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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 145 records · Page 8

INTEGRATION OF DATA ANALYTICS WITH SYSTEM HEALTH PROGRAMS

Industry equipment reliability and asset management programs are essential elements that help ensure the safe and economical operation of nuclear power plants. The effectiveness of these programs is addressed in several industry developed and regulatory programs. However, these programs have proven to be labor intensive and expensive. There is an opportunity to significantly enhance the collection, analysis, and use of this information to provide more cost-effective plant operation. Additionally, there is an acute industry need to leverage advanced technology to reduce costs and improve operational effectiveness. The goal of this paper is to provide effective and efficient analytical methods and tools to support risk-informed decisions for the equipment reliability and asset management programs at nuclear power plants. This is accomplished by creating a direct bridge between component health/lifecycle data and decision making (e.g., maintenance scheduling and project prioritization). Here we are supporting typical system engineer decisions regarding maintenance activity scheduling and component ageing management. This is performed in a risk-informed context where herein the term “risk” is broadly constructed to include both plant reliability and economics. This framework combines data analytics tools to analyze equipment reliability data with risk-informed methods designed to support system engineer decisions (e.g., maintenance and replacement schedules, optimal maintenance posture) in a customizable workflow. A challenge is that the structure of this workflow strongly depends on the decision that needs to be made, the type of data available, and the constraints that need to be considered. Current methods are designed to provide specific answers to specific problems; however, these methods might prove to be inadequate even when problem settings slightly change (e.g., different types of requirements, additional dependencies between system reliability and economics). We tackled this challenge by designing framework in a flexible and modular fashion such that the user can assemble and customize his/her own workflow that integrates SSC economic lifecycle models (e.g., maintenance and replacement costs), system reliability models, and optimization methods.

97 - MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Development of a nearly autonomous management and control system for advanced reactors

This presentation discusses the development of a Nearly Autonomous Management and Control (NAMAC) system for advanced reactors. This presentation first introduces the NAMAC-enabled plant control. Next, this presentation introduces major technologies of implementing NAMAC, including operational workflow, digital twin, and advanced machine learning algorithms. To demonstrate the capability of the NAMAC system, NAMAC is connected with a simulator of the Experimental Breeder Reactor II, where NAMAC is activated to provide recommendations during a single loss of flow accident.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Active learning path-dependent properties using a cloud-based materials acceleration platform

Solid state materials are central to many modern technologies in which a given material may be exposed to a variety of environments. The material properties often vary with the sequence of environments in an irreversible manner, resulting in a quintessential path-dependency in experimental observables. While sequential learning techniques have been effectively deployed for accelerating learning of state properties of materials, they often use a consistent environment path in all experiments. To elevate such techniques for making optimal decisions in experimental investigations of path-dependent properties, we introduce an iterated expected information gain acquisition function that optimizes over entire experimental trajectories. This approach is implemented within a cloud-based Materials Acceleration Platform architecture utilizing an event-driven stateful broker coupled with remote HELAO (Hierarchical Experimental Laboratory Automation and Orchestration) instances and an AI science manager. The platform's efficacy was demonstrated through a case study optimizing multi-step spectro-electrochemical experiments to identify optically stable potential windows in (Co–Ni–Sb)O z metal oxides. The system successfully integrated AI-driven experiment design, remote laboratory automation, and cloud-based data infrastructure, validating the platform's capability for managing complex, adaptive, path-dependent workflows in materials discovery.

Guevarra, Dan [California Institute of Technology ↗

Parallel Battery: The Framework and Process for an Intelligent and Ecological Battery System and Related Services

The concept, framework, process methodology and applications of parallel battery were proposed from both virtual and real aspects.The parallel battery was an application of ACP-based parallel intelligence in battery and related energy system areas.The real battery system was running with its equivalent, and the artificial battery system was in a virtual space, in a parallel and interactive manner.The artificial battery system contained the descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive functions on the real battery and related energy systems.There was a closed-loop workflow between the real battery system and the artificial battery system, which iteratively optimizes the battery and related energy systems, leading to a new paradigm of intelligent and ecological parallel battery system management.

ACP approach↗

Darshan for HEP applications

Modern HEP workflows must manage increasingly large and complex data collections. HPC facilities may be employed to help meet these workflows’ growing data processing needs. However, a better understanding of the I/O patterns and underlying bottlenecks of these workflows is necessary to meet the performance expectations of HPC systems.Darshan is a lightweight I/O characterization tool that captures concise views of HPC application I/O behavior. It intercepts application I/O calls at runtime, records file access statistics for each process, and generates log files detailing application I/O access patterns.Typical HEP workflows include event generation, detector simulation, event reconstruction, and subsequent analysis stages. A study of the I/O behavior of the ATLAS simulation and filtering stage, and the CMS simulation workflow using Darshan is presented, including insights into the I/O operations and data access size.

