Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “scalable performance”

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

MuyGPyS

MuyGPs is a GP estimation method that affords fast hyperparameter optimization by way of performing leave-one-out cross-validation. MuyGPs achieves best-in-class speed and scalability by limiting inference to the information contained in k nearest neighborhoods for prediction locations for both hyperparameter optimization and tuning. This feature affords the optimization of hyperparameters by way of leave-one-out cross-validation, as opposed to the more expensive loglikelihood evaluations requires by similar sparse methods

Priest, BenjaminW.↗

Eureka: Enabling Fine-Grained Access and Range Queries on Compressed Scientific Data via Data-Index Co-Compression

Handling large-scale scientific data in high-performance computing (HPC) environments poses significant challenges, including excessive I/O, high storage costs, and slow query performance. Traditional approaches often require full data decompression and scans, making them impractical for real-time or interactive analysis. To address these limitations, we introduce Eureka, a unified data-index co-compression framework that enables fine-grained access and efficient range queries on compressed scientific datasets. Eureka integrates spatial domain decomposition with block-wise error-bounded lossy compression to support selective decompression. It constructs a hierarchical AVL-tree index during compression to capture block-level value ranges, enabling fast pruning during query execution. To reduce metadata overhead, the index itself is also compressed while ensuring recall-preserving results. Experiments on six diverse HPC simulation datasets show that Eureka achieves up to 25x data compression and over 300x index compression, surpassing state-of-the-art compressors such as SZ3 and ZFP in rate-distortion performance. Additionally, Eureka delivers over 30x speedup for low-selectivity range queries, making it a scalable and efficient solution for modern scientific data analysis.

Yan, Ning↗

Ceramic high temperature receiver design and tests

The High Temperature Solar Thermal Receiver, which was tested a Edwards AFB, CA during the winter of 1980-1981, evolved from technologies developed over a five year period of work. This receiver was tested at the Army Solar Furnace at White Sands, NM in 1976. The receiver, was tested successfully at 1768 deg F and showed thermal efficiencies of 85%. The results were sufficiently promising to lead ERDA to fund our development and test of a 250 kW receiver to measure the efficiency of an open cavity receiver atop a central tower of a heliostat field. This receiver was required to be design scalable to 10, 50, and 100 MW-electric sizes to show applicability to central power tower receivers. That receiver employed rectagular silicon carbide panels and vertical stanchions to achieve scalability. The construction was shown to be fully scalable; and the receiver was operated at temperatures up to 2000 deg F to achieve the performance goals of the experiment during tests at the GIT advanced components test facility during the fall of 1978.

Davis, S. B.↗

Charon Message-Passing Toolkit for Scientific Computations

The Charon toolkit for piecemeal development of high-efficiency parallel programs for scientific computing is described. The portable toolkit, callable from C and Fortran, provides flexible domain decompositions and high-level distributed constructs for easy translation of serial legacy code or design to distributed environments. Gradual tuning can subsequently be applied to obtain high performance, possibly by using explicit message passing. Charon also features general structured communications that support stencil-based computations with complex recurrences. Through the separation of partitioning and distribution, the toolkit can also be used for blocking of uni-processor code, and for debugging of parallel algorithms on serial machines. An elaborate review of recent parallelization aids is presented to highlight the need for a toolkit like Charon. Some performance results of parallelizing the NAS Parallel Benchmark SP program using Charon are given, showing good scalability.

VanderWijngaart, Rob F.↗

Climate Data Assimilation on a Massively Parallel Supercomputer

We have designed and implemented a set of highly efficient and highly scalable algorithms for an unstructured computational package, the PSAS data assimilation package, as demonstrated by detailed performance analysis of systematic runs on up to 512-nodes of an Intel Paragon. The preconditioned Conjugate Gradient solver achieves a sustained 18 Gflops performance. Consequently, we achieve an unprecedented 100-fold reduction in time to solution on the Intel Paragon over a single head of a Cray C90. This not only exceeds the daily performance requirement of the Data Assimilation Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, but also makes it possible to explore much larger and challenging data assimilation problems which are unthinkable on a traditional computer platform such as the Cray C90.

supercomputer↗

A Small Fission Power System with Stirling Power Conversion for NASA Science Missions

