Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “NSF”

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
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2012

Italian hybrid and fission reactors scenario analysis

Italy is a country where a long tradition of studies both in the fission and fusion field is consolidated; nevertheless a strong public opinion concerned with the destination of the Spent Nuclear Fuel hinders the development of nuclear power. The possibility to a severe reduction of the NSF mass generated from a fleet of nuclear reactors employing an hypothetical fusionfission hybrid reactor has been investigated in the Italian framework. The possibility to produce nuclear fuel for the fission nuclear reactors with the hybrid reactor was analyzed too.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2013

The Majorana Demonstrator: A search for neutrinoless double-beta decay of germanium-76

The MAJORANA collaboration is searching for neutrinoless double beta decay using {sup 76}Ge, which has been shown to have a number of advantages in terms of sensitivities and backgrounds. The observation of neutrinoless double-beta decay would show that lepton number is violated and that neutrinos are Majorana particles and would simultaneously provide information on neutrino mass. Attaining sensitivities for neutrino masses in the inverted hierarchy region, 15 - 50 meV, will require large, tonne-scale detectors with extremely low backgrounds, at the level of ∼1 count/t-y or lower in the region of the signal. The MAJORANA collaboration, with funding support from DOE Office of Nuclear Physics and NSF Particle Astrophysics, is constructing the DEMONSTRATOR, an array consisting of 40 kg of p-type point-contact high-purity germanium (HPGe) detectors, of which ∼30 kg will be enriched to 87% in {sup 76}Ge. The DEMONSTRATOR is being constructed in a clean room laboratory facility at the 4850' level (4300 m.w.e.) of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, SD. It utilizes a compact graded shield approach with the inner portion consisting of ultra-clean Cu that is being electroformed and machined underground. The primary aim of the DEMONSTRATOR is to show the feasibility of a future tonne-scale measurement in terms of backgrounds and scalability.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Design and construction of the main linac module for the superconducting energy recovery linac project at Cornell

Cornell University has been designing and building superconducting accelerators for various applications for more than 50 years. Currently, an energy-recovery linac (ERL) based synchrotron-light facility is proposed making use of the existing CESR facility. As part of the phase 1 R and D program funded by the NSF, critical challenges in the design were addressed, one of them being a full linac cryo-module. It houses 6 superconducting cavities- operated at 1.8 K in continuous wave (CW) mode - with individual HOM absorbers and one magnet/ BPM section. Pushing the limits, a high quality factor of the cavities (2⋅10{sup 10}) and high beam currents (100 mA accelerated plus 100 mA decelerated) are targeted. We will present the design of the main linac cryo-module (MLC) being finalized recently, its cryogenic features and report on the status of the fabrication which started in late 2012.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Advanced polarization-control strategies for enhancing performance in multipetawatt laser facilities

Our research focuses on designing all-reflective phase retarders (RPRs) to generate and maintain circularly polarized (CP) light for NSF OPAL and other multipetawatt laser facilities. Assuming that the input polarization is either s- or p-polarized, RPRs need to be used in an out-of-plane configuration. Here, we will discuss the impact of transporting and focusing optics on CP light.

Lasers↗
DOE OSTI2013

THE PULSAR SEARCH COLLABORATORY: DISCOVERY AND TIMING OF FIVE NEW PULSARS

We present the discovery and timing solutions of five new pulsars by students involved in the Pulsar Search Collaboratory, a NSF-funded joint program between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and West Virginia University designed to excite and engage high-school students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and related fields. We encourage students to pursue STEM fields by apprenticing them within a professional scientific community doing cutting edge research, specifically by teaching them to search for pulsars. The students are analyzing 300 hr of drift-scan survey data taken with the Green Bank Telescope at 350 MHz. These data cover 2876 deg{sup 2} of the sky. Over the course of five years, more than 700 students have inspected diagnostic plots through a web-based graphical interface designed for this project. The five pulsars discovered in the data have spin periods ranging from 3.1 ms to 4.8 s. Among the new discoveries are PSR J1926-1314, a long period, nulling pulsar; PSR J1821+0155, an isolated, partially recycled 33 ms pulsar; and PSR J1400-1438, a millisecond pulsar in a 9.5 day orbit whose companion is likely a white dwarf star.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2014

First faint dual-field off-axis observations in optical long baseline interferometry

