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Final Technical Report

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97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Simultaneously improving accuracy and computational cost under parametric constraints in materials property prediction tasks

Abstract Modern data mining techniques using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms have been shown to excel in the regression-based task of materials property prediction using various materials representations. In an attempt to improve the predictive performance of the deep neural network model, researchers have tried to add more layers as well as develop new architectural components to create sophisticated and deep neural network models that can aid in the training process and improve the predictive ability of the final model. However, usually, these modifications require a lot of computational resources, thereby further increasing the already large model training time, which is often not feasible, thereby limiting usage for most researchers. In this paper, we study and propose a deep neural network framework for regression-based problems comprising of fully connected layers that can work with any numerical vector-based materials representations as model input. We present a novel deep regression neural network, iBRNet, with branched skip connections and multiple schedulers, which can reduce the number of parameters used to construct the model, improve the accuracy, and decrease the training time of the predictive model. We perform the model training using composition-based numerical vectors representing the elemental fractions of the respective materials and compare their performance against other traditional ML and several known DL architectures. Using multiple datasets with varying data sizes for training and testing, We show that the proposed iBRNet models outperform the state-of-the-art ML and DL models for all data sizes. We also show that the branched structure and usage of multiple schedulers lead to fewer parameters and faster model training time with better convergence than other neural networks. Scientific contribution: The combination of multiple callback functions in deep neural networks minimizes training time and maximizes accuracy in a controlled computational environment with parametric constraints for the task of materials property prediction.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Finding Electronic Structure Machine Learning Surrogates without Training

A myriad of phenomena in materials science and chemistry rely on quantum-level simulations of the electronic structure in matter. While moving to larger length and time scales has been a pressing issue for decades, such large-scale electronic structure calculations are still challenging despite modern software approaches and advances in high-performance computing. The silver lining in this regard is the use of machine learning to accelerate electronic structure calculations – this line of research has recently gained growing attention. The grand challenge therein is finding a suitable machine-learning model during a process called hyperparameter optimization. This, however, causes a massive computational overhead in addition to that of data generation. We accelerate the construction of machine-learning surrogate models by roughly two orders of magnitude by circumventing excessive training during the hyperparameter optimization phase. We demonstrate our workflow for Kohn-Sham density functional theory, the most popular computational method in materials science and chemistry.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

A Dynamic Risk Framework for the Physical Security of Nuclear Power Plants

This paper describes ongoing work within the Light Water Reactor Sustainability pathway at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to optimize the security and cost of nuclear power plants. It introduces the dynamic risk assessment tool developed at INL, Event Modeling Risk Assessment using Linked Diagrams (EMRALD). EMRALD is leveraged to optimize the security posture of a nuclear power plant by integrating force-on-force (FOF) simulations and operator mitigation actions, including dynamic and flexible coping strategies (FLEX). To illustrate the methodology, four attack scenarios are modeled in a commercially available FOF simulation tool using a hypothetical nuclear power plant facility. The simulation results provide valuable insights into possible attack outcomes, as well as the probabilistic risk of a core damage event given these outcomes. Safety mitigation procedures are modeled in EMRALD dependent on the attack outcomes by considering human operator uncertainties. The results demonstrate that the number of armed responders can be optimized, while still maintaining the same protection level as the initial security posture. The proposed modeling and simulation framework of integrating FLEX equipment with FOF models enables the nuclear power plants to credit FLEX portable equipment in the plant security posture, resulting in an efficient and optimized physical security system.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

A Dynamic Risk Framework for the Optimization of Physical Security Posture of Nuclear Power Plants

This paper describes an ongoing work within the Light Water Reactor Sustainability pathway at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to optimize security and cost of nuclear power plants. It introduces the dynamic risk assessment tool developed at INL, Event Modeling Risk Assessment using Linked Diagrams (EMRALD). EMRALD was leveraged to optimize the security posture of a nuclear power plant by integrating force-on-force (FOF) simulations and operator mitigation actions including the dynamic and flexible coping strategies (FLEX). To illustrate the methodology, four attack scenarios were modeled in a commercially available FOF simulation tool using a hypothetical nuclear power plant facility. The simulation results provide valuable insights into possible attack outcomes, as well as the probabilistic risk of core damage event given these outcomes. Safety mitigation procedures were modeled in EMRALD dependent on the attack outcomes by considering human operator uncertainties. The results demonstrate that the number of armed responders can be optimized, while still maintaining the same protection level as the initial security posture. The proposed modeling and simulation framework of integrating FLEX equipment with FOF models enables the nuclear power plants to credit FLEX portable equipment in the plant security posture, resulting in an efficient and optimized physical security system.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