In early 2010, a joint National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Department of Energy (DOE) study team developed a concept for a 1 kWe Fission Power System with a 15-year design life that could be available for a 2020 launch to support future NASA science missions. The baseline concept included a solid block uranium-molybdenum reactor core with embedded heat pipes and distributed thermoelectric converters directly coupled to aluminum radiator fins. A short follow-on study was conducted at NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) to evaluate an alternative power conversion approach. The GRC study considered the use of free-piston Stirling power conversion as a substitution to the thermoelectric converters. The resulting concept enables a power increase to 3 kWe with the same reactor design and scalability to 10 kW without changing the reactor technology. This paper presents the configuration layout, system performance, mass summary, and heat transfer analysis resulting from the study.

Mason, Lee↗

Hardware Implementation of Lossless Adaptive and Scalable Hyperspectral Data Compression for Space

On-board lossless hyperspectral data compression reduces data volume in order to meet NASA and DoD limited downlink capabilities. The technique also improves signature extraction, object recognition and feature classification capabilities by providing exact reconstructed data on constrained downlink resources. At JPL a novel, adaptive and predictive technique for lossless compression of hyperspectral data was recently developed. This technique uses an adaptive filtering method and achieves a combination of low complexity and compression effectiveness that far exceeds state-of-the-art techniques currently in use. The JPL-developed 'Fast Lossless' algorithm requires no training data or other specific information about the nature of the spectral bands for a fixed instrument dynamic range. It is of low computational complexity and thus well-suited for implementation in hardware. A modified form of the algorithm that is better suited for data from pushbroom instruments is generally appropriate for flight implementation. A scalable field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware implementation was developed. The FPGA implementation achieves a throughput performance of 58 Msamples/sec, which can be increased to over 100 Msamples/sec in a parallel implementation that uses twice the hardware resources This paper describes the hardware implementation of the 'Modified Fast Lossless' compression algorithm on an FPGA. The FPGA implementation targets the current state-of-the-art FPGAs (Xilinx Virtex IV and V families) and compresses one sample every clock cycle to provide a fast and practical real-time solution for space applications.

FPGA implementation↗

NASA POWER: Providing Analysis-Ready, Cloud-Optimized Data for AI /ML Training and Applications in Earth Science

As global demand for sustainable development grows, the integration of Earth Observation (EO) data into decision making frameworks has become a primary objective for the scientific community. The NASA Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) project serves as a bridge between NASA EO data and the specialized needs of the renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure and agroclimatology communities. In this poster presentation we will present an overview of POWER data products and services along with its use in diverse research to decision-making workflows. By providing over 40 years of high-resolution historical, hourly and daily solar and meteorological data, POWER transforms satellite observations and global model reanalysis into actionable, Analysis-Ready Dataset (ARD). Currently, the project delivers over 250 industry-friendly parameters to the users from different NASA datasets like CERES SYN1Deg, MERRA-2, and IMERG alongside downscaled CMIP6 climate model data, fulfilling over 16 million requests from 50,000 unique users monthly. To ensure data quality and traceability, these parameters are rigorously validated against the ground-based observations from the Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) and the Global Surface Summary of the Day (GSOD) – these results will be discussed in the presentation. A newly introduced web-based PaRameter Uncertainty ViEwer (PRUVE) tool will be presented that provides an online validation platform to the users that benchmarks satellite-based and assimilation data products against these surface measurements. To reduce technical barriers to data adoption, POWER data is accessible through RESTful APIs, ESRI ArcGIS Image Services, a web-based Data Access Viewer tool, allowing users to visualize, validate and apply the dataset. For efficient data delivery POWER data is cloud-optimized into Zarr datastore accessible through NASA managed Amazon S3 ensures high-performance allowing users to integrate EO directly into operational pipelines. These customized services will be presented. Use cases from application will be presented from the energy sector - such as for design of generation systems, performance monitoring of solar power plants, in infrastructure sector- optimizing building energy efficiency and thermal comfort, in agriculture – such as driving crop simulation and yield forecasting models to enable climate resilient farming. Furthermore, the shift toward machine learning (ML) in EO research that has positioned POWER as a key provider for training datasets which will be discussed. Use-cases will be presented to showcase how NASA data is enabling the development of predictive tools for climate variability and resource management. The poster will present POWER’s future plans including technology development to enhance data traceability and reproducibility and improving I/O performance to support the rapid integration of new EO products, ensuring that POWER remains a robust scalable backend for the evolving landscape of AI-driven Earth Science. Additionally, POWER is developing an AI Agent and an MCP-Server to enable industry AI-Agentic workflows.

