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At least 991 records · Page 55

Very small-scale, segregating-fluidized-bed experiments: A dataset for CFD-DEM validation and uncertainty quantification

IWe report fluidization experiments were conducted on a small scale and with a rapid response (short duration) to enable corresponding simulations at low-computational cost. Rise times are reported for four or fewer polyethylene particles (intruders) in an air-fluidized bed of ~5000 group D glass beads. Experimental inputs were completely characterized—particle properties, system dimensions and operating conditions—which is necessary for validating computational fluid mechanics (CFD)-discrete element method (DEM) including a comprehensive uncertainty quantification (UQ) analysis. Input uncertainties are reported as bounds or cumulative distribution functions of measured values. The staggering number of simulations required to complete a UQ analysis (~O[10 4 ] simulations corresponding to ~5 uncertain inputs) motivates this study. These segregating-bed experiments are designed to permit analogous CFD-DEM simulations to complete in less than a day on a single (~2.5 GHz) computational processor unit (CPU). Segregation times are reported for several operating conditions, intruder sizes, and initial configurations, providing a rich dataset for numerical model testing, validation and UQ.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Time‐Lapse Image Classification Using a Diffractive Neural Network

Diffractive deep neural networks (D 2 NNs), comprised of spatially engineered passive surfaces, collectively process optical input information at the speed of light propagation through a thin diffractive volume, without any external computing power. Diffractive networks were demonstrated to achieve all‐optical object classification and perform universal linear transformations. Herein, a “time‐lapse” image classification scheme using a diffractive network is demonstrated for the first time, significantly advancing its classification accuracy and generalization performance on complex input objects by using the lateral movements of the input objects and/or the diffractive network, relative to each other. In a different context, such relative movements of the objects and/or the camera are routinely being used for image super‐resolution applications; inspired by their success, a time‐lapse diffractive network is designed to benefit from the complementary information content created by controlled or random lateral shifts. The design space and performance limits of time‐lapse diffractive networks are numerically explored, revealing a blind testing accuracy of 62.03% on the optical classification of objects from the CIFAR‐10 dataset. This constitutes the highest inference accuracy achieved so far using a single diffractive network on the CIFAR‐10 dataset. Time‐lapse diffractive networks will be broadly useful for the spatiotemporal analysis of input signals using all‐optical processors.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Solving Large‐Scale Linear Systems of Equations by a Quantum Hybrid Algorithm

Abstract Today's intermediate‐scale quantum computers, although imperfect, already perform computational tasks that are manifestly beyond the capabilities of modern classical supercomputers. However, so far, quantum‐enabled large‐scale solutions have been realized only for limited set of problems. Here a hybrid algorithm based on phase estimation and classical optimization of the circuit width and depth is employed for solving a specific class of large linear systems of equations ubiquitous to many areas of science and engineering. A classification of linear systems based on the entanglement properties of the associated phase‐estimation unitary operation is introduced, enabling a highly efficient search for solutions that is facilitated by a straightforward matrix‐to‐circuit map. A 2 17 ‐dimensional problem is implemented on several IBM quantum computer superconducting quantum processors, a record‐breaking result for a linear system solved by a quantum computer. Demonstrated realisation sets a clear benchmark in the quest for the future quantum speedup in the linear systems of equations solution.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Material‐Driven Neuronal Oscillators and Filters via Active Reactance in CC‐NDR and VC‐NDR Electro‐Thermal Memristors

The continued scaling of artificial intelligence and telecommunications hardware is increasingly constrained by the power, bandwidth, and area limitations of transistor-based circuits. Neuromorphic processor units, analog oscillators, and active inductors and capacitors rely on complex multi-transistor architectures restricting material choices and incurring energy and footprint overhead. Here, we show that active reactance in electro-thermal memristors provides an intrinsic, material driven route to neuronal oscillator dynamics and signal processing. Using a physics-based compact modeling framework, we bridge negative differential resistance (NDR) and bias-tunable reactance, which underlies spiking dynamics in electro-thermal memristors. Memristors with negative temperature coefficients of resistance (TCR) manifest current-controlled (CC-) NDR and act as active inductors, thus generating spiking above a critical circuit capacitance; whereas memristors with positive TCR manifest voltage-controlled (VC-) NDR and active capacitance, leading to spiking above a critical inductance. By creating a compact model for La 0.7 Ca 0.3 MnO 3 as a representative VC-NDR material and comparing it with LaCoO 3 manifesting CC-NDR, we explain the physical origins of their distinct current-voltage characteristics, reactive phase shifts and consequent spiking behaviors. Finally, we demonstrate tunable filtering enabled by the active reactance of electro-thermal memristors, establishing them as a compact hardware platform for neuronal oscillator functionality and integrated filtering beyond conventional CMOS.

