Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “HPC system”

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 127 records · Page 7

Online data analysis and reduction: An important co-design motif for extreme-scale computers

A growing disparity between supercomputer computation speeds and I/O rates means that it is rapidly becoming infeasible to analyze supercomputer application output only after that output has been written to a file system. Instead, data-generating applications must run concurrently with data reduction and/or analysis operations, with which they exchange information via high-speed methods such as interprocess communications. The resulting parallel computing motif, online data analysis and reduction (ODAR), has important implications for both application and HPC systems design. Here we introduce the ODAR motif and its co-design concerns, describe a co-design process for identifying and addressing those concerns, present tools that assist in the co-design process, and present case studies to illustrate the use of the process and tools in practical settings.

Data Analysis↗

Quantum/AI Topology-Aware Latency-Adaptive HPC Workflow Scheduling Optimization

The growing demand for more powerful high-performance computing (HPC) systems has led to a steady rise in energy consumption by supercomputing worldwide. This study is focused on comparing our Application-Topology Mapper (ATMapper) to the popular Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM) for the purpose of exploring methods that can further optimize job-scheduling within HPC systems. ATMapper is an Artificial-Intelligence based approach to job-scheduling that is currently being enhanced with quantum annealing (QA) to generate optimal schedules faster. We are applying QA to speedup our ATMapper process to achieve higher computing efficiency, thereby reducing HPC energy consumption. Here, we examine how four job-scheduling approaches perform in processor node assignment when using an example network architecture of 4 interconnected nodes. Using a specialized script, we are assessing the schedule of a computation flow with 11 interdependent tasks. The data movements among nodes were tracked to count for the number of interactions (network hops) between nodes needed to complete the tasks. The total number of hops and the job completion time were then used to quantify the efficiency of the different mapping approaches. In addition to SLURM, we also compare our ATMapper to the QA-enabled LBNL TIGER and the D-Wave Distributed Computing processor assignment approaches. The preliminary results showed that our topology-aware, latency-adaptive ATMapper is significantly more efficient when compared to the other scheduling approaches due to its load-imbalance network allocation. The scheduler displayed a computing efficiency of 53% by performing significantly fewer network hops than its alternatives. By reducing the number of hops, ATMapper was able to perform all 11 tasks by using only 3 nodes out of given 4. This research indicates the potential to use QA/AI for HPC job-scheduling. Later, we will test a SLURM simulator program to draw further comparisons on the effectiveness of ATMapper's scheduling approach. The results of this comparison will serve as a baseline for later improving SLURM's performance using a QA-enhanced ATMapper approach.

Caraveo, Braulio [University of Huston - Clear Lak↗

High-Throughput Computing: Case Study of Medical Image Processing Applications

HPC is designed for large-scale simulations using monolithic codes of tightly coupled processes highly optimized to deliver decreased time to solution. Medical image processing is not a traditional field of HPC. Similar to AI applications, medical image processing parses large datasets, typically multiple times, to support a variety of studies for classification, diagnosis or monitoring purposes. The convergence of AI, HPC and Big Data encouraged more fields using image processing to transition to HPC. However, not all applications benefit from the same optimizations. In this paper we focus on high throughput medical image processing applications that analyze a huge dataset of small MRI images and that require HPC systems to decrease the time of parsing the entire dataset and not individual MRIs. We show in this research the performance of running SLANT, an image processing application for a whole brain segmentation, on large-scale systems and highlight performance limitations. We present optimizations prioritizing throughput that exhibit a 3.5x speed-up on the Summit Supercomputer that can be used as a baseline for building a high-throughput execution framework for other HPC systems.

Predescu, Maria↗

Addressing GPU memory limitations for Graph Neural Networks in High-Energy Physics applications

Introduction Reconstructing low-level particle tracks in neutrino physics can address some of the most fundamental questions about the universe. However, processing petabytes of raw data using deep learning techniques poses a challenging problem in the field of High Energy Physics (HEP). In the Exa.TrkX Project, an illustrative HEP application, preprocessed simulation data is fed into a state-of-art Graph Neural Network (GNN) model, accelerated by GPUs. However, limited GPU memory often leads to Out-of-Memory (OOM) exceptions during training, due to the large size of models and datasets. This problem is exacerbated when deploying models on High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems designed for large-scale applications. Methods We observe a high workload imbalance issue during GNN model training caused by the irregular sizes of input graph samples in HEP datasets, contributing to OOM exceptions. We aim to scale GNNs on HPC systems, by prioritizing workload balance in graph inputs while maintaining model accuracy. Our paper introduces diverse balancing strategies aimed at decreasing the maximum GPU memory footprint and avoiding the OOM exception, across various datasets. Results Our experiments showcase memory reduction of up to 32.14% compared to the baseline. We also demonstrate the proposed strategies can avoid OOM in application. Additionally, we create a distributed multi-GPU implementation using these samplers to demonstrate the scalability of these techniques on the HEP dataset. Discussion By assessing the performance of these strategies as data loading samplers across multiple datasets, we can gauge their effectiveness in both single-GPU and distributed environments. Our experiments, conducted on datasets of varying sizes and across multiple GPUs, broaden the applicability of our work to various GNN applications that handle input datasets with irregular graph sizes.

