisms. The Conference will feature a wide range of topics, such as homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, metallobiochemistry, electron-transfer in energy reactions, polymerization, nitrogen fixation, green chemistry, oxidation, solar conversion, alkane functionalization, organotransition metal chemistry, and computational chemistry. The talks will cover themes of current interest including energy, materials, and bioinorganic chemistry. Sections cover: Electron-Transfer in Energy Reactions; Catalytic Polymerization and Oxidation Chemistry; Kinetics and Spectroscopy of Heterogeneous Catalysts; Metal-Organic Chemistry and its Application in Synthesis; Green Energy Conversion;Organometallic Chemistry and Activation of Small Molecules; Advances in Kinetics Modeling and Green Chemistry; Metals in Biology and Disease; Frontiers in Catalytic Bond Activation and Cleavage.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Experimental and Computational Methods for the Deconstruction and Valorization of Lignin

Lignin is among the most abundant natural heteropolymers on Earth. While lignin represents an abundant feedstock material for the production of renewable fuels and value-added chemicals, it is an underutilized value stream in current biomass conversion technologies because there exist no economic and technically feasible routes for lignin depolymerization and upgrading. My work at NREL has focused on elucidating deconstruction pathways of this recalcitrant polymer using homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts. This entails testing putative catalyst species against a library of model compounds as well as using computational modeling of the substrates and catalysts to determine thermodynamic and kinetic parameters. From these preliminary studies, I hope to develop strategies for the selective conversion of biomass to fuels and chemicals. Synthetic techniques applicable to a model compound library, synthesis and spectroscopic characterization of catalyst species, as well as DFT studies of all of the aforementioned will be presented.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

Enabling Innovative Analysis on Heterogeneous Clusters through HTCdaskgateway

High energy particle (HEP) physics research is going through fundamental changes as we move to collect larger amounts of data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Analysis facilities and distributed computing, through HTCs, have come together to create the next pythonic generation of analysis by utilizing HTCdaskgateway, a Dask gateway extension, allowing users to spawn workers compatible with both their analysis and heterogeneous clusters in line with authentication requirements. This is enabling physicists to engage with scientific python in ways they had not before because of domain specific C++ tools. An example of HTCdaskgateway’s use is Fermilab’s Elastic Analysis Facility.

Chavez, Elise [U. Wisconsin, Madison (main)]↗