active reactance↗

An efficient parallel simulation of unsteady blood flows in patient-specific pulmonary artery

Simulation of blood flows in the pulmonary artery provides some insight into certain diseases by examining the relationship between some continuum metrics, eg, the wall shear stress acting on the vascular endothelium, which responds to flow-induced mechanical forces by releasing vasodilators/constrictors. V. Kheyfets, in his previous work, studies numerically a patient-specific pulmonary circulation to show that decreasing wall shear stress is correlated with increasing pulmonary vascular impedance. We develop a scalable parallel algorithm based on domain decomposition methods to investigate an unsteady model with patient-specific pulsatile waveforms as the inlet boundary condition. The unsteady model offers tremendously more information about the dynamic behavior of the flow field, but computationally speaking, the simulation is a lot more expensive since a problem which is similar to the steady-state problem has to be solved many times, and therefore, the traditional sequential approach is not suitable anymore. We show computationally that simulations using the proposed parallel approach with up to 10 000 processor cores can be obtained with much reduced compute time. Finally, this makes the technology potentially usable for the routine study of the dynamic behavior of blood flows in the pulmonary artery, in particular, the changes of the blood flows and the wall shear stress in the spatial and temporal dimensions.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Evaluating the networking characteristics of the Cray XC-40 Intel Knights Landing-based Cori supercomputer at NERSC

There are many potential issues associated with deploying the Intel Xeon Phi™ (code named Knights Landing [KNL]) manycore processor in a large-scale supercomputer. One in particular is the ability to fully utilize the high-speed communications network, given that the serial performance of a Xeon Phi TM core is a fraction of a Xeon®core. In this paper, we take a look at the trade-offs associated with allocating enough cores to fully utilize the Aries high-speed network versus cores dedicated to computation, e.g., the trade-off between MPI and OpenMP. In addition, we evaluate new features of Cray MPI in support of KNL, such as internode optimizations. We also evaluate one-sided programming models such as Unified Parallel C. We quantify the impact of the above trade-offs and features using a suite of National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center applications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Investigating power capping toward energy-efficient scientific applications: Investigating Power Capping toward Energy-Efficient Scientific Applications

The emergence of power efficiency as a primary constraint in processor and system design poses new challenges concerning power and energy awareness for numerical libraries and scientific applications. Power consumption also plays a major role in the design of data centers, which may house petascale or exascale-level computing systems. At these extreme scales, understanding and improving the energy efficiency of numerical libraries and their related applications becomes a crucial part of the successful implementation and operation of the computing system. In this paper, we study and investigate the practice of controlling a compute system's power usage, and we explore how different power caps affect the performance of numerical algorithms with different computational intensities. Further, we determine the impact, in terms of performance and energy usage, that these caps have on a system running scientific applications. This analysis will enable us to characterize the types of algorithms that benefit most from these power management schemes. Our experiments are performed using a set of representative kernels and several popular scientific benchmarks. Lastly, we quantify a number of power and performance measurements and draw observations and conclusions that can be viewed as a roadmap to achieving energy efficiency in the design and execution of scientific algorithms.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Runtime power allocation approach for GAMESS hybrid CPU‐GPU implementation

Summary To improve power consumption of applications at the runtime, modern processors provide frequency scaling capabilities, which along with workload optimization, are also available on GPU accelerators. In this work, a runtime strategy is proposed to distribute a given power allocation among the host components and the GPU according to the current application performance and power usage, such that GPU execution is prioritized over CPU for power allocation to maximize application performance. Next, the strategy is tailored to an application, a quantum‐chemistry package GAMESS for ab initio electronic structure calculations. Specifically, GAMESS hybrid CPU–GPU implementation as provided in the Libcchem library is considered. Experiments, performed on a 28‐core node with a Kepler GPU, resulted in performance gains of up to 50% under the proposed strategy and the largest power allocation considered here as compared with the scenario when this allocation was equally distributed among the computing‐platform components.

Sundriyal, Vaibhav↗

FPGA-based HPC accelerators: An evaluation on performance and energy efficiency

Hardware specialization is a promising direction for the future of digital computing. Reconfigurable technologies enable hardware specialization with modest non-recurring engineering cost, but their performance and energy efficiency compared to state-of-the-art processor architectures remain an open question. In this article, we use FPGAs to evaluate the benefits of building specialized hardware for numerical kernels found in scientific applications. In order to properly evaluate performance, we not only compare Intel Arria 10 and Xilinx U280 performance against Intel Xeon, Intel Xeon Phi, and NVIDIA V100 GPUs, but we also extend the Empirical Roofline Toolkit (ERT) to FPGAs in order to assess our results in terms of the Roofline model. We show design optimization and tuning techniques for peak FPGA performance at reasonable hardware usage and power consumption. As FPGA peak performance is known to be far less than that of a GPU, we also benchmark the energy efficiency of each platform for the scientific kernels comparing against microbenchmark and technological limits. Results show that while FPGAs struggle to compete in absolute terms with GPUs on memory- and compute-intensive kernels, they require far less power and can deliver nearly the same energy efficiency.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Parallel domain decomposition method for finite element approximation of 3D steady state non‐Newtonian fluids