Lee, Claire Songhyun↗

Scaling Ensembles of Data-Intensive Quantum Chemical Calculations for Millions of Molecules

Deep learning models are efficient computational tools that can accelerate the inverse design of molecules with desired functional properties by generating predictions at a fraction of the time required by traditional quantum chemical approaches. To ensure that a model maintains accuracy and transferability across broad regions of the chemical space explored during the inverse design, it must be trained on massively large volumes of simulation data. This requires running large-scale ensemble quantum chemical calculations on high-performance computing (HPC) systems for data collection. However, the efficient execution of such large ensemble calculations and the management of large volumes of output data require tools that can judiciously utilize computational resources and manage metadata overhead on the file system. Therefore, we present a high-performance, scalable, ensemble management framework for performing data-intensive quantum chemical electronic structure calculations for organic molecules. This framework provides abstractions to plug different ab initio, first principles, and first principles-based semi-empirical methods and executes them efficiently at large scale on HPC systems. It dynamically distributes tasks to resources and uses tiered storage for managing large collections of files. We employed this framework to process over ten million organic molecules and generate open-source datasets that provide UV-vis absorption spectra by running time-dependent density-functional tight-binding calculations. It is the largest database containing molecular optical spectra that were simulated with quantum chemical methods in a consistent manner.

Mehta, Kshitij↗

HPC Digital Twins for Evaluating Scheduling Policies, Incentive Structures and their Impact on Power and Cooling

Schedulers are critical for optimal resource utilization in high-performance computing. Traditional methods to evaluate sched- ulers are limited to post-deployment analysis, or simulators, which do not model associated infrastructure. In this work, we present the first-of-its-kind integration of scheduling and digital twins in HPC. This enables what-if studies to understand the impact of parameter configurations and scheduling decisions on the physical assets, even before deployment, or regarching changes not easily realizable in production. We (1) provide the first digital twin framework extended with scheduling capabilities, (2) integrate various top-tier HPC systems given their publicly available datasets, (3) implement extensions to integrate external scheduling simulators. Finally, we show how to (4) implement and evaluate incentive structures, as- well-as (5) evaluate machine learning based scheduling, in such novel digital-twin based meta-framework to prototype scheduling. Our work enables what-if scenarios of HPC systems to evaluate sustainability, and the impact on the simulated system.

Maiterth, Matthias [ORNL] (ORCID:000000018698460X)↗

Advanced Computing Annual Report 2023

In 2023, advanced computing saw the arrival of Kestrel, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL's) newest high-performance computing (HPC) system. Kestrel will accelerate clean energy research at a pace and scale more than five times greater than Eagle, with approximately 44 petaflops of computing power. Kestrel's heterogeneous architecture - which includes both CPU-only and GPU-accelerated nodes - is designed to bring a much greater GPU capacity to EERE workloads compared to Eagle, enabling rapidly advancing applications in artificial intelligence and expanding research in new directions for computing. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2023, 333 projects utilized NREL's HPC system, advancing the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) mission across 13 funding areas. Cross-disciplinary collaboration among researchers yielded more than 800 technical outputs, including 177 peer-reviewed journal articles in FY 2023. All this great work continues to advance the science of energy efficiency and renewable energy. This report highlights research that utilized HPC resources in FY 2023.

advanced computing↗

The Kokkos Ecosystem [Brief]

