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At least 937 records · Page 52

Developing the Proof of Concept for the SERI QC Flag Translation

SERI QC is a robust solar data quality assessment software tool that has been in continuous use for more than three decades. This report, the second of six in the Data Quality and Uncertainty Integration project, develops the proof of concept, including programming in C and a collection of spreadsheet tools, for estimating the operational uncertainty from three-component solar irradiance measurements using information available from SERI QC. The report establishes a field reference for determining the operational uncertainty for each irradiance component based on the SERI QC coupling. Results demonstrate that the operational uncertainty estimates based on global irradiance best represent the collective results for all sky conditions.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

RISMC Industry Application no. 1 (ECCS/LOCA) - Core Characterization Automation: Lattice Codes Interface for PHISICS/RELAP5-3D

The U.S. NRC is currently proposing rulemaking '10 CFR 50.46c' to revise the loss-of-coolant-accident (LOCA) and emergency core cooling system (ECCS) acceptance criteria to include the effects of higher burn-up on cladding performance. The key implications of this proposition are that the cladding performance cannot be evaluated in isolation anymore. Both cladding and ECCS performance need to be considered in a coupled manner. This also implies that models for cladding performance as well as LOCA methodologies will need to be updated for regulatory purposes. Furthermore, efforts need to be made to find the limiting case within the regulatory input space. The Risk-Informed Safety Margin Characterization (RISMC) Pathway, as part of the DOE Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) research and development program initialed several programs at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to support the industry in the transition to the new rule and to offer potential solutions to this LOCA/ECCS analysis. One of these programs is the Industry Application no. 1 (IA1). Its purpose is to provide to the plant owner/operator a vehicle to inform decisions to manage margins related to compliance with the proposed 10 CFR 50.46c rule. IA1's goal is to develop an Integrated Evaluation Model (IEM) to revisit how uncertainties are propagated across the physical disciplines and data involved, as well as well as how risks are evaluated in a LOCA under 10 CFR 50.46c. This IEM is called LOCA Tool-kit for the US (LOTUS) and it connects five major disciplines involved in LOCA analysis. The focus of LOTUS is to establish the automation interfaces among the five disciplines. LOTUS will utilize in a first step existing computer codes. The risk-informed margins management approach for IA1 will provide a means of quantifying the impact on the key LOCA analysis figures-of-merit like peak cladding temperature (PCT), equivalent cladding reacted (ECR), etc. of a change in LOCA analysis inputs. The information that the risk analysis and associated tools provide can then be used for decision-making and margin management. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Build and Execute Environment

At exascale, the challenge becomes to develop applications that run at scale and use exascale platforms reliably, efficiently, and flexibly. Workflows become much more complex because they must seamlessly integrate simulation and data analytics. They must include down-sampling, post-processing, feature extraction, and visualization. Power and data transfer limitations require these analysis tasks to be run in-situ or in-transit. We expect successful workflows will comprise multiple linked simulations along with tens of analysis routines. Users will have limited development time at scale and, therefore, must have rich tools to develop, debug, test, and deploy applications. At this scale, successful workflows will compose linked computations from an assortment of reliable, well-defined computation elements, ones that can come and go as required, based on the needs of the workflow over time. We propose a novel framework that utilizes both virtual machines (VMs) and software containers to create a workflow system that establishes a uniform build and execution environment (BEE) beyond the capabilities of current systems. In this environment, applications will run reliably and repeatably across heterogeneous hardware and software. Containers, both commercial (Docker and Rocket) and open-source (LXC and LXD), define a runtime that isolates all software dependencies from the machine operating system. Workflows may contain multiple containers that run different operating systems, different software, and even different versions of the same software. We will run containers in open-source virtual machines (KVM) and emulators (QEMU) so that workflows run on any machine entirely in user-space. On this platform of containers and virtual machines, we will deliver workflow software that provides services, including repeatable execution, provenance, checkpointing, and future proofing. We will capture provenance about how containers were launched and how they interact to annotate workflows for repeatable and partial re-execution. We will coordinate the physical snapshots of virtual machines with parallel programming constructs, such as barriers, to automate checkpoint and restart. We will also integrate with HPC-specific container runtimes to gain access to accelerators and other specialized hardware to preserve native performance. Containers will link development to continuous integration. When application developers check code in, it will automatically be tested on a suite of different software and hardware architectures.