Ground-based long baseline interferometers have long been limited in sensitivity in part by the short integration periods imposed by atmospheric turbulence. The first observation fainter than this limit was performed on 2011 January 22 when the Keck Interferometer observed a K = 11.5 target, about 1 mag fainter than its K = 10.3 atmospherically imposed limit; the currently demonstrated limit is K = 12.5. These observations were made possible by the Dual-Field Phase-Referencing (DFPR) instrument, part of the NSF-funded ASTrometry and phase-Referenced Astronomy project; integration times longer than the turbulence time scale are made possible by its ability to simultaneously measure the real-time effects of the atmosphere on a nearby bright guide star and correct for it on the faint target. We present the implementation of DFPR on the Keck Interferometer. Then, we detail its on-sky performance focusing on the accuracy of the turbulence correction and the resulting fringe contrast stability.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2018

Carnegie Supernova Project-II: Extending the Near-infrared Hubble Diagram for Type Ia Supernovae to z ~0.1

The Carnegie Supernova Project-II (CSP-II) was an NSF-funded, four-year program to obtain optical and near-infrared observations of a "Cosmology" sample of ~100 Type Ia supernovae located in the smooth Hubble flow (0.03 $\lesssim$ z $\lesssim$ 0.10). Light curves were also obtained of a "Physics" sample composed of 90 nearby Type Ia supernovae at z ≤ 0.04 selected for near-infrared spectroscopic timeseries observations. The primary emphasis of the CSP-II is to use the combination of optical and near-infrared photometry to achieve a distance precision of better than 5%. Here in this paper, details of the supernova sample, the observational strategy, and the characteristics of the photometric data are provided. In a companion paper, the near-infrared spectroscopy component of the project is presented.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2014

GLOBAL NON-SPHERICAL OSCILLATIONS IN THREE-DIMENSIONAL 4π SIMULATIONS OF THE H-INGESTION FLASH

We performed three-dimensional simulations of proton-rich material entrainment into {sup 12}C-rich He-shell flash convection and the subsequent H-ingestion flash that took place in the post-asymptotic giant branch star Sakurai's object. Observations of the transient nature and anomalous abundance features are available to validate our method and assumptions, with the aim of applying them to very low-metallicity stars in the future. We include nuclear energy feedback from H burning and cover the full 4π geometry of the shell. Runs on 768{sup 3} and 1536{sup 3} grids agree well with each other and have been followed for 1500 minutes and 1200 minutes. After an 850 minute long quiescent entrainment phase, the simulations enter into a global non-spherical oscillation that is launched and sustained by individual ignition events of H-rich fluid pockets. Fast circumferential flows collide at the antipode and cause the formation and localized ignition of the next H-overabundant pocket. The cycle repeats for more than a dozen times while its amplitude decreases. During the global oscillation, the entrainment rate increases temporarily by a factor of ≈100. Entrained entropy quenches convective motions in the upper layer until the burning of entrained H establishes a separate convection zone. The lower-resolution run hints at the possibility that another global oscillation, perhaps even more violent, will follow. The location of the H-burning convection zone agrees with a one-dimensional model in which the mixing efficiency is calibrated to reproduce the light curve. The simulations have been performed at the NSF Blue Waters supercomputer at NCSA.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Very Large Array imaging rules out precessing radio jets in three DES–SDSS-selected candidate periodic quasars

ABSTRACT Periodic quasars have been suggested as candidates for hosting binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs), although alternative scenarios remain possible to explain the optical light-curve periodicity. To test the alternative hypothesis of precessing radio jet, we present deep 6 GHz radio imaging conducted with NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in its C configuration for the three candidate periodic quasars, DES J024703.24−010032.0, DES J024944.66−000036.8, and DES J025214.67−002813.7. Our targets were selected based on their optical variability using 20 yr long multicolour light curves from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The new VLA observations show that all three periodic quasars are radio-quiet with the radio loudness parameters measured to be $R\equiv f_{6\, {\rm cm}}/f_{{\rm 2500}}$ of ≲1.0–1.5 and the k-corrected luminosities νLν[6 GHz] of ≲5–21 × 1039 erg s−1. They are in stark contrast to previously known periodic quasars proposed as binary SMBH candidates such as the blazar OJ 287 and PG1302−102. Our results rule out optical emission contributed from precessing radio jets as the origin of the optical periodicity in the three DES–SDSS-selected candidate periodic quasars. Future continued optical monitoring and complementary multiwavelength observations are still needed to further test the binary SMBH hypothesis as well as other competing scenarios to explain the optical periodicity.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2018