In 2016/2017, the field of High-Performance Computing (HPC) entered a new era driven by fundamental physics challenges to produce ever more energy and cost-efficient processors. Since the convergence on the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) standard in the mid-1990s, application developers enjoyed a seemingly static view of the underlying machine — that of a distributed collection of homogeneous nodes executing in collaboration. However, after almost two decades of dominance, the sole use of MPI to derive parallelism acted as a limiter to improved future performance. While MPI is widely expected to continue to function as the basic mechanism for communication between compute nodes for the immediate future, additional parallelism is required on the computing node itself if high performance and efficiency goals are to be realized. When reviewing the architectures of the top HPC systems today, the change in paradigm is clear: the compute nodes of the leading machines in the world are either powered by many-core chips with a few dozen cores each, or use heterogeneous designs, where traditional CPUs marshal work to massively parallel compute accelerators which has as many as 200,000 processing threads in flight simultaneously. Complicating matters further for application developers, each processor vendor has its own preferred way of writing code for their architecture.The Kokkos EcoSystem was released by Sandia in 2017 to address this new era in HPC system design by providing a vendor independent performance portable programming system for scientific, engineering, and mathematical software applications written in the C++ programming language. Using Kokkos, application developers can be more productive because they will not have to create and maintain separate versions of their software for each architecture, nor will they have to be experts in each architecture's peculiar requirements. Instead, they will have a single method of programming for the diverse set of modern HPC architectures. While Kokkos started in 2011 as a programming model only, it soon became clear that complex applications needed more. It is also critical to have a portable mathematical functions and developers need tools to debug their applications, gain insight into the performance characteristics of their codes and tune algorithm performance parameters through automated processes. The Kokkos EcoSystem addresses those needs through its three main components: the Kokkos Core programming model, the Kokkos Kernels math library, and the Kokkos Tools project.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

High Performance Computing Systems Tools, Visualization, and Management

High Performance Computing (HPC) systems are complex setups of servers, storage devices, network switches, and cables that are specifically designed to accommodate hundreds of users running highly computationally intensive applications at a time. These applications require numerous softwares, licenses, and various levels of storage as well. All of these resources must be monitored and managed by HPC administrators, which presents a daunting task. In this project, I created numerous software tools as part of an HPC Visualization and Management system, which is now used by HPC administrators on a daily basis.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Frontier Job-Centric Telemetry Dataset

Comprehensive analysis of high-performance computing (HPC) systems requires linking workload execution to system behavior. This kind of analysis is vital for diagnosing performance issues, managing capacity, detecting anomalous workloads, and understanding how applications interact with system hardware. This job-centric telemetry dataset unifies scheduler job records with node-level measurements, enabling direct association between workloads and their corresponding power, thermal, and performance characteristics. It contains sanitized, scheduler related metadata for 152,400 individual jobs that ran on the Frontier supercomputer and ended on selected days throughout 2024 and 2025, a subpopulation of ~6.8% of the total number of allocated jobs with non-zero run time on the system over that same period. Each is linked with files that contain telemetry time series records of the power utilization and temperature behavior of its allocated nodes and their processors during the run time of the job. Where available, a portion of the job files also contain network performance time series. Jobs are sampled from select days that reflect normal levels of user activity and possess job size distributions with large numbers of leadership class jobs (>20% of Frontier nodes). Jobs in this dataset attempt to best represent successful user workflows.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Distributed deep learning training using silicon photonic switched architectures

The scaling trends of deep learning models and distributed training workloads are challenging network capacities in today’s datacenters and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. We propose a system architecture that leverages silicon photonic (SiP) switch-enabled server regrouping using bandwidth steering to tackle the challenges and accelerate distributed deep learning training. In addition, our proposed system architecture utilizes a highly integrated operating system-based SiP switch control scheme to reduce implementation complexity. To demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal, we built an experimental testbed with a SiP switch-enabled reconfigurable fat tree topology and evaluated the network performance of distributed ring all-reduce and parameter server workloads. The experimental results show up to 3.6× improvements over the static non-reconfigurable fat tree. Our large-scale simulation results show that server regrouping can deliver up to 2.3× flow throughput improvement for a 2× tapered fat tree and a further 11% improvement when higher-layer bandwidth steering is employed. The collective results show the potential of integrating SiP switches into datacenters and HPC systems to accelerate distributed deep learning training.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

RingX: Scalable Parallel Attention for Long-Context Learning on HPC

The attention mechanism has become foundational for remarkable AI breakthroughs since the introduction of the Transformer, driving the demand for increasingly longer context to power frontier models such as large-scale reasoning language models and high-resolution image/video generators. However, its quadratic computational and memory complexities present substantial challenges. Current state-of-the-art parallel attention methods, such as ring attention, are widely adopted for long-context training but utilize a point-to-point communication strategy that fails to fully exploit the capabilities of modern HPC network architectures. In this work, we propose ringX, a scalable family of parallel attention methods optimized explicitly for HPC systems. By enhancing workload partitioning, refining communication patterns, and improving load balancing, ringX achieves up to 3.4 × speedup compared to conventional ring attention on the Frontier supercomputer. Optimized for both bi-directional and causal attention mechanisms, ringX demonstrates its effectiveness through training benchmarks of a Vision Transformer (ViT) on a climate dataset and a Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) model, Llama3 8B. Our method attains an end-to-end training speedup of approximately 1.5 × in both scenarios. To our knowledge, the achieved 38% model FLOPs utilization (MFU) for training Llama3 8B with a 1M-token sequence length on 4,096 GPUs represents one of the highest training efficiencies reported for long-context learning on HPC systems. Our code implementation is available at https://github.com/jqyin/ringX-attention.