Neha Khadka↗

A Computationally Improved Heuristic Algorithm for Transmission Switching Using Line Flow Thresholds for Load Shed Reduction

We present a computationally improved heuristic algorithm for transmission switching (TS) to recover load shed. Research from the past showed that changing power system topology may control power flows and remove line congestion. Hence, TS may reduce the required load shed. One of the main challenges is to find a potential TS candidate in a suitable time. Here, we propose a novel heuristic method that is capable of finding the potential TS candidate faster than existing algorithms in literature. The proposed method is compatible with both the AC and DC optimal power flows (OPF). Three metrics are used to compare the proposed algorithm with the state-of-the-art from literature to show the speedup and accuracy achieved. The proposed method is implemented on the IEEE 30-bus system, PEGASE 89-bus system, IEEE 118-bus system, and Polish 2383- bus system. The results on the large-scale Polish 2383-bus system shows that the proposed algorithm is scalable to large real-world systems. Parallel computing is implemented to further improve the computational performance of the proposed algorithm.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Non-Electricity Based Renewable Fuels: Theory and Computation for Solar Thermochemical Hydrogen

Dominated by photovoltaics and wind, current renewable energy sources generate mostly electricity, but 80% of the global final energy consumption occurs in form of fuels. Therefore, direct solar fuel generation would be a major breakthrough for the energy transition. Solar thermochemical hydrogen (STCH) is one of the very few potential routes towards scalable renewable fuels, but currently suffers from lack of an oxide working material that could optimally perform energy conversion within the thermodynamic boundary conditions. Theory and computation can contribute in two distinct ways, through materials search and discovery, but also by providing detailed mechanistic models for specific systems so to advance our understanding of possible design strategies. To enable high-throughput materials screening, we developed a defect graph neural network (dGNN) machine learning approach,[1] which accelerates the prediction of defect formation energies by replacing the tedious density functional theory (DFT) supercell calculations for all possible defect sites. This approach enables high-throughput database screening of oxides, which was integrated with thermodynamic modeling to extract the reduction entropies as additional selection criterion for STCH. Once potential candidate materials are identified, detailed models can guide materials design by predicting performance characteristics. One challenge is to quantitatively predict thermochemical equilibria at high concentrations when the redox active defects start to interact with each other, thereby impeding the formation of additional defects. Introducing a model for the free energy of defect interaction, parametrized on the basis of DFT data, we simulated the complete STCH redox cycle for (Sr,Ce)MnO3 alloys, achieving near-quantitative agreement with experimental data.[2] The analysis of these simulations reveals how defect interactions diminish the reduction entropy and H2 yield, suggesting to include these interactions in design considerations. Finally, we revisit the popular van't Hoff method for analyzing reduction enthalpies and entropies. This method is not ideal, as it involves a temperature-dependent convolution of gas-phase and solid-state entropies, causing uncertainties in the same order of magnitude as the physical quantities of interest. To avoid this problem, we suggest a simple alternative approach which can be applied to experimental and simulated data alike.