2022 American Conference on Neutron Scattering (ACNS 2022)

The 11th American Conference on Neutron Scattering (ACNS 2022) will be held on June 5-9, 2022, in Boulder, CO. The Conference will provide essential information on the breadth and depth of current neutron-related research worldwide. Hosted by the Neutron Scattering Society of America, this year’s Conference will feature a combination of invited and contributed talks, poster sessions, and tutorials. Topics of the conference are: Advances in Neutron Facilities, Instrumentation and Software: Developments in sources, instrumentation, sample environments and control software. Hard Condensed Matter: Magnetism, correlated metals, quantum/topological materials, superconductors, ferroelectrics, multiferroics, glasses, and disorder phenomena. Submissions outlining examples of neutron scattering in industrial and engineering applications involving hard condensed matter systems are also encouraged. Soft Matter: Neutron studies of soft materials and related fields including in situ and in operando studies. Polymers, surfactants, emulsions, gels, nanoparticles, colloidal suspensions and more. Submissions of computational studies or applications of machine learning beneficial to neutron scattering experiments, as well as examples of neutron scattering in industrial and engineering applications are strongly encouraged. Biology, Biophysics and Biotechnology: Neutron studies of biological and biologically relevant systems. Proteins, bio membranes, biological assemblies, natural materials, nucleic acids, drug-delivery platforms and biomedical systems. Submissions of computational studies or applications of machine learning beneficial to biological neutron scattering experiments, as well as examples of neutron scattering in applied research involving biological systems, are strongly encouraged. Materials Chemistry and Energy: Neutron-based studies of functional materials and materials for energy applications. Examples include porous materials such as metal organic frameworks (MOFs), zeolites; phosphors; novel pigments; electrolytes; catalysts; ionic conductors/cathode materials; photovoltaic materials (hybrid perovskites); thermoelectrics; magnetocalorics/electrocalorics. Structural Materials and Engineering: Neutron scattering studies of materials and engineering processes including structural materials, concrete and metals, as well as engineering processes including combustion, corrosion, additive manufacturing, and others. Neutron Physics: Fundamental physical studies of the neutron and related areas. Emerging Applications in Neutron Scattering: Machine Learning and Data Science: Advances in computing power have contributed to rapidly evolving machine learning and data science fields that can be leveraged to the benefit of the neutron scattering community. The purpose of this session is to highlight recent advances in machine learning and data science and to serve as the foundation of a parallel data and computation track highlighting computation advances and applications in neutron scattering throughout the conference.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

A Four-Layer Cyber-Physical Security Model for Electric Machine Drives Considering Control Information Flow

Despite the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) establishing Technical Committee 10 on Design Methodologies with a focus on the cyber-physical security of power electronics systems, a holistic design methodology for addressing security vulnerabilities remains underdeveloped. This gap largely stems from the limited integration of computer science and power/control engineering studies in this interdisciplinary field. Addressing the inadequacy of unilateral cyber or control perspectives, this article presents a novel four-layer cyber-physical security model specifically designed for electric machine drives. Central to this model is the innovative control information flow (CIF) model, residing within the control layer, which serves as a pivotal link between the cyber layer's vulnerable resources and the physical layer's state-space models. By mapping vulnerable resources to control variable space and tracing attack propagation, the CIF model facilitates accurate impact predictions based on tainted control laws. The effectiveness and validity of this proposed model are demonstrated through hardware experiments involving two typical cyber-attack scenarios, underscoring its potential as a comprehensive framework for multidisciplinary security strategies.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Non-local corrections to the typical medium theory of Anderson localization

We use the recently developed finite cluster typical medium approach to study the Anderson localization transition in three dimensions. Applying our method to the box and binary alloy disorder distributions, we find a fast convergence with the cluster size. We demonstrate the importance of the typical medium environment and the non-local spatial correlations for the proper characterization of the localization transition. As the cluster size increases, our typical medium cluster method recovers the correct critical disorder strength for the transition. Our findings highlight the importance of the non-local cluster corrections for capturing the localization behavior of the mobility edge trajectories. Our results demonstrate that the typical medium cluster approach developed here provides a consistent and systematic description of the Anderson localization transition in the framework of the effective medium embedding schemes.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Field Programmable Gate Arrays for Enhancing the Speed and Energy Efficiency of Quantum Dynamics Simulations