Wang, Rui↗

Distributed Computing for the Project 8 Experiment

The Project 8 collaboration aims to measure the absolute neutrino mass or improve on the current limit by measuring the tritium beta decay electron spectrum. We present the current distributed computing model for the Project 8 experiment. Project 8 is in its second phase of data taking with a near continuous data rate of 1Gbps. The current computing model uses DIRAC (Distributed Infrastructure with Remote Agent Control) for its workflow and data management. A detailed meta-data assignment using the DIRAC File Catalog is used to automate raw data transfers and subsequent stages of data processing. The DIRAC system is deployed on containers managed using a Kubernetes cluster to provide a scalable infrastructure. A modified DIRAC Site Director provides the ability to submit jobs using Singularity on opportunistic High-Performance Computing (HPC) sites.

Distributed Computing, Kubernetes, DIRAC, Project ↗

Interpretable Models for Workflow Differentiation in High-Performance Scientific Networks

Scientific workflows in high-performance networks spawn hundreds of interdependent flows that must be managed collectively—yet existing network classifiers treat each flow in isolation, leading to fragmented QoS decisions and missed interflow patterns. We present a novel traffic classification solution that operates at the workflow level, distinguishing entire filetransfer operations from streaming analytics by capturing how concurrent flows interact and burst together. We introduce a workflow identification window (WIW) that ingests raw packet headers from parallel flows into unified tensors, preserving the spatial-temporal patterns that differentiate scientific workflows. This approach achieves 98.7% accuracy using CNN, LSTM, and hybrid architectures, while maintaining 84% accuracy on production traffic collected a week later—demonstrating robustness to temporal drift. By integrating SHAP and GradCAM explainability, we reveal that early-packet timing patterns and cross-flow correlations drive classification decisions, providing operators with interpretable insights. Our system enables coherent workflow-level QoS enforcement and dynamic bandwidth allocation in scientific networks, eliminating manual per-flow configuration while maintaining classification latency at millisecond level.

Giannakou, Anna [LBL, Berkeley]↗

VA EDH Advanced Software Pipeline Framework Report: Enhancing Automation and Scalability

The VA Environmental Determinants of Health (EDH) Advanced Software Pipeline Framework is designed to enhance the efficiency, scalability, and security of geospatial data processing workflows. This framework integrates modern data orchestration and containerization technologies, including Prefect for workflow automation, Docker for containerization, and PostgreSQL/PostGIS for geospatial data storage and analysis. It ensures standardized, reproducible, and automated data processing, supporting VA objectives related to substance use risk assessment and recovery research. The pipeline addresses key scalability and performance challenges through horizontal and vertical scaling, high-performance computing (HPC) integration, parallel processing, task caching, and dynamic resource allocation. These optimizations improve throughput and reduce latency, allowing the system to efficiently manage large and complex datasets. Additionally, security and compliance measures—such as data encryption (SSL), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and adherence to GDPR and HIPAA standards—safeguard sensitive information throughout data transmission and storage. A key implementation of this framework includes the automation of shelter list geolocation workflows, ensuring that up-to-date data is readily available for VA decision-making. Lessons learned from this project include the transition from in-memory processing to incremental storage writes, improving resource management and reliability. Future enhancements aim to expand automation, integrate AI-driven anomaly detection, and incorporate high-performance computing resources. This framework provides a scalable, secure, and adaptable solution for managing geospatial datasets, reinforcing the VA’s ability to support clinical and strategic initiatives through data-driven decision-making.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

AI-Based Analytics and Energy Modeling Framework for Characterizing Urban Energy Systems

Developing location-specific district energy models is essential for understanding energy patterns and supporting efficient management and planning decisions. However, accurately characterizing these models remains challenging due to gaps in building characteristics and labor-intensive traditional modeling workflows. To address these challenges, we develop an AI-based framework that integrates top-down and bottom-up building energy data to automate urban energy model characterization. The framework trains multimodal deep learning models using heterogeneous ResStockTM datasets to infer missing building characteristics from varying levels of known information and generate simulation-ready inputs for district-scale energy modeling. It also employs a conditioning-based injection approach to generate ”what-if” scenarios, enabling users to explore retrofit, efficiency, and technology-upgrade pathways. Integrated within URBANoptTM, a bottom-up district energy modeling platform for simulating co-located buildings, the framework infers detailed building-level inputs required for bottom-up simulations. Both localized and generalized AI models are developed to learn relationships across categorical, numerical, and time-series data, enabling reconstruction of missing attributes and generation of targeted upgrade scenarios. We demonstrate this methodology on a residential neighborhood in Baltimore, MD, assessing internal consistency against ResStock reference data and URBANopt simulation, and comparing selected attributes against real-world building characteristics. Results show strong overall predictive accuracy in data completion and scenario generation, with localized and generalized models offering complementary trade-offs between precision and scalability. Overall, our automated framework streamlines energy modeling and provides a reliable framework for urban building energy characterization.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