Cdc48a AAA‐ATPase and its association with ubiquitin‐like SAMP1 and DNA repair in Archaea

Cdc48/p97/VCP is an AAA ATPase, conserved in eukaryotes and archaea, which is demonstrated to convert chemical energy from the hydrolysis of ATP into the mechanical energy, for either unfolding protein substrates or dislodging protein substrates from complexes. The role of Cdc48 in ubiquitin mediated protein degradation has been well reported; however, its role in DNA repair is less understood so far. Evidence in eukaryotes which implicates Cdc48 in DNA repair is based on the association of Cdc48 with partners and substrate proteins, which are known to be involved in DNA damage response. In our study, we found Cdc48A of Haloferax volcanii co‐purifies with RecJ‐domain (RecJ3 and RecJ4) and RNase J1 homologs in an apparent thiol sensitive complex that binds the oxidative stress‐responsive, ubiquitin‐like SAMP1 in the presence of ATP . RecJ domain proteins are DNases reported to be involved in DNA repair pathways in bacteria. Further analysis revealed an Hfx. volcanii Δcdc48A mutant showed significant difference in survival when compared to its wildtype, on subjecting them to DNA damaging agents like phleomycin and UV. An increase (up to 3.4‐fold; p < 0.05) in transcript levels of cdc48a , recj3 and rnj1 was observed after treatment with the DNA damaging agent phleomycin, suggesting the expression of these genes is correlated with DNA repair. Current focus of this study is to decipher the role of Cdc48A in DNA repair by identifying its partner and substrate proteins. In addition, we are determining the substrate modifications required for signaling the Cdc48A mediated repair pathway using classic biochemistry techniques and genetic manipulations. Support or Funding Information The work was supported by funds awarded to Dr. Julie A. Maupin‐Furlow through the Bilateral NSF/BIO‐BBSRC program (NSF 1642283), U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences, Physical Biosciences Program (DOE DE‐FG02‐05ER15650) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH R01 GM57498). This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .

Dantuluri, Swathi↗
DOE OSTI2018

Functional characterization of three GH10 xylanases

Decreased availability of fossil fuels has driven an increased demand for sustainable energy sources such as biofuels. One area of bioenergy research involves development of biocatalysts able to efficiently degrade biomass “waste”‐products, such as substrates derived from corn stover, rather than easily‐fermentable biomass used for food, such as starch from corn kernels. Xylanases are of interest for their ability to hydrolyze hemicellulosic sugars found in plant cell walls, allowing utilization of waste‐derived biomass. In this study, three xylanases of glycoside hydrolase family 10 (GH10) are functionally characterized and optimized for temperature and pH, as well as kinetically analyzed for xylose monomer and oligomer production. These enzymes, GH10‐4, GH10‐9, and GH10‐15, demonstrate activity upon substrates xylan and arabinoxylan. For GH10‐4, optima are 50°C at pH 8 on xylan and 45°C at pH 8 on arabinoxylan. For GH10‐9, optima are 70°C at pH 5 on xylan and 70°C at pH 5 on arabinoxylan. For GH10‐15, optima are 50°C at pH 8 on xylan and 45°C at pH 5 on arabinoxylan. Kinetic analysis reveals GH10‐4 produces xylose (X1), xylobiose (X2), xylotriose (X3), xylotetraose (X4), and xylopentaose (X5) from xylan, while GH10‐9 and GH10‐15 produce X1, X2, and X3. From arabinoxylan, GH10‐4 produces X1, X2, X3, X4, while GH10‐9 and GH10‐15 produce X1, X2, X3. Conclusive kinetic data may suggest applicability of these enzymes for industrial use within biocatalysts and contribute further insight to the functionality of enzymes within GH10. Support or Funding Information The authors are grateful for financial support by the Integrated Biological Sciences Summer Research Program (IBS‐SRP, NSF) at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) of the U.S. Department of Energy. Presentation travel support is provided by the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program of Winthrop University. The authors also thank Lai Bergeman, Craig Bingman, Bob Smith, Emily Beebe, Kirk Vander Meulen, Amber Smith, David Wassarman, and John Greenler for professional support.