Guan, Qiang↗

Build and Execute Environment

At exascale, the challenge becomes to develop applications that run at scale and use exascale platforms reliably, efficiently, and flexibly. Workflows become much more complex because they must seamlessly integrate simulation and data analytics. They must include down-sampling, post-processing, feature extraction, and visualization. Power and data transfer limitations require these analysis tasks to be run in-situ or in-transit. We expect successful workflows will comprise multiple linked simulations along with tens of analysis routines. Users will have limited development time at scale and, therefore, must have rich tools to develop, debug, test, and deploy applications. At this scale, successful workflows will compose linked computations from an assortment of reliable, well-defined computation elements, ones that can come and go as required, based on the needs of the workflow over time. We propose a novel framework that utilizes both virtual machines (VMs) and software containers to create a workflow system that establishes a uniform build and execution environment (BEE) beyond the capabilities of current systems. In this environment, applications will run reliably and repeatably across heterogeneous hardware and software. Containers, both commercial (Docker and Rocket) and open-source (LXC and LXD), define a runtime that isolates all software dependencies from the machine operating system. Workflows may contain multiple containers that run different operating systems, different software, and even different versions of the same software. We will run containers in open-source virtual machines (KVM) and emulators (QEMU) so that workflows run on any machine entirely in user-space. On this platform of containers and virtual machines, we will deliver workflow software that provides services, including repeatable execution, provenance, checkpointing, and future proofing. We will capture provenance about how containers were launched and how they interact to annotate workflows for repeatable and partial re-execution. We will coordinate the physical snapshots of virtual machines with parallel programming constructs, such as barriers, to automate checkpoint and restart. We will also integrate with HPC-specific container runtimes to gain access to accelerators and other specialized hardware to preserve native performance. Containers will link development to continuous integration. When application developers check code in, it will automatically be tested on a suite of different software and hardware architectures.

Guan, Qiang↗

Consistent Space Runtime (CSPACER) v1.0

This software provides a runtime for communication-bound applications, especially with irregular communication patterns. The target programming abstraction for the runtime is the space consistency model, which defines consistency guarantees at the granularity of memory spaces. This model has relaxed consistency semantics that enables a wide range of runtime optimizations. The runtime leverages threading to accelerate communication primitives, especially collective operations. It also allows efficient pipelining of communication operations and enable constructing a consistent state of multiple unordered communication activities targeting a memory space. The runtime uses a reduced API design that decomposes complex communication primitives in traditional general-purpose runtime into a sequence of simpler steps. To improve the productivity of using this runtime, we provide communication patterns commonly used for regular scientific computing applications and irregular data analytics. These communication patterns offer skeletons for the integration with application computation to allow efficient overlap.

Ibrahim, Khaled↗

Performance Analysis of Scientific Computing Workloads on Trusted Execution Environments

Scientific computing sometimes involves computation on sensitive data. Depending on the data and the execution environment, the HPC (high-performance computing) user or data provider may require confidentiality and/or integrity guarantees. To study the applicability of hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) to enable secure scientific computing, we deeply analyze the performance impact of AMD SEV and Intel SGX for diverse HPC benchmarks including traditional scientific computing, machine learning, graph analytics, and emerging scientific computing workloads. We observe three main findings: 1) SEV requires careful memory placement on large scale NUMA machines (1x -3.4x slowdown without and 1x -1.15x slowdown with NUMA aware placement), 2) virtualization - a prerequisite for SEV - results in performance degradation for workloads with irregular memory accesses and large working sets (1x -4x slowdown compared to native execution for graph applications) and 3) SGX is inappropriate for HPC given its limited secure memory size and inflexible programming model (1.2x -126x slowdown over unsecure execution). Finally, we discuss forthcoming new TEE designs and their potential impact on scientific computing.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Bioinformatic teaching resources - for educators, by educators - using KBase, a free, user-friendly, open source platform

Over the past year, biology educators and staff at the Department of Energy Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) initiated a collaborative effort to develop a curriculum for bioinformatics education. KBase is a free and easily accessible data science platform that integrates many bioinformatics resources into a graphical user interface built upon reproducible analysis notebooks. KBase held conversations with college and high school instructors to understand how KBase could potentially support their educational goals. These conversations morphed into a working group of biological and data science instructors that adapted the KBase platform to their curriculum needs, specifically around concepts in Genomics, Metagenomics, Pangenomics, and Phylogenetics. The KBase Educators Working Group developed modular, adaptable, and customizable instructional units. Each instructional module contains teaching resources, publicly available data, analysis tools, and markdown capability to tailor instructions and learning goals for each class. The online user interface enables students to conduct hands-on data science research and analyses without requiring programming skills or their own computational resources (these are provided by KBase). Alongside these resources, KBase continues to work with instructors, supporting the development of additional curriculum modules. For anyone new to the platform, KBase, and the growing KBase Educators Organization, provides a community network, accompanied by community-sourced guidelines, instructional templates, and peer support to use KBase within a classroom whether virtual or in-person.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Legacy Well Leakage Risk Analysis at the Farnsworth Unit Site

