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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.

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At least 1,279 records · Page 71
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2021

Controlled exposure of CuO thin films through corrosion-protecting, ALD-deposited TiO 2 overlayers

Ultra-thin film coatings are used to protect semiconductor photoelectrodes from the harsh chemical environments common to photoelectrochemical energy conversion. These layers add contact transfer resistance to the interface that can result in a reduction of photoelectrochemical energy conversion efficiency of the photoelectrode. Here, we describe the concept of a partial protection layer, which allows for direct chemical access to a small fraction of the semiconductor underlayer for further functionalization by an electrocatalyst. The rest of the interface remains protected by a stable, inert protection layer. CuO is used as a model system for this scheme. Atomic layer deposition (ALD)-prepared TiO 2 layers on CuO thin films prepared from electrodeposited Cu 2 O allow for the control of interfacial morphology to intentionally expose the CuO underlayer. The ALD-TiO 2 overlayer shrinks during crystallization, while Cu 2 O in the underlayer expands during oxidation. As a result, the TiO 2 protection layer cracks to expose the oxidized underlying CuO layer, which can be controlled by preceding thermal oxidation. Furthermore, this work demonstrates a potentially promising strategy for the parallel optimization of photoelectrochemical interfaces for chemical stability and high performance.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement Adaptations to Retain Performance Portability With Increasing Heterogeneity

Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is an important method that enables many mesh-based applications to run at effectively higher resolution within limited computing resources by allowing high resolution only where really needed. This advantage comes at a cost, however: greater complexity in the mesh management machinery and challenges with load distribution. With the current trend of increasing heterogeneity in hardware architecture, AMR presents an orthogonal axis of complexity. Additionally, the usual techniques, such as asynchronous communication and hierarchy management for parallelism and memory that are necessary to obtain reasonable performance are very challenging to reason about with AMR. Different groups working with AMR are bringing different approaches to this challenge. Here, we examine the design choices of several AMR codes and also the degree to which demands placed on them by their users influence these choices.

42 ENGINEERING↗
NASA NTRS1975

High subsonic flow tests of a parallel pipe followed by a large area ratio diffuser

Experiments were performed on a pilot model duct system in order to explore its aerodynamic characteristics. The model was scaled from a design projected for the high speed operation mode of the Aircraft Noise Reduction Laboratory. The test results show that the model performed satisfactorily and therefore the projected design will most likely meet the specifications.

Barna, P. S.↗
NASA NTRS2001

Demonstration of Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) Performance for Planetary and Geostationary Earth Observing

The combination of massively parallel spatial sampling and accurate spectral radiometry offered by imaging FTS makes it extremely attractive for earth and planetary remote sensing. We constructed a breadboard instrument to help assess the potential for planetary applications of small imaging FTS instruments in the 1 - 5 micrometer range. The results also support definition of the NASA Geostationary Imaging FTS (GIFTS) instrument that will make key meteorological and climate observations from geostationary earth orbit. The Planetary Imaging FTS (PIFTS) breadboard is based on a custom miniaturized Bomen interferometer that uses corner cube reflectors, a wishbone pivoting voice-coil delay scan mechanism, and a laser diode metrology system. The interferometer optical output is measured by a commercial infrared camera procured from Santa Barbara Focalplane. It uses an InSb 128x128 detector array that covers the entire FOV of the instrument when coupled with a 25 mm focal length commercial camera lens. With appropriate lenses and cold filters the instrument can be used from the visible to 5 micrometers. The delay scan is continuous, but slow, covering the maximum range of +/- 0.4 cm in 37.56 sec at a rate of 500 image frames per second. Image exposures are timed to be centered around predicted zero crossings. The design allows for prediction algorithms that account for the most recent fringe rate so that timing jitter produced by scan speed variations can be minimized. Response to a fixed source is linear with exposure time nearly to the point of saturation. Linearity with respect to input variations was demonstrated to within 0.16% using a 3-point blackbody calibration. Imaging of external complex scenes was carried out at low and high spectral resolution. These require full complex calibration to remove background contributions that vary dramatically over the instrument FOV. Testing is continuing to demonstrate the precise radiometric accuracy and noise characteristics.

