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At least 1,297 records · Page 72

Computational Math Problems for a Clean Energy Future

Cutting edge computational mathematics are ubiquitous in renewable energy research. Problems in resilient and reliable electric grid operations, infrastructure planning, wind farm yaw control, and more demand sophisticated and scalable computational tools that enable the transition of renewable energy technologies from proof of concept to deployment into our energy system. The mission of the Computational Science Center at NREL is to lead the lab's efforts to solve energy challenges using high-performance computing (HPC), computational science, applied mathematics, scientific data management, visualization, and informatics. In this poster, we provide a short overview of three areas of computational mathematics research at NREL: wind power scenario generation for stochastic grid operations and infrastructure planning, improved rational function approximations for electromagnetic transients codes, and wind farm yaw control using a combination of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and reinforcement learning (RL). Increasing penetrations of renewable energy into power grids motivate the investigation of new approaches to characterizing uncertainty for five-minute economic dispatch problems. Similarly, as the penetration of distributed energy resources on power grids increases, it becomes important to revisit our methods of modelling transient phenomena, i.e. electromagnetic transients programs. Finally, the combination of ADMM and RL for wind farm yaw control presented here can potentially increase the efficiency of the deployed distributed controllers by orders of magnitude.

ADMM↗

GASNet-EX: A High-Performance, Portable Communication Library for Exascale

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) models, typified by such languages as Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Co-Array Fortran, expose one-sided communication as a key building block for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Architectural trends in supercomputing make such programming models increasingly attractive, and newer, more sophisticated models such as UPC++, Legion and Chapel that rely upon similar communication paradigms are gaining popularity. GASNet-EX is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models in future exascale machines. The library is an evolution of the popular GASNet communication system, building upon over 15 years of lessons learned. We describe and evaluate several features and enhancements that have been introduced to address the needs of modern client systems. Microbenchmark results demonstrate the RMA performance of GASNet-EX is competitive with several MPI-3 implementations on current HPC systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Final Technical Report: Integrated Distribution-Transmission Analysis for Very High Penetration Solar PV

Transmission and distribution simulations have historically been conducted separately, echoing their division in grid operations and planning while avoiding inherent computational challenges. Today, however, rapid growth in distributed energy resources (DERs)--including distributed generation from solar photovoltaics (DGPV)--requires understanding the unprecedented interactions between distribution and transmission. To capture these interactions, especially for high-penetration DGPV scenarios, this research project developed a first-of-its-kind, high performance computer (HPC) based, integrated transmission-distribution tool, the Integrated Grid Modeling System (IGMS). The tool was then used in initial explorations of system-wide operational interactions of high-penetration DGPV.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Generic Discretization Library

The GenDiL library is a collection of C++ software abstractions designed to discretize and solve partial differential equations (PDEs) for high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Its primary focus is on modern C++ generic programming, which helps ensure portability across various hardware architectures. The central idea behind the library is to provide building blocks for numerical algorithms-such as discretization methods and iteration patterns-so that domain experts can focus on the math, rather than the low-level details of hardware or implementation. By defining abstractions for data types, iteration over computational grids, and scheduling of operations, the library isolates the high-level PDE algorithms from the platform-specific optimizations needed to achieve efficient performance.

Dudouit, Yohann [Lawrence Livermore National Labor↗

OpenMSI: A High-Performance Web-Based Platform for Mass Spectrometry Imaging

Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) enables researchers to directly probe endogenous molecules directly within the architecture of the biological matrix. Unfortunately, efficient access, management, and analysis of the data generated by MSI approaches remain major challenges to this rapidly developing field. Despite the availability of numerous dedicated file formats and software packages, it is a widely held viewpoint that the biggest challenge is simply opening, sharing, and analyzing a file without loss of information. Here we present OpenMSI, a software framework and platform that addresses these challenges via an advanced, high-performance, extensible file format and Web API for remote data access (http://openmsi.nersc.gov). The OpenMSI file format supports storage of raw MSI data, metadata, and derived analyses in a single, self-describing format based on HDF5 and is supported by a large range of analysis software (e.g., Matlab and R) and programming languages (e.g., C++, Fortran, and Python). Careful optimization of the storage layout of MSI data sets using chunking, compression, and data replication accelerates common, selective data access operations while minimizing data storage requirements and are critical enablers of rapid data I/O. The OpenMSI file format has shown to provide >2000-fold improvement for image access operations, enabling spectrum and image retrieval in less than 0.3 s across the Internet even for 50 GB MSI data sets. To make remote high-performance compute resources accessible for analysis and to facilitate data sharing and collaboration, we describe an easy-to-use yet powerful Web API, enabling fast and convenient access to MSI data, metadata, and derived analysis results stored remotely to facilitate high-performance data analysis and enable implementation of Web based data sharing, visualization, and analysis.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