We present the first application of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as new, customizable hardware architectures for carrying out fast and energy-efficient quantum dynamics simulations of large chemical/material systems. Instead of tailoring the software to fixed hardware, which is the typical case for writing quantum chemistry code for central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), FPGAs allow us to directly customize the underlying hardware (even at the level of specific electrical signals in the circuit) to give a truly optimized computational performance for quantum dynamics calculations. By offloading the most intensive and repetitive calculations onto an FPGA, we show that the computational performance of our real-time electron dynamics calculations can even exceed that of optimized commercial mathematical libraries running on high-performance GPUs. In addition to this impressive computational speedup, we show that FPGAs are immensely energy-efficient and consume 4 times less energy than modern GPU or CPU architectures. These energy savings are a practical and important metric for supercomputing centers (many of which exceed over $1 million in power costs alone), as exascale computing capabilities become more widespread and commonplace. Taken together, the implementation techniques and performance metrics of our study demonstrate that FPGAs could play a promising role in upcoming quantum chemistry and materials science applications, particularly for the acceleration and energy-efficient execution of quantum dynamics calculations.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Performing Numerical Analysis of Cybersecurity Options Using Dynamic Risk Analysis Tool EMRALD

Cyberattacks can have many different attack paths, durations, and goals. There are also many different mitigation options involving hardware, software, and/or humans. Considering a cyber threat should involve defense-in-depth methods and a quantitative or numerical evaluation of overall effectiveness against dynamic, time-dependent attacks to make cost and risk-informed decisions. Typical cyberattack modeling methods only provide a qualitative evaluation. The main areas of cybersecurity are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. For companies with cyber-physical systems such as advanced nuclear reactors, cyber-related safety is a requirement set by North American Electric Reliability and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are also concerned about availability or reliability as a business case. As cyber threats are evolving to a business-for-hire structure, more attacks may focus on disrupting business success and reliability, causing financial and economic stability risk. Companies want to know business reliability and recovery from those threats, and that requires modeling physical behavior of the targets. Dynamic-state-based and Markov-based modeling provides a method for better cyber scenario modeling with different tools having issues such as state-base explosion. Dynamic modeling enables time and conditional features not found in other numerical evaluation methods. EMRALD (Event Modeling Risk Assessment using Lined Diagrams) is a dynamic risk analysis modeling and simulation tool and has features that reduce modeling issues. It has been used to model different time-dependent events including plant behavior and operator procedures. As a general modeling tool, EMRALD can also be used to model cyberattack scenarios with varying mitigation options and quantify effectiveness, producing numerical data for risk-informed decisions. This paper uses EMRALD to demonstrate that dynamic numerical risk analysis can be used for cyber threat modeling to provide insights for design decision-making and optimize defense strategies. Keywords: cyber modeling; cyber-physical systems; numerical cyber modeling

97 - MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Photoelectron Spectroscopic and ab Initio Computational Studies of the Anion, HThO –

The synergetic combination of anion photoelectron spectroscopy and high-level relativistic coupled-cluster calculations was employed to study the anion, HThO-. The atomic connectivity of this anion was found to be HThO- and not ThOH-. Vibrational and electronic energy spacings in the HThO- photoelectron spectrum were measured and calculated, with good agreement between them being found. Computations yielded electronic energies and equilibrium structures as well as enabling orbital analyses. The adiabatic electron affinity of HThO was determined to be 1.297 ± 0.035 eV.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

TChem v2.0 - A Software Toolkit for the Analysis of Complex Kinetic Models

TChem is an open source software library for solving complex computational chemistry problems and analyzing detailed chemical kinetic models. The software provides support for: complex kinetic models for gas-phase and surface chemistry; thermodynamic properties based on NASA polynomials; species production/consumption rates; stable time integrator for solving stiff time ordinary differential equations; and, reactor models such as homogenous gas-phase ignition (with analytical Jacobian matrices), continuously stirred tank reactor, plug-flow reactor. This toolkit builds upon earlier versions that were written in C and featured tools for gas-phase chemistry only. The current version of the software was completely refactored in C++, uses an object-oriented programming model, and adopts Kokkos as its portability layer to make it ready for the next generation computing architectures i.e., multi/many core computing platforms with GPU accelerators. We have expanded the range of kinetic models to include surface chemistry and have added examples pertaining to Continuously Stirred Tank Reactors (CSTR) and Plug Flow Reactor (PFR) models to complement the homogenous ignition examples present in the earlier versions. To exploit the massive parallelism available from modern computing platforms, the current software interface is designed to evaluate samples in parallel, which enables large scale parametric studies, e.g. for sensitivity analysis and model calibration.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Dynamic Species Reduction for Multi-Cycle CFD Simulations (Final Technical Report)