Revercomb, Henry E.↗
NASA NTRS1971

Performance of a neutralizer for electron bombardment thruster

Results of the SERT II flight indicate that the hollow cathode neutralizer not only represents a power and propellant weight penalty but can be a contributing cause to accelerator grid erosion. Tests with a 30-cm diameter thruster show that a neutralizer position of approximately 9 cm axially downstream of the accelerator grid and approximately 9 cm radially away from the outer edge of the accelerator grid and pointing parallel to the thruster axis provides the best overall performance. The estimated grid wear rate was less than 0.08 mm in 10,000 hours. The coupling voltage was approximately 17 volts at a neutralizer flow rate of 22 equivalent milliamperes of mercury and a beam current of 1.5 amperes. Neutralizer power was 31 watts and the effect of neutralizer flow on overall propellant utilization efficiency is a 1.2 percentage point reduction at a thruster utilization efficiency of 90 percent. The neutralizer position defined in tests with a 30 cm thruster was tested with a 15 cm SERT II thruster. When the neutralizer was relocated further downstream with this different orientation, accelerator impingement current due to neutralizer operation was reduced by approximately a factor of seven and was nearly independent of neutralizer operation.

Bechtel, R. T.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Case studies in serial and parallel simulation

The design of a ground combat simulation in a time-driven and in an event-driven style is discussed. The differences between time-driven and event-driven simulation are illustrated, and performance results for the two systems executing both serially and in parallel are presented. It is noted that the event-driven style produces a more efficient system both serially and in parallel, primarily because it minimizes the number of messages produced and thereby reduces the amount of computation.

Wieland, Frederick↗
NASA NTRS1988

Problems in characterizing barrier performance

The barrier is a synchronization construct which is useful in separating a parallel program into parallel sections which are executed in sequence. The completion of a barrier requires cooperation among all executing processes. This requirement not only introduces the wait for the slowest process delay which is inherent in the definition of the synchronization, but also has implications for the efficient implementation and measurement of barrier performance in different systems. Types of barrier implementation and their relationship to different multiprocessor environments are described. Then the problem of measuring the performance of barrier implementations on specific machine architecture is discussed. The fact that the barrier synchronization requires the cooperation of all processes makes the problem of performance measurement similarly global. Making non-intrusive measurements of sufficient accuracy can be tricky on systems offering only rudimentary measurement tools.

Jordan, Harry F.↗
NASA NTRS1972

Performance of a neutralizer for electron bombardment thruster.

Results of the SERT II flight indicate that the hollow cathode neutralizer not only represents a power and propellant weight penalty but can be a contributing cause to accelerator grid erosion. Tests with a 30-cm diameter thruster have shown that a neutralizer position of approximately 9 cm axially downstream of the accelerator grid and approximately 9 cm radially away from the outer edge of the accelerator grid and pointing parallel to the thruster axis provides the best overall performance. The estimated grid wear rate was less than 0.08 mm in 10,000 hr. The coupling voltage (neutralizer to beam voltage) was approximately 17 volts at a neutralizer flow rate of 22 equivalent milliamperes of mercury and a beam current of 1.5 amperes. Neutralizer power (excluding heaters) was 31 watts and the effect of neutralizer flow on overall propellant utilization efficiency is a 1.2 percentage point reduction at a thruster utilization efficiency of 90 percent.

Bechtel, R. T.↗
DOE OSTI2022

Bit-GraphBLAS: Bit-Level Optimizations of Matrix-Centric Graph Processing on GPU

In the graph data structure like adjacency matrix, the connectivity of two nodes can be sufficiently represented using only 1 bit, but they are generally treated as 32-bit full-precision in state-of-the-art graph frameworks to adopt common sparse format such as CSR. Meanwhile, bit-level parallelism has recently be explored to have high-performance potential and low storage requirement on GPUs with dense bit-tiles. To fill the gap, our solution is a hierarchical storage format that contains the bit-indexing base and dense bit-tile units. Inherently, the granularity of the bit-tile is an essential factor in achieving both storage compression and GPU parallelism. How to find a sweet spot that trades off between avoiding sparsity and exploiting is comprehensively researched in this work. In the experiment, we evaluate the proposed storage format and algorithms on modern generation GPUs, including Pascal and Volta, to figure out critical software co-designs in conjunction with existing hardware-specific optimization.

Chen, Jou-An↗
DOE OSTI2021

Computational Fluid Dynamics Using the Adaptive Wavelet-Collocation Method

Advancements to the adaptive wavelet-collocation method over the last decade have opened up a number of new possible areas for active research. Volume penalization techniques allow complex immersed boundary conditions to be used with high efficiency for both internal and external flows. Anisotropic methods make it possible to use body-fitted meshes while still taking advantage of the dynamic adaptability properties wavelet-based methods provide. The parallelization of the approach has made it possible to perform large high-resolution simulations of detonation initiation and fluid instabilities to uncover new physical insights that would otherwise be difficult to discover. Other developments include space-time adaptive methods and nonreflecting boundary conditions. This article summarizes the work performed using the adaptive wavelet-collocation method developed by Vasilyev and coworkers over the past decade.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2020