Park, Jesslyn↗
DOE OSTI2021

Development of Quantum Interconnects (QuICs) for Next-Generation Information Technologies

Just as “classical” information technology rests on a foundation built of interconnected information-processing systems, quantum information technology (QIT) must do the same. A critical component of such systems is the “interconnect,” a device or process that allows transfer of information between disparate physical media, for example, semiconductor electronics, individual atoms, light pulses in optical fiber, or microwave fields. While interconnects have been well engineered for decades in the realm of classical information technology, quantum interconnects (QuICs) present special challenges, as they must allow the transfer of fragile quantum states between different physical parts or degrees of freedom of the system. The diversity of QIT platforms (superconducting, atomic, solid-state color center, optical, etc.) that will form a “quantum internet” poses additional challenges. As quantum systems scale to larger size, the quantum interconnect bottleneck is imminent, and is emerging as a grand challenge for QIT. For these reasons, it is the position of the community represented by participants of the NSF workshop on “Quantum Interconnects” that accelerating QuIC research is crucial for sustained development of a national quantum science and technology program. Given the diversity of QIT platforms, materials used, applications, and infrastructure required, a convergent research program including partnership between academia, industry, and national laboratories is required.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2017

Scaling Up Data-Parallel Analytics Platforms: Linear Algebraic Operation Cases

Linear algebraic operations such as matrix manipulations form the kernel of many machine learning and other crucial algorithms. Scaling up as well as scaling out such algorithms are key to supporting large scale data analysis that require efficient processing over millions of data samples. To this end, we present, ARION, a hardware acceleration based approach for scaling-up individual tasks of Spark, a popular data-parallel analytics platform. We support both linear algebraic operations of between two dense matrices, and between sparse and dense matrices in distributed environments. ARION provides a flexible control of acceleration according to matrix density, along with efficient scheduling based on runtime resource utilization. We demonstrate the benefit of our approach for general matrix multiplication operations over large matrices with up to four billion elements by using Gramian matrix computation that is commonly used in machine learning. Experiments show that our approach achieves more than 2× and 1.5× end-to-end performance speedups for dense and sparse matrices, respectively, and up to 57.04× faster computation compared to MLlib, a state of the art Spark-based implementation. This work is sponsored in part by the NSF under the grants: CNS-1565314, CNS-1405697, and CNS-1615411. The manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan). This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725.

Xu, Luna↗
DOE OSTI2019

The engagement and performance operations center: Epoc

In 2018, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Engagement and Performance Operations Center (EPOC), a joint project between Indiana University (IU) and the Department of Energy's Energy Science Network (ESnet), to work with domain scientists to accelerate the ability of distributed collaborations to share data in order to reach broader science goals. The goal of this funding was to create an operations center for engagement-including definition of formal processes, tracking of engagements, and funded staff, not simply best effort by volunteers, with a goal of enabling digital societies to better share scientific data.

Moynihan, E↗
DOE OSTI2022

The COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium

In March of 2020, recognizing the potential of High Performance Computing (HPC) to accelerate understanding and the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop COVID-19, the HPC community assembled the largest collection of worldwide HPC resources to enable COVID-19 researchers worldwide to advance their critical efforts. Amazingly, the COVID-19 HPC Consortium was formed within one week through the joint effort of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and IBM to create a unique public–private partnership between government, industry, and academic leaders. This article is the Consortium's story–how the Consortium was created, its founding members, what it provides, how it works, and its accomplishments. We will reflect on the lessons learned from the creation and operation of the Consortium and describe how the features of the Consortium could be sustained as a National Strategic Computing Reserve to ensure the nation is prepared for future crises.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Design and Performance Characterization of RADICAL-Pilot on Leadership-Class Platforms