Summary We introduce a stabilized finite element method for the 3D non‐Newtonian Navier–Stokes equations and a parallel domain decomposition method for solving the sparse system of nonlinear equations arising from the discretization. Non‐Newtonian flow problems are, generally speaking, more challenging than Newtonian flows because the nonlinearities are not only in the convection term but also in the viscosity term, which depends on the shear rate. Many good iterative methods and preconditioning techniques that work well for the Newtonian flows do not work well for the non‐Newtonian flows. We employ a Galerkin/least squares finite element method, with stabilization parameters adjusted to count the non‐Newtonian effect, to discretize the equations, and the resulting highly nonlinear system of equations is solved by a Newton–Krylov–Schwarz algorithm. In this study, we apply the proposed method to some inelastic power‐law fluid flows through the eccentric annuli with inner cylinder rotation and investigate the robustness of the method with respect to some physical parameters, including the power‐law index and the Reynolds number ratios. We then report the superlinear speedup achieved by the domain decomposition algorithm on a computer with up to 512 processors. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Shiu, Wen‐Shin↗

Portable Data-Parallel Surface Reconstruction on a Uniform Rectilinear Grid

With the increasing heterogeneity and on-node parallelism of high-performance computing hardware, a major challenge is to develop portable and efficient algorithms and software. In this work, we present our implementation of a portable code to perform surface reconstruction using NVIDIA's Thrust library. Surface reconstruction is a technique commonly used in volume tracking methods for simulations of multimaterial flow with interfaces. Here, we have designed a 3D mesh data structure that is easily mapped to the 1D vectors used by Thrust and at the same time is simple to use and uses familiar data structure terminology (such as cells, faces, vertices, and edges). With this new data structure in place, we have implemented a piecewise linear interface reconstruction algorithm in 3 dimensions that effectively exploits the symmetry present in a uniform rectilinear computational cell. Finally, we report performance results, which show that a single implementation of these algorithms can be compiled to multiple backends (specifically, multi-core CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, and Intel Xeon Phi processors), making efficient use of the available parallelism on each. We also compare performance of our implementation to a legacy FORTRAN implementation in Message Passing Interface (MPI) and show performance parity on single and multi-core CPU and achieved good parallel speed-ups on GPU. In conclusion, our research demonstrates the advantage of performance portability of the underlying data-parallel programming model.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Accuracy of finite-difference harmonic frequencies in density functional theory

Analytic Hessians are often viewed as essential for the calculation of accurate harmonic frequencies, but the implementation of analytic second derivatives is nontrivial and solution of the requisite coupled-perturbed equations engenders a sizable memory footprint for large systems, given that these equations are not required for energy and gradient calculations in density functional theory. Here, we benchmark the alternative approach to harmonic frequencies based on finite differences of analytic first derivatives, a procedure that is amenable to large-scale parallelization. Not only for absolute frequencies but also for isotopic and conformer-dependent frequency shifts in flexible molecules, we find that the finite-difference approach exhibits mean errors < 0.1 cm -1 as compared to results based on an analytic Hessian. For very small frequencies corresponding to nonbonded vibrations in noncovalent complexes (for which the harmonic approximation is questionable anyway), the finite-difference error can be larger, but even in these cases the errors can be reduced below 0.1 cm -1 by judicious choice of the displacement step size and a higher-order finite-difference approach. Finally, the surprising accuracy and robustness of the finite-difference results suggests that availability of the analytic Hessian is not so important in today's era of commodity processors that are readily available in large numbers.

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS↗

Improving efficiency of semi‐direct møller–plesset second‐order perturbation methods through oversubscription on multiple nodes

The purpose of this work is to evaluate the efficacy of oversubscription, at the 1 n , 2 n , and 3 n levels for n physical cores, on semi‐direct MP2 methods within NWChem when using two and three Intel nodes. Semi‐direct MP2 energy and gradient calculations were performed on chemical systems ranging from 824 to 1626 basis functions using the cc‐pVDZ basis set. Wall times for semi‐direct MP2 energies were reduced by as much as 36% using two nodes and 44% using three nodes compared to no oversubscription. Total energy consumed by the CPU and DRAM was also reduced by as much as 12% using two nodes and as much as 20% using three nodes when oversubscribing. MP2 gradient wall times improved by as much as 16% using two nodes and 18% using three nodes compared to execution at the 1 n level; however, energy savings were insignificant. Intel performance‐counter data show a strong correlation between total wall time saved and less time spent in the idle state, indicating a more efficient use of the processors when oversubscribing. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Fought, Ellie L.↗