Yin, Junqi [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000338435520)↗

Exploring the Landscape of Distributed Graph Clustering on Leadership Supercomputers

The rapid growth of large-scale datasets in fields like biology and social networks has driven the need for advanced graph analytics techniques. Community detection, a fundamental task in graph analytics, identifies closely connected groups of nodes within a network, providing valuable insights across various disciplines. This study focuses on two classic community detection methods, the Louvain algorithm and Markov Clustering (MCL), and evaluates the performance of two prominent distributed community detection algorithms: HiPDPL-GPU, our prior implementation, and HipMCL. We conduct experiments on GPU-accelerated heterogeneous HPC systems, Summit and Frontier, to assess their performance under varying conditions. Our objective is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of these algorithms in terms of scalability, and quality of solutions. We evaluate these algorithms on a diverse set of 70+ networks spanning 13 domains, with sizes ranging up to 4.2 billion edges. Our results demonstrate that HiPDPL-GPU consistently outperforms HipMCL, especially for large-scale networks. HiPDPL-GPU achieves significantly faster runtimes (47x to 1439x), higher modularity scores, and improved scalability. These findings highlight HiPDPL-GPU as a promising solution for efficient and effective large-scale graph analytics in diverse application domains, and provide insights into the feasibility of using MCL-based approaches for certain application domains.

Community detection, graph algorithms↗

Pavilion 2 Feature Additions [Slides]

Pavilion 2 is a critical component of system testing for LANL HPC systems. Pavilion 2 is system independent, which allows for the creation of a large suite of generalized tests than can be applied to multiple systems. These additions to Pavilion 2 improve our ability to test systems and diagnose issues. With such a large suite, running the proper tests when diagnosing and fixing a system can be difficult, as well as locating old tests for reference. Test configurations may contain several permutations of a test, not all of which may apply to a given system. The ability to run sets of test permutations lets the tester focus on specific parts of the test without having to edit the test configurations or run extraneous tests. The addition of the filter argument improves the ability to find test results based on test attributes, including past tests. Pavilion 2's system independence is largely based on various layers of configuration files. Configuration files for the host, test, and modes exist to allow generalized testing. The operating system configuration layer can provide helpful OS defaults to a test. Survey, a collection and reporting tool, can help us gauge the performance of a system as well as diagnose issues. The addition of a Survey mode in Pavilion 2 makes running tests with Survey very straightforward. The Survey results are combined with Pavilion 2's test results to make it easy to access.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

MADA: Multi-Agent Design Assistant

MADA (Multi-Agent Design Assistant) is a Large Language Model (LLM) powered multi-agent framework that coordinates specialized agents for complex design workflows. The system was designed for HPC workflows with the following agents in mind: 1) A Job Management Agent (JMA) launches and manages ensemble simulations on HPC systems, 2) a Geometry Agent (GA) generates meshes, and 3) an Inverse Design Agent (IDA) proposes new designs informed by simulation outcomes. Our framework reduces cumbersome manual workflow setup, and enables automated design exploration at scale. However, the software also enables users to rapidly create new multi-agent systems. Simply define new agents in a configuration file, giving each their own set of tools (via MCP), and then chat and prompt your new multi-agent system. Is

Gunnarson, BrianS [Lawrence Livermore National Lab↗

Pavilion 2 Feature Additions [Slides]

Pavilion 2 is a critical component of system testing for LANL HPC systems. Pavilion 2 is system independent, which allows for the creation of a large suite of generalized tests than can be applied to multiple systems. These additions to Pavilion 2 improve our ability to test systems and diagnose issues. With such a large suite, running the proper tests when diagnosing and fixing a system can be difficult, as well as locating old tests for reference. Test configurations may contain several permutations of a test, not all of which may apply to a given system. The ability to run sets of test permutations lets the tester focus on specific parts of the test without having to edit the test configurations or run extraneous tests. The addition of the filter argument improves the ability to find test results based on test attributes, including past tests. Pavilion 2's system independence is largely based on various layers of configuration files. Configuration files for the host, test, and modes exist to allow generalized testing. The operating system configuration layer can provide helpful OS defaults to a test. Survey, a collection and reporting tool, can help us gauge the performance of a system as well as diagnose issues. The addition of a Survey mode in Pavilion 2 makes running tests with Survey very straightforward. The Survey results are combined with Pavilion 2's test results to make it easy to access.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