This paper summarizes the results of the risk analysis and characterization of the CO 2 and brine leakage potential of Farnsworth Unit (FWU) site wells. The study is part of the U.S. DOE’s National Risk Assessment Partnership (NRAP) program, which aims to quantitatively evaluate long-term environmental risks under conditions of significant geologic uncertainty and variability. To achieve this, NRAP utilizes risk assessment and computational tools specifically designed to quantify uncertainties and calculate the risk associated with geologic carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) sequestration. For this study, we have developed a workflow that utilizes physics-based reservoir simulation results as input to perform leakage calculations using NRAP Tools, specifically NRAP-IAM-CS and RROM-Gen. These tools enable us to conduct leakage risk analysis based on ECLIPSE reservoir simulation results and to characterize wellbore leakage at the Farnsworth Unit Site. We analyze the risk of leakage from both individual wells and the entire field under various wellbore integrity distribution scenarios. The results of the risk analysis for the leakage potential of FWU wells indicate that, when compared to the total amount of CO 2 injected, the highest cemented well integrity distribution scenario (FutureGen high flow rate) exhibits approximately 0.01% cumulative CO 2 leakage for a 25-year CO 2 injection duration at the end of a 50-year post-injection monitoring period. In contrast, the highest possible leakage scenario (open well) shows approximately 0.1% cumulative CO 2 leakage over the same time frame.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

ITS version 6.4: The Integrated TIGER Series of Monte Carlo Electron/Photon Radiation Transport Codes - Paper 40

ITS (Integrated TIGER Series) is a suite of fully coupled electron/photon Monte Carlo radiation transport codes. The package contains programs to perform 1D, 2D and 3D simulations. The 3D geometry representations include the traditional combinatorial geometry (CG), facet-based models, CAD models for those users who have a license for the ACIS{sup R} CAD libraries, and hybrid models of any combination. There is a multigroup version which permits adjoint analysis. The availability of source code permits the more sophisticated user to tailor the code to specific applications and to extend the capabilities of the codes to more complex applications. ITS is presently available only through a U.S.-government-use license. It is available once again through the Radiation Safety Information Computational Center (RSICC). (authors)

61 RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY↗

TCR Data Management Plan

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Transformation Challenge Reactor (TCR) program is developing additive manufacturing and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver enabling technologies for advanced reactors. Through the application of these advanced technologies, the program targets delivering solutions to the high costs and lengthy deployment timelines that threaten the future of nuclear energy—the country’s largest source of carbon-free energy. This document describes the plan for integrating and managing TCR data from multiple sources throughout ORNL and external sources, including novel data sources associated with advanced manufacturing, characterization systems, and the TCR Digital Platform that incorporates various levels of AI and data analytics.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

Coupling SCALE with DAKOTA for Axial Burnup Profiles Assessment in Burnup Credit

This paper presents a computational study that demonstrates the application of the SCALE code system in conjunction with the Design Analysis Kit for Optimization and Terascale Applications (DAKOTA) for the analysis of key factors influencing the evaluation of burnup credit (BUC) in pressurized water reactors (PWRs). The primary objective of this analysis is to characterize the model by utilizing parameterization, uncertainty quantification, and optimization studies. Using this approach, we can comprehensively assess the system and conduct informed predictive studies. This study highlights the effectiveness of the SCALE code system integrated within the DAKOTA framework in terms of efficiency and capability. With the coupling of the burnup code ORIGAMI with the CSAS or TSUNAMI-3D sequence embedded in a DAKOTA analysis, we can characterize the factors that influence the k eff of PWR 17x17 spent nuclear fuel (SNF) in the GBC-32 computational benchmark cask for the assessment of BUC in criticality safety analysis. The coupling methodology used in this study is not exclusive to BUC analysis. However, the choice to apply this methodology to the BUC problem is particularly significant because of the diverse range of aspects it encompasses in nuclear criticality safety analyses. This problem presents a unique opportunity to explore and address multiple facets of such analyses related to BUC and illustrates the capability of the SCALE code system with DAKOTA. This analysis makes use of historical reference data for the axial burnup profile, where the entire space within the bounds is considered. Both SCALE and DAKOTA are currently integrated in the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling Simulation (NEAMS) Workbench code system, which has a user-friendly graphical interface that simplifies the setup of simulations and configuration of input parameters as well as the visualization of simulation results.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

