Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “portability”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 901 records · Page 50
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2018

P4: Portable Parallel Processing Pipelines for Interactive Information Visualization

We present P4, an information visualization toolkit that combines declarative design specification and GPU computing for building high-performance interactive systems. Most of the existing information visualization toolkits do not harness the power of parallel processors in today's mainstream computers. P4 leverages GPU computing to accelerate both data processing and visualization rendering for interactive visualization applications. P4's programming interface offers a declarative visualization grammar for rapid specifications of data transformations, visual encodings, and interactions. By simplifying the development of GPU-accelerated visualization systems while supporting a high degree of flexibility and customization for design specification, P4 narrows the gap between expressiveness and scalability in information visualization toolkits. Through a range of examples and benchmark tests, we demonstrate that P4 provides high efficiency for creating interactive visualizations and offers drastic performance improvement over current state-of-the-art toolkits.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2011

Prompt Neutron Multiplicity Measurements with Portable Detectors

Mobile detection of kilogram quantities of special nuclear materials (SNM) during maritime transportation is a challenging problem for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Counting neutrons emitted by the SNM and partitioning them from background neutrons of multiple origins is the most effective passive means of detecting the SNM. Unfortunately, neutron detection, counting, and partitioning in a maritime environment is complex due to the presence of spallation neutrons (commonly known as “ship effect”) and to the complicated nature of the neutron scattering in that environment. This work studied the possibilities of building a prototype neutron detector using boron- 10 (10B) as the converter in a novel form factor called “straws” that would address the above problem by examining multiplicity distributions of neutrons originating from a fissioning source. Currently, commercially manufactured fission meters (FM) are available that separate cosmic neutrons from non-cosmic neutrons and quantitatively determine the strength of a fissioning source; however, these FMs use 3He, which is becoming increasingly difficult to procure; also the size and weight of a commercial FM is not conducive to manual neutron detection operations in a maritime environment. The current project may provide a near-term solution to the crisis that has arisen from the global scarcity of 3He by offering a viable alternative to the FM. The prototype detector provides a large-area, efficient, lightweight, more granular neutron responsive detection surface (to facilitate imaging) to ease the application of the new FMs. A novel prototype fission meter is being designed at National Security Technologies, LLC, using a thin uniform coating of 10B as neutron converter (only 1 micron thick) inside a large array of thin (4 mm diameter) copper tubes. The copper tubes are only 2-mil thick, and each holds the stretched anode wire under tension and high voltage. The tubes are filled with proportional counter gas (a mixture of 90% Ar and 10% CO2). The tubes operate in proportional counter mode and attract mobile charged particles (alpha-particles) created in the nuclear interaction 10B(n, a)7Li. Several MCNPX calculations covering the substantial design parameter space of neutron multiplicity detectors have been performed and are presented. Our detector’s thermal neutron detection efficiency is compared to two Ortec commercial products, the Fission Meter and Detective-EX. Pulse height spectra originating from the charged particles created in the nuclear reaction 10B(n, a) 7Li* + 2.310 MeV (94%) – excited state (1) and 10B(n, a) 7Li + 2.792 MeV (6%) – ground state (2) are examined, and the response to incident gamma rays are demonstrated.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2015

WE-AB-BRB-11: Portable Fast Neutron and Photon Dose Meter

Purpose: To develop an instrument for measuring neutron and photon dose rates from mixed fields with a single device. Methods: Stilbene organic scintillators can be used to detect fast neutrons and photons. Stilbene was used to measure emission from mixed particle sources californium-252 (Cf-252) and plutonium-beryllium (PuBe). Many source detector configurations were used, along with varying amounts of shielding. Collected spectra were analyzed using pulse shape discrimination software, to separate neutron and photon interactions. With a measured light output to energy relationship the pulse height spectrum was converted to energy deposited in the detector. Energy deposited was converted to dose with a variety of standard dose factors, for comparison to current methods. For validation, all measurements and processing was repeated using an EJ-309 liquid scintillator detector. Dose rates were also measured in the same configuration with commercially available dose meters for further validation. Results: Measurements of dose rates will show agreement across all methods. Higher accuracy of pulse shape discrimination at lower energies with stilbene leads to more accurate measurement of neutron and photon deposited dose. In strong fields of mixed particles discrimination can be performed well at a very low energy threshold. This shows accurate dose measurements over a large range of incident particle energy. Conclusion: Stilbene shows promise as a material for dose rate measurements due to its strong ability for separating neutrons and photon pulses and agreement with current methods. A dual particle dose meter would simplify methods which are currently limited to the measurement of only one particle type. Future work will investigate the use of a silicon photomultiplier to reduce the size and required voltage of the assembly, for practical use as a handheld survey meter, room monitor, or phantom installation. Funding From the United States Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2025

Introducing Quantum Entanglement and Superposition to Secondary School Students Using Portable, Hands-on Exhibits

Historically, the teaching of quantum mechanics has been reserved for advanced undergraduate physics courses, mostly due to how far removed from classical intuition the subject is. Extensive mathematical background is usually a prerequisite for college-level introductory quantum mechanics courses. However, several ways to introduce quantum mechanics at the secondary school level have been suggested and developed. Unlike most other topics in physics, it is difficult to find intuitive examples of quantum phenomena outside of a specialized laboratory; additionally, straightforward hands-on demonstrations, activities, and experiments are somewhat limited.