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↗

Snowmass 2021 Computational Frontier CompF4 Topical Group Report Storage and Processing Resource Access

Computing plays a significant role in all areas of high energy physics. The Snowmass 2021 CompF4 topical group's scope is facilities R&D, where we consider "facilities" as the computing hardware and software infrastructure inside the data centers plus the networking between data centers, irrespective of who owns them, and what policies are applied for using them. In other words, it includes commercial clouds, federally funded High Performance Computing (HPC) systems for all of science, and systems funded explicitly for a given experimental or theoretical program. This topical group report summarizes the findings and recommendations for the storage, processing, networking and associated software service infrastructures for future high energy physics research, based on the discussions organized through the Snowmass 2021 community study.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Evaluating Application Resilience with XRay

The rising count and shrinking feature size of transistors within modern computers is making them increasingly vulnerable to various types of soft faults. This problem is especially acute in high-performance computing (HPC) systems used for scientific computing, because these systems include many thousands of compute cores and nodes, all of which may be utilized in a single large-scale run. The increasing vulnerability of HPC applications to errors induced by soft faults is motivating extensive work on techniques to make these applications more resilient to such faults, ranging from generic techniques such as replication or checkpoint/restart to algorithm-specific error detection and tolerance techniques. Effective use of such techniques requires a detailed understanding of how a given application is affected by soft faults to ensure that (i) efforts to improve application resilience are spent in the code regions most vulnerable to faults and (ii) the appropriate resilience technique is applied to each code region. This paper presents XRay, a tool to view the application vulnerability to soft errors, and illustrates how XRay can be used in the context of a representative application. In addition to providing actionable insights into application behavior XRay automatically selects the number of fault injection experiments required to provide an informative view of application behavior, ensuring that the information is statistically well-grounded without performing unnecessary experiments.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Advancing Science Through Computation at NDSU (Final Report)

The Center for Computationally Assisted Science and Technology (CCAST), a research unit within the Office for the Vice President for Research and Creative Activity, is in its build-out phase at North Dakota State University (NDSU). CCAST is developing high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities, designed to support existing HPC-oriented NDSU programs as well as to support its own research program which will initially concentrate, but not be limited to, application of theory and computation toward development of high-value functional materials and systems for renewable energy and energy efficiency. The following initial priorities for the Center were established: (1) reconstruct the NDSU HPC hardware and software infrastructure, (2) define CCAST research focus, (3) hire research and HPC support staff, (4) fit-out CCAST computer rooms to ensure continuation and growth of the Center’s HPC activities and, (5) support the NDSU existing thrust in chemo- and bio-informatics (as applied to the high-throughput combinatorial chemistry, biology, and genomics). These priorities are subject to change as the Center grows and evolves.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Variable Precision Computing

This report summarizes the activities and major accomplishments of the Variable Precision Computing Strategic Initiative project. The overarching goal of this project was to initiate and promote a new paradigm in High Performance Computing (HPC) that would fundamentally change how we represent and make use of representations of real numbers in finite precision and that would establish Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as a leader in precision-related research for HPC. We pursued three integrated and concurrent research thrusts: new, more dynamic data representations to address data motion and capacity limitations; improved mixed precision algorithms to accelerate computation and to leverage new hardware; and new tools to help developers reason about precision and to automate code transformations. Within these thrust areas, we made significant advances in the use of compressed array data types in numerical calculations, in the theoretical justification, in improved performance, and in the prospects of hardware implementation; in the development of metrics to significantly reduce the storage needs of molecular dynamics simulations; in the development and analysis of efficient mixed-precision algorithms for time-dependent partial differential equations and for orthogonal factorization; and in the capability of tools that can analyze sensitivity of computed results to choices in precision and that can make automated code transformations based on such analysis. We established that there are definite opportunities to realize significant improvements in HPC above and beyond the 2x limits of traditional mixed precision using the technologies we have developed. The project produced numerous papers, presentations, and posters in important venues as well as open-source software contributions to the community, and many of the new capabilities have initiated or are being leveraged in ongoing projects.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Portable Software Environment for Ultrahigh-Resolution ELM Development on GPUs

This paper presents our endeavors in developing the large-scale, ultra-high-resolution E3SM Land Model (uELM), specifically designed for exascale computers furnished with accelerators such as Nvidia GPUs. The uELM is a sophisticated code that substantially relies on High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments, necessitating particular machine and software configurations. To facilitate community-based uELM developments employing GPUs, we have created a portable, standalone software environment preconfigured with uELM input datasets, simulation cases, and source code. This environment, utilizing Docker, encompasses all essential code, libraries, and system software for uELM development on GPUs. It also features a functional unit test framework and an offline model testbed for comprehensive numerical experiments. From a technical perspective, the paper discusses GPU-ready container generations, uELM code management, and input data distribution across computational platforms. Lastly, the paper demonstrates the use of environment for functional unit testing, end-to-end simulation on CPUs and GPUs, and collaborative code development.