Integrating Energy-Efficient Computing with Computational Research to Accelerate Energy Technology

NREL's computational sciences center hosts the largest high performance computing (HPC) capabilities dedicated to energy research while functioning as a living laboratory for energy-efficient computing. NREL's HPC capabilities support the research needs of the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). In ten years of operation, HPC use in EERE-sponsored research has grown by a factor of 30, including work in electricity generation, energy efficiency, transportation, and energy system modeling. This paper analyzes this research portfolio, providing examples of individual use cases. The paper documents NREL's history of operating one of the world's most energy-efficient data centers while examining pathways to reduce economic and environmental impact beyond reduction of Power Usage Efficiency (PUE). This paper concludes by examining the unique opportunities created for accelerating improvements in data center efficiency created by combining an HPC system dedicated to energy research and a research program in energy-efficient computing.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Performance Refactoring of Instrumentation, Measurement, and Analysis Technologies for Petascale Computing. The PRIMA Project

The growing number of cores provided by today’s high-­end computing systems present substantial challenges to application developers in their pursuit of parallel efficiency. To find the most effective optimization strategy, application developers need insight into the runtime behavior of their code. The University of Oregon (UO) and the Juelich Supercomputing Centre of Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) develop the performance analysis tools TAU and Scalasca, respectively, which allow high-­performance computing (HPC) users to collect and analyze relevant performance data – even at very large scales. TAU and Scalasca are considered among the most advanced parallel performance systems available, and are used extensively across HPC centers in the U.S., Germany, and around the world. The TAU and Scalasca groups share a heritage of parallel performance tool research and partnership throughout the past fifteen years. Indeed, the close interactions of the two groups resulted in a cross-­fertilization of tool ideas and technologies that pushed TAU and Scalasca to what they are today. It also produced two performance systems with an increasing degree of functional overlap. While each tool has its specific analysis focus, the tools were implementing measurement infrastructures that were substantially similar. Because each tool provides complementary performance analysis, sharing of measurement results is valuable to provide the user with more facets to understand performance behavior. However, each measurement system was producing performance data in different formats, requiring data interoperability tools to be created. A common measurement and instrumentation system was needed to more closely integrate TAU and Scalasca and to avoid the duplication of development and maintenance effort. The PRIMA (Performance Refactoring of Instrumentation, Measurement, and Analysis) project was proposed over three years ago as a joint international effort between UO and FZJ to accomplish these objectives: (1) refactor TAU and Scalasca performance system components for core code sharing and (2) integrate TAU and Scalasca functionality through data interfaces, formats, and utilities. As presented in this report, the project has completed these goals. In addition to shared technical advances, the groups have worked to engage with users through application performance engineering and tools training. In this regard, the project benefits from the close interactions the teams have with national laboratories in the United States and Germany. We have also sought to enhance our interactions through joint tutorials and outreach. UO has become a member of the Virtual Institute of High-­Productivity Supercomputing (VI-­HPS) established by the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres as a center of excellence, focusing on HPC tools for diagnosing programming errors and optimizing performance. UO and FZJ have conducted several VI-­HPS training activities together within the past three years.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Thermochimica

Thermochimica is a software library that determines a unique combination of phases and their compositions at thermochemical equilibrium. Thermochimica can be used for stand-alone calculations or it can be directly coupled to other codes. This release of the software does not have a graphical user interface (GUI) and it can be executed from the command line or from an Application Programming Interface (API). Also, it is not intended for thermodynamic model development or for constructing phase diagrams. The main purpose of the software is to be directly coupled with a multi-physics code to provide material properties and boundary conditions for various physical phenomena. Significant research efforts have been dedicated to enhance computational performance through advanced algorithm development, such as improved estimation techniques and non-linear solvers. Various useful parameters can be provided as output from Thermochimica, such as: determination of which phases are stable at equilibrium, the mass of solution species and phases at equilibrium, mole fractions of solution phase constituents, thermochemical activities (which are related to partial pressures for gaseous species), chemical potentials of solution species and phases, and integral Gibbs energy (referenced relative to standard state). The overall goal is to provide an open source computational tool to enhance the predictive capability of multi-physics codes without significantly impeding computational performance.