A simplified protocol for the automated production of 2‐[ 18 F]fluoro‐3‐[2‐((S)‐3‐pyrrolinyl)methoxy]pyridine ([ 18 F]nifene) on an IBA Synthera® module

The α4β2 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) ligand 2‐[18F]fluoro‐3‐[2‐((S)‐3‐pyrrolinyl)methoxy]pyridine ([18F]nifene) has been synthesized in 10% decay‐corrected radiochemical yield using the IBA Synthera® platform (IBA Cyclotron Solutions, Louvain‐la‐Neuve, Belgium) with an integrated fluidic processor (IFP). Boc‐nitronifene served as the precursor, and 20% trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) was used to deprotect the Boc‐group after radiolabeling. By omitting the solvent extraction step after radiolabeling, the process was simplified to a single step with no manual intervention. [18F]Nifene was obtained in decay‐corrected radiochemical yields of 10 ± 2% (n = 20) and radiochemical purity >99%. Typical specific radioactivities of 2700–4865 mCi/μmole (100–180 GBq/μmol) were measured at the end of synthesis; total synthesis times were about 1 h 40 min.

IBA Synthera®↗

A fully coupled two-level Schwarz preconditioner based on smoothed aggregation for the transient multigroup neutron diffusion equations

The neutron multigroup diffusion equations is an important approximation of the neutron transport equation, and has been widely used for studying the motion of neutrons and their interactions with the stationary background materials. Solving the multigroup diffusion equations faces challenging because many variables are coupled together and a lot of computing resources are required. In this paper, we focus on the development of a scalable parallel algorithm framework for the system of equations arising from the discretization of the multigroup diffusion equations using a finite element method in space and using an implicit scheme in time. The parallel agorithm framweork consists of an inexact Jacobian-free Newton for the nonlinear equations, a Krylov subspace method for the Jacobian system and a parallel Schwarz preconditioner for the acceleration of the algorithm convergence. A coarse space based on smoothed aggregation is introduced to construct a two-level method to improve the parallel performance of the Schwarz preconditioner. We numerically shown that compared with the one-level method, the proposed two-level method works significantly better in terms of the number of linear iterations and the compute time for a system of equations with millions of unknowns and a supercomputer with thousands of processors.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Parallel performance of algebraic multigrid domain decomposition

Algebraic multigrid (AMG) is a widely used scalable solver and preconditioner for large-scale linear systems resulting from the discretization of a wide class of elliptic PDEs. While AMG has optimal computational complexity, the cost of communication has become a significant bottleneck that limits its scalability as processor counts continue to grow on modern machines. This article examines the design, implementation, and parallel performance of a novel algorithm, algebraic multigrid domain decomposition (AMG-DD), designed specifically to limit communication. The goal of AMG-DD is to provide a low-communication alternative to standard AMG V-cycles by trading some additional computational overhead for a significant reduction in communication cost. Numerical results show that AMG-DD achieves superior accuracy per communication cost compared with AMG, and speedup over AMG is demonstrated on a large GPU cluster.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Massively parallel solvers for elliptic partial differential equations in numerical weather and climate prediction

The demand for substantial increases in the spatial resolution of global weather and climate prediction models makes it essential to use numerically efficient and highly scalable algorithms to solve the equations of large-scale atmospheric fluid dynamics. For stability and efficiency reasons, several of the operational forecasting centres, in particular the Met Office and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in the UK, use semi-implicit semi-Lagrangian time-stepping in the dynamical core of the model. The additional burden with this method is that a three-dimensional elliptic partial differential equation (PDE) for the pressure correction has to be solved at every model time step and this often constitutes a significant proportion of the time spent in the dynamical core. In global models, this PDE must be solved in a thin spherical shell. To run within tight operational time-scales, the solver has to be parallelized and there seems to be a (perceived) misconception that elliptic solvers do not scale to large processor counts and hence implicit time-stepping cannot be used in very high-resolution global models. After reviewing several methods for solving the elliptic PDE for the pressure correction and their application in atmospheric models, we demonstrate the performance and very good scalability of Krylov subspace solvers and multigrid algorithms for a representative model equation with more than 1010 unknowns on 65 536 cores on the High-End Computing Terascale Resource (HECToR), the UK's national supercomputer. Here, we tested and optimized solvers from two existing numerical libraries (the Distributed and Unified Numerics Environment (DUNE) and Parallel High Performance Preconditioners (hypre)) and implemented both a conjugate gradient solver and a geometric multigrid algorithm based on a tensor-product approach, which exploits the strong vertical anisotropy of the discretized equation. We study both weak and strong scalability and compare the absolute solution times for all methods; in contrast to one-level methods, the multigrid solver is robust with respect to parameter variations.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