HPDR: High-Performance Portable Scientific Data Reduction Framework

The rapid growth in scientific data generation is outpacing advancements in computing systems necessary for efficient storage, transfer, and analysis, particularly in the context of exascale computing. With the deployment of first-generation exascale computing systems and next-generation experimental facilities, this gap is widening and necessitates effective data reduction techniques to manage enormous data volumes. Over the past decade, various data reduction methods, including lossless compression, error-controlled lossy compression, and data refactoring, have been developed to accelerate I/O in scientific workflows. Despite significant reductions in data volume, these methods introduce considerable computational overhead, which can become the new bottleneck in data processing. To mitigate this, GPU-accelerated data reduction algorithms have been introduced. However, challenges remain in their integration into exascale workflows, including limited portability across different GPU architectures, substantial memory transfer overhead, and reduced scalability on dense multi-GPU systems. To address these challenges, we propose HPDR, a high-performance and portable data reduction framework. HPDR is designed to enable the execution of state-of-the-art reduction algorithms across diverse processor architectures while reducing memory transfer overhead to 2.3 % of the original, resulting in up to 3.5× faster throughput compared to existing solutions. It also achieves up to 96% of the theoretical speedup in multi-GPU settings. In addition, evaluations on accelerating I/O operations at scale up to 1,024 nodes of the Frontier supercomputer demonstrate that HPDR can achieve up to 103 TB/s reduction throughput, providing up to 4× acceleration in parallel I/O performance compared to existing data reduction routines. This work highlights the potential of HPDR to significantly enhance data reduction efficiency in exascale computing environments.

Chen, Jieyang [University of Oregon]↗

Expanding Biological Repository Data Available for Sharing and Knowledge Discovery

Biology has developed next-generation data science and alternative analytical approaches with methodologies which require principal investigator (PI) experimental assay data be re-used. This new approach involves mining multiple datasets at once from various hierarchical organizations of biological complexity, while concurrently evaluating how experimental factors affect endpoints of standard assays. The purpose of the NASA Ames Life Sciences Data Archive (ALSDA) is to collect, curate, and make findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) all non-human space-relevant biological data. These data include mission metadata, subject metadata, assay metadata (parameters), raw and processed assay data, assay imagery, and subject-experienced telemetry (radiation, temperature, humidity, acoustics, vibrations). ALSDA has transformed to bring current biological repository data and all future collected data into this new scientific data mining reality. It has integrated into the ‘NASA Open Science’ group of projects to facilitate a suite of new tools and workflows to improve data accessibility and reusability by implementing data management plans, automating data submission agreements, and adopting the single-point-of-entry data submission portal, originally developed by NASA GeneLab. These systems required ALSDA to develop science assay configurations for the submission portal, capturing essential assay parameters according to established norms in each sub-field within biology. The submission portal expedites data collection by enhancing ease of PI data submission, providing a user interface and specificity for which data is to be submitted. ALSDA datasets are curated to maintain rich metadata, accuracy of datasets, data transparency, provenance, and additionally ensure data are machine-readable (e.g., R and Python languages). ALSDA integration with GeneLab and its analysis portals enable higher-order physiological-level datasets be mined in conjunction with -omics datasets. As ALSDA physiological-level datasets are published (micro-computed tomography, histology, intraocular pressure, hormonal assays, immunostaining, ultrasonography), the merging of hierarchical organizations of biological complexity from spaceflight will enable new knowledge discovery approaches.

Ryan T Scott↗

2023 Real-time Optimization Workflow Status Update

Nuclear integrated energy systems are composed of a diverse set of energy generation sources and exist in dynamic and competitive electricity markets. With the inclusion of thermal energy storage, nuclear power systems can store heat for future use through various processes, such as water desalination or hydrogen generation. This heat storage can be managed in such a way as to economically optimize its usage. By combining real-time price data from the day-ahead and real-time markets with predictive and intelligent models, the charging and discharging of the thermal energy storage may be determined and optimized. This research details an approach through models and systems for the real-time optimization (RTO) of capacity allocation. Virtual models of the energy system and its physics phenomenon and component interactions provide intelligence to verification and prediction of operations. An optimization framework can use data generated from both a set of physical assets as well as the virtual models to predict future performance and create optimization and control workflows. Data warehouse technologies can be used to combine data across models, optimization workflows, market price data, and sensor data to intuitively store various types of data and provide integrations to physical control systems as well as user visualizations. Put together, these components can create a system for the RTO of nuclear integrated energy systems. Various virtual models and bench-scale physical demonstrations have been successfully performed and verified using this system. Larger scale testbeds that include thermal energy storage systems have been identified as future opportunities. A gap analysis that details the steps necessary to reach a physical demonstration at this scale is provided, along with conclusions on the current effort and future work.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Symmetry is the Key to the Design of Reticular Frameworks