Stochastic AC optimal power flow: A data-driven approach

There is an emerging need for efficient solutions to stochastic AC Optimal Power Flow (AC-OPF) to ensure optimal and reliable grid operations in the presence of increasing demand and generation uncertainty. Herein this paper presents a highly scalable data-driven algorithm for stochastic AC-OPF that has extremely low sample requirement. The novelty behind the algorithm’s performance involves an iterative scenario design approach that merges information regarding constraint violations in the system with data-driven sparse regression. Compared to conventional methods with random scenario sampling, our approach is able to provide feasible operating points for realistic systems with much lower sample requirements. Furthermore, multiple sub-tasks in our approach can be easily paralleled and based on historical data to enhance its performance and application. We demonstrate the computational improvements of our approach through simulations on different test cases in the IEEE PES PGLib-OPF benchmark library.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2024

A Performance and Energy Study of GPU-Resident Preconditioners for Conjugate Gradient Solvers: In the Context of Existing and Novel Approaches

Optimizing a particular subprogram out of the set of Basic (sparse) Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) for a given architecture is a common topic of research. In applications, however, these BLAS functions rarely appear in isolation; usually, many of them are used together, in various combinations and with varying inputs. As the need to solve a large, sparse linear system is ubiquitous throughout HPC applications, linear solvers constitute a realistic, sufficiently complex and well-defined representative use case for composite BLAS routines. To this end, based on a representative set of matrices drawn from a diverse set of fields, we present a framework to study, from the performance and energy perspective, the efficacy of GPU- resident parallel Conjugate Gradient (CG) linear solver with different preconditioner options, including Gauss-Seidel, Jacobi, and incomplete Cholesky. We also propose a novel GPU-based preconditioner, in which the triangular solves are approximated by an iterative process. The development of this preconditioner was motivated by solving large graph Laplacian linear systems, for which the existing preconditioners either perform slow on GPU-based platforms or are not applicable. We compare the performance of these preconditioners on different hardware accelerator architectures, i.e., AMD MI250X, MI100, Nvidia A100, V100, and Jetson. Our experiments reveal performance trade-offs and provide information on how to select the best strategy for the given linear system, dictated by its properties, and the platform of interest. We demonstrate the application of our novel preconditioner for solving CG and graph Laplacian systems. Overall, the framework can be utilized as a benchmark to guide informed decisions in choosing a specific preconditioner, i.e., whether it is better to rely on the performance of a triangular solver or on the performance of sparse matrix-vector product. Finally, by considering power consumption to solve the linear systems, we report the energy footprint for the solvers.

Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient, GPUs, iterative↗
DOE OSTI2023

An extension to V ORO ++ for multithreaded computation of Voronoi cells

V ORO ++ is a software library written in C++ for computing the Voronoi tessellation, a technique in computational geometry that is widely used for analyzing systems of particles. V ORO ++ was released in 2009 and is based on computing the Voronoi cell for each particle individually. Here, we take advantage of modern computer hardware, and extend the original serial version to allow for multithreaded computation of Voronoi cells via the OpenMP application programming interface. We test the performance of the code, and demonstrate that it can achieve parallel efficiencies greater than 95% in many cases. Further, the multithreaded extension follows standard OpenMP programming paradigms, allowing it to be incorporated into other programs. We provide an example of this using the VoroTop software library, performing a multithreaded Voronoi cell topology analysis of up to 102.4 million particles.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Summary of CTF Modeling and Numerical Improvements for Boiling Water Reactor Simulation

This report documents geometry and numerical improvements made to CTF for the modeling of boiling water reactor (BWR) geometry and operating conditions. These activities are part of a larger program to extend the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) to better support BWR modeling and simulation. The activities documented in this report added features to CTF, including support for mixed-fuel cores, modeling of the upper plenum, and modeling of the lower tie plate form losses. A review of the spacer grid modeling approach was also performed, and a plan was discussed for future improvement. The parallelization of the model was improved, leading to a roughly 2× improvement in CTF runtime and a 1.6× improvement in total VERA runtime. An in-depth review of the governing equations and their linearization was performed and is documented in this report. Once implemented, this new linearization will allow CTF to take much larger timesteps, leading to more significant reductions in CTF and VERA runtimes.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Experimental Investigation of Low-Frequency Distributed Acoustic Sensor Responses to Two Parallel Propagating Fractures