first-principles calculations↗

Hybrid Sorbents for 129 I Capture from Contaminated Groundwater

Radioiodine ( 129 I) poses a risk to the environment due to its long half-life, toxicity, and mobility. It is found at the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Site due to legacy releases of nuclear wastes to the subsurface where 129 I is predominantly present as iodate (IO 3 – ). To date, a cost-effective and scalable cleanup technology for 129 I has not been identified, with hydraulic containment implemented as the remedial approach. Here, novel high-performing sorbents for 129 I remediation with the capacity to reduce 129 I concentrations to or below the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drinking water standard and procedures to deploy them in an ex-situ pump and treat (P&T) system are introduced. Furthermore, this includes implementation of hybridized polyacrylonitrile (PAN) beads for ex-situ remediation of IO 3 – -contaminated groundwater for the first time. Iron (Fe) oxyhydroxide and bismuth (Bi) oxyhydroxide sorbents were deployed on silica substrates or encapsulated in porous PAN beads. In addition, Fe–, cerium (Ce)–, and Bi–oxyhydroxides were encapsulated with anion-exchange resins. The PAN–bismuth oxyhydroxide and PAN–ferrihydrite composites along with Fe- and Ce-based hybrid anion-exchange resins performed well in batch sorption experiments with distribution coefficients for IO 3 – of >1000 mL/g and rapid removal kinetics. Of the tested materials, the Ce-based hybrid anion-exchange resin was the most efficient for removal of IO 3 – from Hanford groundwater in a column system, with 50% breakthrough occurring at 324 pore volumes. The functional amine groups on the parent resin and amount of active sorbent in the resin can be customized to improve the iodine loading capacity. These results highlight the potential for IO 3 – remediation by hybrid sorbents and represent a benchmark for the implementation of commercially available materials to meet EPA standards for cleanup of 129 I in a large-scale P&T system.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Porting hypre to heterogeneous computer architectures: Strategies and experiences

We report that linear systems are occurring in many applications, and solving them can take a large amount of the total simulation time. The high performance library hypre provides a variety of interfaces and linear solvers, including various multigrid methods, that have achieved good scalability on a variety of homogeneous parallel computer architectures. Heterogeneous architectures with nodes that have both CPUs and accelerators provide new challenges, since they require more fine-grained parallelism and reduced data movement between different memories on a single node as well as across nodes. We will discuss our experiences and strategies to port hypre to heterogeneous computers with accelerators, including the design of a new memory model, the use of abstractions, the BoxLoop macros in the structured and semi-structured interfaces, and the restructuring of algebraic multigrid (AMG) into modular components. We present numerical experiments comparing CPU and GPU performance for several test problems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

FPDeep: Scalable Acceleration of CNN Training on Deeply-Pipelined FPGA Clusters

In this paper, we propose a framework called FPDeep, which uses a hybrid of model and layer paral- lelism to configure distributed reconfigurable clusters to train DNNs. This approach has numerous benefits. First, the design does not suffer from batch size growth. Second, novel workload and weight partitioning leads to balanced loads of both among nodes. And third, the entire system is fine-grained pipeline. This leads to high parallelism and utilization and also minimizes the time features need to be cached while waiting for back-propagation.

Wang, Tianqi↗

Asynchronous-many-task systems: Challenges and opportunities - Scaling an AMR astrophysics code on exascale machines using Kokkos and HPX

Dynamic and adaptive mesh refinement is pivotal in high-resolution, multi-physics, multi-model simulations, necessitating precise physics resolution in localized areas across expansive domains. Today’s supercomputers’ extreme heterogeneity presents a significant challenge for dynamically adaptive codes, highlighting the importance of achieving performance portability at scale. Our research focuses on astrophysical simulations, particularly stellar mergers, to elucidate early universe dynamics. Here, we present Octo-Tiger, leveraging Kokkos, HPX, and SIMD for portable performance at scale in complex, massively parallel adaptive multi-physics simulations. Octo-Tiger supports diverse processors, accelerators, and network backends. Experiments demonstrate exceptional scalability across several heterogeneous supercomputers including Perlmutter, Frontier, and Fugaku, encompassing major GPU architectures and x86, ARM, and RISC-V CPUs. Parallel efficiency of 47.59% (110,080 cores and 6880 hybrid A100 GPUs) on a full-system run on Perlmutter (26% HPCG peak performance) and 51.37% (using 32,768 cores and 2048 MI250X) on Frontier are achieved.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Evaluation of Portable Acceleration Solutions for LArTPC Simulation Using Wire-Cell Toolkit

The Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) technology plays an essential role in many current and future neutrino experiments. Accurate and fast simulation is critical to developing efficient analysis algorithms and precise physics model projections. The speed of simulation becomes more important as Deep Learning algorithms are getting more widely used in LArTPC analysis and their training requires a large simulated dataset. Heterogeneous computing is an efficient way to delegate computationally intensive tasks to specialized hardware. However, as the landscape of compute accelerators quickly evolves, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually adapt the code to the latest hardware or software environments. A solution which is portable to multiple hardware architectures without substantially compromising performance would thus be very beneficial, especially for long-term projects such as the LArTPC simulations. In search of a portable, scalable and maintainable software solution for LArTPC simulations, we have started to explore high-level portable programming frameworks that support several hardware backends. In this paper, we present our experience porting the LArTPC simulation code in the Wire-Cell Toolkit to NVIDIA GPUs, first with the CUDA programming model and then with a portable library called Kokkos. Preliminary performance results on NVIDIA V100 GPUs and multi-core CPUs are presented, followed by a discussion of the factors affiecting the performance and plans for future improvements.

Yu, Haiwang↗

Performance Analysis and Optimal Node-aware Communication for Enlarged Conjugate Gradient Methods

Krylov methods are a key way of solving large sparse linear systems of equations but suffer from poor strong scalability on distributed memory machines. Furthermore, this is due to high synchronization costs from large numbers of collective communication calls alongside a low computational workload. Enlarged Krylov methods address this issue by decreasing the total iterations to convergence, an artifact of splitting the initial residual and resulting in operations on block vectors. In this article, we present a performance study of an enlarged Krylov method, Enlarged Conjugate Gradients (ECG), noting the impact of block vectors on parallel performance at scale. Most notably, we observe the increased overhead of point-to-point communication as a result of denser messages in the sparse matrix-block vector multiplication kernel. Additionally, we present models to analyze expected performance of ECG, as well as motivate design decisions. Most importantly, we introduce a new point-to-point communication approach based on node-aware communication techniques that increases efficiency of the method at scale.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Toward a Seamless Integration of Computing, Experimental, and Observational Science Facilities: A Blueprint to Accelerate Discovery

The Department of Energy, Office of Science operates world-leading facilities for experimental, observational, and computational science. DOE supercomputing facilities will reach performance at the scale of ExaFLOPs in the coming years, enabling new vistas of scale and precision for large scale simulations and data analysis. Experimental scientific facilities are undergoing similar upgrades that will lead to higher data rates and correspondingly larger computational demands, and will increase the need for near-real-time processing and resilient support for more complex workflows. A transformation of science is underway, with workloads at supercomputing facilities increasingly driven by this explosion of data from instruments and experimental facilities, as well as the accelerating use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a tool for scientific discovery. A seamless integration of computing, networking, instruments, and experimental facilities is required to support these emerging workloads and open up a new frontier of U.S. leadership in scientific discovery. We propose to accomplish this by providing frictionless access to the ASCR supercomputing facilities. We describe our vision of combining the power of ASCR supercomputers and networking infrastructure into an integrated scalable fabric, available to end user scientists via interfaces that aim to automate and simplify access to high performance computing systems. This will enable unprecedented computational science capabilities for experimental and observational facilities, and will create new opportunities to combine large simulations and modeling with experimental facility data analysis. This blueprint for creating an integrated network of computational and experimental facilities will provide an enriched discovery environment and open doors for new scientific communities to access the DOE’s world-leading computing and networking capabilities.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Characterizing the Performance of Executing Many-tasks on Summit

Many scientific workloads are comprised of many tasks, where each task is an independent simulation or analysis of data. The execution of millions of tasks on heterogeneous HPC platforms requires scalable dynamic resource management and multi-level scheduling. RADICAL-Pilot (RP) -- an implementation of the Pilot abstraction, addresses these challenges and serves as an effective runtime system to execute workloads comprised of many tasks. In this paper, we characterize the performance of executing many tasks using RP when interfaced with JSM and PRRTE on Summit: RP is responsible for resource management and task scheduling on acquired resource; JSM or PRRTE enact the placement of launching of scheduled tasks. Our experiments provide lower bounds on the performance of RP when integrated with JSM and PRRTE. Specifically, for workloads comprised of homogeneous single-core, 15 minutes-long tasks we find that: PRRTE scales better than JSM for > O(1000) tasks; PRRTE overheads are negligible; and PRRTE supports optimizations that lower the impact of overheads and enable resource utilization of 63% when executing O(16K), 1-core tasks over 404 compute nodes.

Matteo, Turilli↗