Educational aids↗
DOE OSTI2018

Interfacing of a Coordinate-Sensitive Detector Based on Charge-Coupled Devices for Recording Ions with a Portable Static Mass Spectrograph

An IDS 2030 IonCCD coordinate-sensitive detector (Analytical/CMS Field Products) is interfaced with a small-sized mass spectrograph developed at the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences. The measurement data obtained with the mass spectrograph using an IonCCD detector and a Magnum-5901-37029PS channel secondary electron multiplier (Photonics USA Inc., United States) are compared. The results of measurements are discussed, and the prospects for using the IonCCD coupled with a microchannel plate are assessed.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2013

Investigating applications portability with the Uintah DAG-based runtime system on PetaScale supercomputers

Present trends in high performance computing present formidable challenges for applications code using multicore nodes possibly with accelerators and/or co-processors and reduced memory while still attaining scalability. Software frameworks that execute machine-independent applications code using a runtime system that shields users from architectural complexities offer a possible solution. The Uintah framework for example, solves a broad class of large-scale problems on structured adaptive grids using fluid-flow solvers coupled with particle-based solids methods. Uintah executes directed acyclic graphs of computational tasks with a scalable asynchronous and dynamic runtime system for CPU cores and/or accelerators/co-processors on a node. Uintah's clear separation between application and runtime code has led to scalability increases of 1000x without significant changes to application code. This methodology is tested on three leading Top500 machines; OLCF Titan, TACC Stampede and ALCF Mira using three diverse and challenging applications problems. This investigation of scalability with regard to the different processors and communications performance leads to the overall conclusion that the adaptive DAG-based approach provides a very powerful abstraction for solving challenging multi-scale multi-physics engineering problems on some of the largest and most powerful computers available today.

Meng, Qingyu↗
DOE OSTI2021

Query relaxation for portable brick-based applications

Semantic metadata standards pave the way for interoperability by providing building operators and application developers with common schemes to describe building resources. Applications can query building metadata models to retrieve the set of entities and relationships they need to operate, instead of hard-coding references to specific points and objects from the underlying data sources. Currently, querying such models requires the developer to be very specific when formulating queries in order to obtain meaningful answers (or any answer). The developer is inevitably expected to be familiar with the systems and components of the buildings being queried, as well as the schema used to represent them. The variety of buildings - both in the composition of their subsystems and in how they happen to be modeled - means that the developer will need to use multiple queries in order to retrieve necessary results. This is complex, time-consuming and error-prone. To address this limitation, we investigate query relaxation as a technique to facilitate discovery of meaningful building resources in a collection of ontology-based buildings data. We evaluate our query relaxation approach over a set of Brick models and demonstrate its use in the context of real-world building applications.

Brick↗
DOE OSTI2022

Performance portability study of epistasis detection using SYCL on NVIDIA GPU

We describe the experience of converting a CUDA implementation of a high-order epistasis detection algorithm to SYCL. The goals are for our work to be useful to application and compiler developers with a detailed description of migration paths between CUDA and SYCL. Evaluating the CUDA and SYCL applications on an NVIDIA V100 GPU, we find that the optimization of loop unrolling needs to be applied manually to the SYCL kernel for obtaining comparable performance. The performance of the SYCL group reduce function, an alternative to the CUDA warp-based reduction, depends on the problem and work group sizes. The 64-bit popcount operation implemented with tree of adders is slightly faster than the built-in popcount operation. When the number of OpenMP threads is four, the highest performance of the SYCL and CUDA applications are comparable.

Jin, Zheming↗
DOE OSTI2023

Optimization and Portability of a Fusion OpenACC-based FORTRAN HPC Code from NVIDIA to AMD GPUs

NVIDIA has been the main provider of GPU hardware in HPC systems for over a decade. Most applications that benefit from GPUs have thus been developed and optimized for the NVIDIA software stack. Recent exascale HPC systems are, however, introducing GPUs from other vendors, e.g. with the AMD GPU-based OLCF Frontier system just becoming available. AMD GPUs cannot be directly accessed using the NVIDIA software stack, and require a porting effort by the application developers. This paper provides an overview of our experience porting and optimizing the CGYRO code, a widely-used fusion simulation tool based on FORTRAN with OpenACC-based GPU acceleration. While the porting from the NVIDIA compilers was relatively straightforward using the CRAY compilers on the AMD systems, the performance optimization required more fine-tuning. In the optimization effort, we uncovered code sections that had performed well on NVIDIA GPUs, but were unexpectedly slow on AMD GPUs. After AMD-targeted code optimizations, performance on AMD GPUs has increased to meet our expectations. Modest speed improvements were also seen on NVIDIA GPUs, which was an unexpected benefit of this exercise.

Sfiligoi, Igor↗
DOE OSTI2013

Adapting Raman Spectra from Laboratory Spectrometers to Portable Detection Libraries

Raman spectral data collected with high-resolution laboratory spectrometers are processed into a for- mat suitable for importing as a user library on a 1064nm DeltaNu rst generation, eld-deployable spectrometer prototype. The two laboratory systems used are a 1064nm Bruker spectrometer and a 785nm Kaiser spectrometer. The steps taken to compensate for device-dependent spectral resolution, wavenumber shifts between instruments, and wavenumber sensitivity variation are described.

Weatherall, James↗