Low-frequency distributed acoustic sensing (LF-DAS) is a diagnostic tool for hydraulic fracture propagation with far-field monitoring using fiber optic sensors. LF-DAS senses strain rate variation caused by stress field change due to fracture propagation. Fiber optic sensors are installed in the monitoring wells in the vicinity of a fractured well. From the strain responses, fracture propagation can be evaluated. To understand subsurface conditions with multiple propagating fractures, a laboratory-scale hydraulic fracture experiment was performed simulating the LF-DAS response to fracture propagation with embedded distributed optical fiber strain sensors under these conditions. The experiment was performed using a transparent cube of epoxy with two parallel radial initial flaws centered in the cube. Fluid was injected into the sample to generate fractures along the initial flaws. The experiment used distributed high-definition fiber optic strain sensors with tight spatial resolutions. The sensors were embedded at two different locations on opposite sides of the initial flaws, serving as observation/monitoring locations. We also employed finite element modeling to numerically solve the linear elastic equations of equilibrium continuity and stress–strain relationships. The measured strains from the experiment were compared to simulation results from the finite element model. The experimentally derived strain and strain-rate waterfall plots from this study show the responses to both fractures propagating, while the fracture at the lower position took most of the fluid during the experiment. Interestingly, a fracture first began propagating from the upper flaw of the two flaws, but once the lower fracture was initiated, it grew much faster than the upper fracture. Both fibers were intercepted by the lower fracture, further verifying the strain signature as a fracture is approaching and intersecting an offset fiber.

Chemistry↗
NASA NTRS1999

I/O Parallelization for the Goddard Earth Observing System Data Assimilation System (GEOS DAS)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Data Assimilation Office (DAO) at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has developed the GEOS DAS, a data assimilation system that provides production support for NASA missions and will support NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) in the coming years. The DAO's support of the EOS project along with the requirement of producing long-term reanalysis datasets with an unvarying system levy a large I/O burden on the future system. The DAO has been involved in prototyping parallel implementations of the GEOS DAS for a number of years and is now converting the production version from shared-memory parallelism to distributed-memory parallelism using the portable Message-Passing Interface (MPI). If the MPI-based GEOS DAS is to meet these production requirements, we must make I/O from the parallel system efficient. We have designed a scheme that allows efficient I/O processing while retaining portability, reducing the need for post-processing, and producing data formats that are required by our users, both internal and external. The first phase of the GEOS DAS Parallel I/O System (GPIOS) will expand upon the common method of gathering global data to a Single PE for output. Instead of using a PE also tasked with primary computation, a number of PEs will be dedicated to I/O and its related tasks. This allows the data transformations and formatting required prior to output to take place asynchronously with respect to the GEOS DAS assimilation cycle, improving performance and generating output data sets in a format convenient for our users. I/O PEs can be added as needed to handle larger data volumes or to meet user file specifications. We will show I/O performance results from a prototype MPI GCM integrated with GPIOS. Phase two of GPIOS development will examine ways of integrating new software technologies to further improve performance and build scalability into the system. The maturing of MPI-IO implementations and other supporting libraries such as parallel HDF should provide performance gains while retaining portability.

Lucchesi, R.↗
NASA NTRS1984

Modeling algorithm execution time on processor arrays

An approach to modelling the execution time of algorithms on parallel arrays is presented. This time is expressed as a function of the number of processors and system parameters. The resulting model has been applied to a parallel implementation of the conjugate-gradient algorithm on NASA's FEM. Results of experiments performed to compare the model predictions against actual behavior show that the floating-point arithmetic, communication, and synchronization components of the parallel algorithm execution time were correctly modelled. The results also show that the overhead caused by the interaction of the system software and the actual parallel hardware must be reflected in the model parameters. The model has been used to predict the performance of the conjugate gradient algorithm on a given problem as the number of processors and machine characteristics varied.

Adams, L. M.↗
DOE OSTI2023

The Kokkos OpenMPTarget Backend: Implementation and Lessons Learned

As the supercomputing landscape diversifies, solutions such as Kokkos to write vendor agnostic applications and libraries have risen in popularity. Kokkos provides a programming model designed for performance portability, which allows developers to write a single source implementation that can run efficiently on various architectures. At its heart, Kokkos maps parallel algorithms to architecture and vendor specific backends written in lower level programming models such as CUDA and HIP. Another approach to writing vendor agnostic parallel code is using OpenMP’s directives based approach, which lets developers annotate code to express parallelism. It is implemented at the compiler level and is supported by all major high performance computing vendors, as well as the primary Open Source toolchains GNU and LLVM. Since its inception, Kokkos has used OpenMP to parallelize on CPU architectures. In this paper, we explore leveraging OpenMP for a GPU backend and discuss the challenges we encountered when mapping the Kokkos APIs and semantics to OpenMP target constructs. As an exemplar workload we chose a simple conjugate gradient solver for sparse matrices. We find that performance on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs varies widely based on details of the implementation strategy and the chosen compiler. Furthermore, the performance of the OpenMP implementations decreases with increasing complexity of the investigated algorithms.

Gayatri, Rahulkumar↗