E3SM Land Model↗

Argonne Out Loud: Computation, Big Data, and the Future of Cities

Charlie Catlett, a Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne and Director of the Urban Center for Computation and Data at the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne, talks about how he and his colleagues are using high-performance computing, data analytics, and embedded systems to better understand and design cities.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Harnessing the power of supercomputers using the PanDA Pilot 2 in the ATLAS Experiment

The unprecedented computing resource needs of the ATLAS experiment at LHC have motivated the Collaboration to become a leader in exploiting High Performance Computers (HPCs). To meet the requirements of HPCs, the PanDA system has been equipped with two new components; Pilot 2 and Harvester, that were designed with HPCs in mind. While Harvester is a resource-facing service which provides resource provisioning and workload shaping, Pilot 2 is responsible for payload execution on the resource. The presentation focuses on Pilot 2, which is a complete rewrite of the original PanDA Pilot used by ATLAS and other experiments for well over a decade. Pilot 2 has a flexible and adaptive design that allows for plugins to be defined with streamlined workflows. In particular, it has plugins for specific hardware infrastructures (HPC/GPU clusters) as well as for dedicated workflows defined by the needs of an experiment. Examples of dedicated HPC workflows are discussed in which the Pilot either uses an MPI application for processing fine-grained event level service under the control of the Harvester service or acts like an MPI application itself and runs a set of job in an assemble. In addition to describing the technical details of these workflows, results are shown from its deployment on Titan (OLCF) and other HPCs in ATLAS.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Monte Carlo electron-photon transport using GPUs as an accelerator: Results for a water-aluminum-water phantom

An electron-photon coupled Monte Carlo code ARCHER - Accelerated Radiation-transport Computations in Heterogeneous Environments - is being developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a software test bed for emerging heterogeneous high performance computers that utilize accelerators such as GPUs. In this paper, the preliminary results of code development and testing are presented. The electron transport in media was modeled using the class-II condensed history method. The electron energy considered ranges from a few hundred keV to 30 MeV. Moller scattering and bremsstrahlung processes above a preset energy were explicitly modeled. Energy loss below that threshold was accounted for using the Continuously Slowing Down Approximation (CSDA). Photon transport was dealt with using the delta tracking method. Photoelectric effect, Compton scattering and pair production were modeled. Voxelised geometry was supported. A serial ARHCHER-CPU was first written in C++. The code was then ported to the GPU platform using CUDA C. The hardware involved a desktop PC with an Intel Xeon X5660 CPU and six NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs. ARHCHER was tested for a case of 20 MeV electron beam incident perpendicularly on a water-aluminum-water phantom. The depth and lateral dose profiles were found to agree with results obtained from well tested MC codes. Using six GPU cards, 6x10{sup 6} histories of electrons were simulated within 2 seconds. In comparison, the same case running the EGSnrc and MCNPX codes required 1645 seconds and 9213 seconds, respectively, on a CPU with a single core used. (authors)

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Quantum Computing Strategy 2026