This project primarily sought to address some of the computational cost concerns of detailed simulations by developing improved methods of handling species transport, and chemical kinetics evaluation in a commercial 3D Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) environment. Secondary goals were to apply these techniques to fuels and conditions of interest to better understand the key species and reactions required to adequately capture cycle to cycle coupling. Improved modeling will lead to better understanding of these combustion modes and their dependence on fuel composition, which can then enable more clean and efficient engines, ultimately benefiting the consumer as well as the general public. Two approaches were used to address the computational cost. A “Dynamic Species Reduction” (DSR) procedure was developed to remove chemical species from the simulation during periods when chemical reactions were not expected to be important, particularly during gas exchange when temperatures are low and little fuel remains. This modelling procedure automatically detects relevant species to retain in the simulation domain based on their local concentration, removes species below a specified concentration threshold, and then adjusts the remaining species mass to conserve not only the number of H, C, and O atoms in each cell, but also the relative proportions between species and the heating value of the mixture in every cell. The second procedure was a “Product Directed Remapping” (PDR) updates the algorithm used to group individual computational cells for chemical kinetics evaluation to account for non-uniform temperature distributions and the CO to CO 2 ratio in the cells. The model techniques developed in this work successfully demonstrated computational performance improvements for a range of conditions relevant for Highly Dilute SI and HCCI engine operation. Runtime reductions of 10% were observed for small mechanisms, with further reductions of up to 36% observed for larger mechanisms. Improvements were primarily related to reducing the number of chemical species tracked during the gas exchange process using the Dynamic Species Reduction method. With smaller benefits observed from changes to the kinetics binning and evaluation strategy in the post combustion region using the PDR method. The results of this work show the potential for improved computational runtime for complicated simulations. They can and should be extended to additional conditions and new bio-derived and renewable fuels as they are developed and new kinetic mechanisms become available.

10 SYNTHETIC FUELS↗

Implementation Aspects of Smart Grids Cyber-Security Cross-Layered Framework for Critical Infrastructure Operation

Communication networks in power systems are a major part of the smart grid paradigm. It enables and facilitates the automation of power grid operation as well as self-healing in contingencies. Such dependencies on communication networks, though, create a roam for cyber-threats. An adversary can launch an attack on the communication network, which in turn reflects on power grid operation. Attacks could be in the form of false data injection into system measurements, flooding the communication channels with unnecessary data, or intercepting messages. Using machine learning-based processing on data gathered from communication networks and the power grid is a promising solution for detecting cyber threats. In this paper, a co-simulation of cyber-security for cross-layer strategy is presented. The advantage of such a framework is the augmentation of valuable data that enhances the detection as well as identification of anomalies in the operation of the power grid. The framework is implemented on the IEEE 118-bus system. The system is constructed in Mininet to simulate a communication network and obtain data for analysis. A distributed three controller software-defined networking (SDN) framework is proposed that utilizes the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) cluster. According to the findings of our suggested architecture, it outperforms a single SDN controller framework by a factor of more than ten times the throughput. This provides for a higher flow of data throughout the network while decreasing congestion caused by a single controller’s processing restrictions. Furthermore, our CECD-AS approach outperforms state-of-the-art physics and machine learning-based techniques in terms of attack classification. The performance of the framework is investigated under various types of communication attacks.

cross-layered↗

Toward the Minimal Floating Operation Count Cholesky Decomposition of Electron Repulsion Integrals

As quantum chemistry calculations deal with molecular systems of increasing size, the memory requirement to store electron-repulsion integrals (ERIs) greatly outpaces the physical memory available in computing hardware. Here, the Cholesky decomposition of ERIs provides a convenient yet accurate technique to reduce the storage requirement of integrals. Recent developments of a two-step algorithm have drastically reduced the memory operation (MOP) count, leaving the floating operation (FLOP) count as the last frontier of cost reduction in the Cholesky ERI algorithm. In this report, we introduce a dynamic integral tracking, reusing, and compression/elimination protocol embedded in the two-step Cholesky ERI method. Benchmark studies suggest that this technique becomes particularly advantageous when the basis set consists of many computationally expensive high-angular-momentum basis functions. With this dynamic ERI improvement, the Cholesky ERI approach proves to be a highly efficient algorithm with minimal FLOP and MOP count.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