Many extreme scale scientific applications have workloads comprised of a large number of individual highperformance tasks. The Pilot abstraction decouples workload specification, resource management, and task execution via job placeholders and late-binding. As such, suitable implementations of the Pilot abstraction can support the collective execution of large number of tasks on supercomputers. We introduce RADICAL-Pilot (RP) as a portable, modular and extensible Pilot enabled runtime system. We describe RP's design, architecture and implementation. We characterize its performance and show its ability to scalably execute workloads comprised of tens of thousands heterogeneous tasks on DOE and NSF leadership-class HPC platforms. Specifically, we investigate RP's weak/strong scaling with CPU/GPU, single/multi core, (non)MPI tasks and python functions when using most of ORNL Summit and TACC Frontera. RADICAL-Pilot can be used stand-alone, as well as the runtime for third-party workflow systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2014

SU-E-J-31: Biodynamic Imaging of Cancer Tissue and Response to Chemotherapy

Purpose: To measure intracellular motions inside three-dimensional living cancer tissue samples to establish a novel set of biodynamic biomarkers that assess tissue proliferative activity and sensitivity or resistance to chemotherapy. Methods: Biodynamic imaging (BDI) uses digital holography with low-coherence low-intensity light illumination to construct 3D holograms from depths up to a millimeter deep inside cancer tissue models that include multicellular tumor spheroids and ex vivo cancer biopsies from canine non-Hodgkins lymphoma and epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) mouse explants. Intracellular motions modulate the holographic intensity with frequencies related to the Doppler effect caused by the motions of a wide variety of intracellular components. These motions are affected by applied therapeutic agents, and BDI produces unique fingerprints of the action of specific drugs on the motions in specific cell types. In this study, chemotherapeutic agents (doxorubicin for canine lymphoma and oxoplatin for ovarian) are applied to the living tissue models and monitored over 10 hours by BDI. Results: Multicellular spheroids and patient biopsies are categorized as either sensitive or insensitive to applied therapeutics depending on the intracellular Doppler signatures of chemotherapy response. For both lymphoma and EOC there is strong specificity to the two types of sensitivities, with sensitive cell lines and biopsies exhibiting a global cessation of proliferation and strong suppression of metabolic activity, while insensitive cell lines and biopsies show moderate activation of Doppler frequencies associated with membrane processes and possible membrane trafficking. Conclusion: This work supports the hypothesis that biodynamic biomarkers from three-dimensional living tumor tissue, that includes tissue heterogeneity and measured within 24 hours of surgery, is predictive of near-term patient response to therapy. Future work will correlate biodynamic biomarkers with progression free survival times. This work is supported by NIH 1R01EB016582 and NSF 1263753-CBET. Nolte, Turek and An have a financial interest in Animated Dynamics, Inc. that will be licensing technology from Purdue University.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2014

SU-E-J-60: Efficient Monte Carlo Dose Calculation On CPU-GPU Heterogeneous Systems

Purpose: It is well-known that the performance of GPU-based Monte Carlo dose calculation implementations is bounded by memory bandwidth. One major cause of this bottleneck is the random memory writing patterns in dose deposition, which leads to several memory efficiency issues on GPU such as un-coalesced writing and atomic operations. We propose a new method to alleviate such issues on CPU-GPU heterogeneous systems, which achieves overall performance improvement for Monte Carlo dose calculation. Methods: Dose deposition is to accumulate dose into the voxels of a dose volume along the trajectories of radiation rays. Our idea is to partition this procedure into the following three steps, which are fine-tuned for CPU or GPU: (1) each GPU thread writes dose results with location information to a buffer on GPU memory, which achieves fully-coalesced and atomic-free memory transactions; (2) the dose results in the buffer are transferred to CPU memory; (3) the dose volume is constructed from the dose buffer on CPU. We organize the processing of all radiation rays into streams. Since the steps within a stream use different hardware resources (i.e., GPU, DMA, CPU), we can overlap the execution of these steps for different streams by pipelining. Results: We evaluated our method using a Monte Carlo Convolution Superposition (MCCS) program and tested our implementation for various clinical cases on a heterogeneous system containing an Intel i7 quad-core CPU and an NVIDIA TITAN GPU. Comparing with a straightforward MCCS implementation on the same system (using both CPU and GPU for radiation ray tracing), our method gained 2-5X speedup without losing dose calculation accuracy. Conclusion: The results show that our new method improves the effective memory bandwidth and overall performance for MCCS on the CPU-GPU systems. Our proposed method can also be applied to accelerate other Monte Carlo dose calculation approaches. This research was supported in part by NSF under Grants CCF-1217906, and also in part by a research contract from the Sandia National Laboratories.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