Quantum computing (QC) is a rapidly maturing technology with the potential for revolutionary impacts on stockpile stewardship science and national security. Recent developments in fault-tolerant architectures have compressed vendor roadmaps, and predictions of a production-ready quantum computer by the mid-2030s are becoming increasingly credible. This strategy provides a roadmap for integrating QC into the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program by investing in four strategic focus areas: 1. Develop Capabilities in Mission-Relevant Quantum Applications: ASC will prioritize developing quantum-ready applications in mission areas that have shown significant promise for quantum advantage, including simulations of materials in extreme environments, nuclear dynamics, solving linear and nonlinear partial differential equations, and uncertainty quantification. These applications directly support stockpile stewardship science and modernization objectives. 2. Conduct R&D in Algorithms, Software, and Hardware: Sustained research into quantum algorithms, robust software tools, and quantum hardware is essential. ASC will develop efficient quantum algorithms; invest in quantum compilers, debuggers, and performance tools; and explore specialized quantum hardware tailored to NNSA’s unique requirements. 3. Engage with Vendors and Partners: Early and active collaboration with commercial quantum hardware vendors and academic partners is critical. Through testbeds, co-design agreements, and quantum demonstration facilities, ASC will influence hardware design, gain early access to emerging technologies, and ensure that quantum platforms evolve to meet mission needs. 4. Build Knowledge, Experience, and Workforce: Expanding and upskilling the quantum-trained workforce is essential to long-term success. This includes hiring, internal training, university outreach, and postdoctoral support to ensure ASC maintains the expertise required to operate, program, and integrate quantum systems as they become available. While quantum computing will never replace classical computing, it has the potential to solve certain problems with speed and accuracy that would be unachievable using any conceivable classical high-performance computing (HPC) system. By investing strategically in QC, ASC will help propel the emergent QC industry, maintain U.S. technological leadership, ensure mission readiness, and position itself to rapidly adopt quantum technologies as they mature.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

2011 Computation Directorate Annual Report [Slides]

From its founding in 1952 until today, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has made significant strategic investments to develop high performance computing (HPC) and its application to national security and basic science. Now, 60 years later, the Computation Directorate and its myriad resources and capabilities have become a key enabler for LLNL programs and an integral part of the effort to support our nation's nuclear deterrent and, more broadly, national security. In addition, the technological innovation HPC makes possible is seen as vital to the nation's economic vitality. LLNL, along with other national laboratories, is working to make supercomputing capabilities and expertise available to industry to boost the nation's global competitiveness.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗

Portability for GPU-accelerated molecular docking applications for cloud and HPC: can portable compiler directives provide performance across all platforms?

High-throughput structure-based screening of drug-like molecules has become a common tool in biomedical research. Recently, acceleration with graphics processing units (GPUs) has provided a large performance boost for molecular docking programs. Both cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) resources have been used for large screens with molecular docking programs; while NVIDIA GPUs have dominated cloud and HPC resources, new vendors such as AMD and Intel are now entering the field, creating the problem of software portability across different GPUs. Ideally, software productivity could be maximized with portable programming models that are able to maintain high performance across architectures. While in many cases compiler directives have been used as an easy way to offload parallel regions of a CPU-based program to a GPU accelerator, they may also be an attractive programming model for providing portability across different GPU vendors, in which case the porting process may proceed in the reverse direction: from low-level, architecture-specific code to higher-level directive-based abstractions. MiniMDock is a new mini-application (miniapp) designed to capture the essential computational kernels found in molecular docking calculations, such as are used in phar-maceutical drug discovery efforts, in order to test different solutions for porting across GPU architectures. Here we extend MiniMDock to GPU offloading with OpenMP directives, and compare to performance of kernels using CUDA and HIP on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, respectively, as well as across different compilers, exploring performance bottlenecks. We document this reverse-porting process, from highly optimized device code to a higher-level version using directives, compare code structure, and describe barriers that were overcome in this effort.

Thavappiragasam, Mathialakan↗

waveSZ: A Hardware-Algorithm Co-Design of Efficient Lossy Compression for Scientific Data

Error-bounded lossy compression is critical to the success of extreme-scale scientific research because of ever-increasing volumes of data produced by today's high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Not only can error-controlled lossy compressors significantly reduce the I/O and storage burden but they can retain high data fidelity for post analysis. Existing state-of-the-art lossy compressors, however, generally suffer from relatively low compression and decompression throughput (up to hundreds of megabytes per second on a single CPU core), which considerably restrict the adoption of lossy compression by many HPC applications especially those with a fairly high data production rate. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient lossy compression approach based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) under the state-of-the-art lossy compression model SZ. Our contributions are fourfold. (1) We adopt a wavefront memory layout to alleviate the data dependency during the prediction for higher-dimensional predictors, such as the Lorenzo predictor. (2) We propose a co-design framework named WAVESZ based on the wavefront memory layout and the characteristics of SZ algorithm and carefully implement it by using high-level synthesis. (3) We propose a hardware-algorithm co-optimization method to improve the performance. (4) We evaluate our proposed WAVESZ on three real-world HPC simulation datasets from the Scientific Data Reduction Benchmarks and compare it with other state-of-the-art methods on both CPUs and FPGAs. Experiments show that our WAVESZ can improve SZ's compression throughput by 6.9x similar to 8.7x over the production version running on a state-of-the-art CPU and improve the compression ratio and throughput by 2.1x and 5.8x on average, respectively, respectively, compared with the state-of-the-art FPGA design.

Compression Ratio↗