Simunovic, Srdjan↗

Net Shape Fabricated Low Cost MHK Pass-Through the Hub Turbine Blades with Integrated Health Management Technology

The primary objective of this project is to develop a three-blade MHK rotor with low manufacturing and maintenance costs. The proposed program will design, fabricate and test a novel half-scale low cost, net shape fabricated single piece three-blade MHK rotor with integrated health management technology to demonstrate significant Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) and Operational Expenditures (OPEX) cost reductions due to the novel design and manufacturing process. The proposed project is divided into three major tasks: Task 1: Single Piece Three-blade Kinetic Hydropower System (KHPS) Rotor Full-Scale and Half-Scale Design; Task 2: Composite Manufacturing Trials and Half-Scale Prototype Rotor Fabrication; and Task 3: Material Characterization and Half-Scale Prototype Test and Evaluation. These three tasks include design and analysis of full-scale and half-scale three-blade rotor prototypes using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite-element analysis (FEA), demonstration of a novel half-scale net shape fabrication process, determination of a fatigue threshold composite strain allowable, three-blade rotor mold design, manufacture of half-scale rotor clam shell mold, three-blade rotor test fixture design and fabrication, development of final manufacturing and test plans, manufacture of the half-scale net shape composite single blade and three-blade prototypes, and test and evaluation of the half-scale rotor.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗

Proof-of-Concept Demonstrations for Computation-Based Human Reliability Analysis. Modeling Operator Performance During Flooding Scenarios

The United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program has the overall objective to help sustain the existing commercial nuclear power plants (NPPs). To accomplish this program objective, there are multiple LWRS “pathways,” or research and development (R&D) focus areas. One LWRS focus area is called the Risk-Informed Safety Margin and Characterization (RISMC) pathway. Initial efforts under this pathway to combine probabilistic and plant multi-physics models to quantify safety margins and support business decisions also included HRA, but in a somewhat simplified manner. HRA experts at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) have been collaborating with other experts to develop a computational HRA approach, called the Human Unimodel for Nuclear Technology to Enhance Reliability (HUNTER), for inclusion into the RISMC framework. The basic premise of this research is to leverage applicable computational techniques, namely simulation and modeling, to develop and then, using RAVEN as a controller, seamlessly integrate virtual operator models (HUNTER) with 1) the dynamic computational MOOSE runtime environment that includes a full-scope plant model, and 2) the RISMC framework PRA models already in use. The HUNTER computational HRA approach is a hybrid approach that leverages past work from cognitive psychology, human performance modeling, and HRA, but it is also a significant departure from existing static and even dynamic HRA methods. This report is divided into five chapters that cover the development of an external flooding event test case and associated statistical modeling considerations.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

Evaluating integration and performance of containerized climate applications on a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Cray system

Containers have taken over large swaths of cloud computing as the most convenient way of packaging and deploying applications. The features that containers offer for packaging and deploying applications translate to high performance computing (HPC) as well. At The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, containers provide an easy way to build and distribute complex HPC applications, allowing faster collaboration, portability, and experiment computer environment reproducibility amongst the scientific community. The challenge arises when applications rely on message passing interface (MPI). This necessitates investigation into how to properly run these applications with their own unique requirements and produce performance on par with native runs. We investigate the MPI performance for benchmarks and containerized climate models for various containers covering selection of compiler and MPI library combinations from the Cray provided programming environments on the Cray XC supercomputer GAEA. Performance from the benchmarks and the climate models shows that for the most part containerized applications perform on par with the natively built applications when the system optimized Cray MPICH libraries are bound into the container, and the hybrid model containers have poor performance in comparison. We also describe several challenges and our solutions in running these containers, particularly challenges with heterogeneous jobs for the containerized model runs.

Abraham, Subil↗

Numerical simulation of gas dynamics and heat exchange tasks in fuel assemblies of the nuclear reactors

This report presents a PC-based program for solution gas dynamics and heat exchange mathematical tasks in fuel assemblies of the fast-neutron nuclear reactors. A fuel assembly consisting of bulk heat-generating elements, which are integrated together by the system of supply and pressure manifolds, is examined. Spherical heat-generating microelements, which contain nuclear fuel, are pulled into the heat-generating elements. Gaseous coolant proceed from supply manifolds to heat-generating elements, where it withdraws the nuclear reaction heat and assembles in pressure manifolds.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