De novo prediction of reticular framework structures is a challenging task for chemists and materials scientists. Herein, a computational workflow that predicts a list of possible reticular frameworks based on only the connectivity and symmetry of node and linker building blocks is presented. This list is ranked based on the occurrence of topologies in known structures, thus providing a manageable number of structures that can be optimized using density functional theory, and inform future experiments. This workflow is broadly applicable, correctly predicts known reticular materials, and furthermore identifies novel unknown phases for some systems.

COF↗

msdlive-cli-distro

MSD-LIVE, the MultiSector Dynamics – Living, Intuitive, Value-adding, Environment, is a flexible and scalable data and code management system combined with a distributed computational platform that will enable MSD researchers to document and archive their data, run their models and analysis tools, and share their data, software, and multi-model workflows within a robust Community of Practice. MSD-LIVE will facilitate a new open, collaborative, resource-rich, technology-facilitated, community-driven way of doing MSD research.

Lansing, Carina↗

Using Selection Pressure as an Asset to Develop Reusable, Adaptable Software Systems

The Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) at NASA has over the years developed and honed several reusable architectural components for supporting large-scale data centers with a large customer base. These include a processing system (S4PM) and an archive system (S4PA) based upon a workflow engine called the Simple Scalable Script based Science Processor (S4P) and an online data visualization and analysis system (Giovanni). These subsystems are currently reused internally in a variety of combinations to implement customized data management on behalf of instrument science teams and other science investigators. Some of these subsystems (S4P and S4PM) have also been reused by other data centers for operational science processing. Our experience has been that development and utilization of robust interoperable and reusable software systems can actually flourish in environments defined by heterogeneous commodity hardware systems the emphasis on value-added customer service and the continual goal for achieving higher cost efficiencies. The repeated internal reuse that is fostered by such an environment encourages and even forces changes to the software that make it more reusable and adaptable. Allowing and even encouraging such selective pressures to software development has been a key factor In the success of S4P and S4PM which are now available to the open source community under the NASA Open source Agreement

Berrick, Stephen↗

Modeling NASA’s Procedural Requirement Processes - Implications for Digital Future

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has an ongoing Digital Transformation effort and to leverage and showcase the power of Digital Transformation, an effort is underway to develop an integrated, datacentric, model representing NASA’s key process requirements. The task was divided into three phases: As Is modeling, Analysis, and To Be Planning. As part of this effort, a team has completed the first Phase I of the modeling task and is nearing completion of the second phase. This effort will capture the key elements as requirements, responsibilities, allocations, roles, products, and associated lifecycle elements. The scope of modeling included NASA’s NPR 7120.5 (Project and Program Management), NPR 7123.1 (Systems Engineering) and NPRs 8705.2 (Risk classification for Robotic Missions) and 8705.4 (Human-Rating Requirements for Space Missions). This paper will summarize the approach, scope, parsing patterns applied, metamodel, and associated workflows for the As-Is modeling. It will also summarize the results and insights gleaned during that phase, including the review process. These insights have informed the analysis and will be discussed. The analysis modeling phase will also be summarized including how the stakeholders were engaged, how the common elements were handled and dispositioned, and will also describe some of the plans for the future of NASA NPDs and NPRs.

Systems Engineering↗

Software Project Management and Measurement on the World-Wide-Web (WWW)

We briefly describe a system for forms-based, work-flow management that helps members of a software development team overcome geographical barriers to collaboration. Our system, called the Web Integrated Software Environment (WISE), is implemented as a World-Wide-Web service that allows for management and measurement of software development projects based on dynamic analysis of change activity in the workflow. WISE tracks issues in a software development process, provides informal communication between the users with different roles, supports to-do lists, and helps in software process improvement. WISE minimizes the time devoted to metrics collection and analysis by providing implicit delivery of messages between users based on the content of project documents. The use of a database in WISE is hidden from the users who view WISE as maintaining a personal 'to-do list' of tasks related to the many projects on which they may play different roles.

Callahan, John↗

The InSAR Scientific Computing Environment 3.0: A Flexible Framework for NISAR Operational and User-Led Science Processing

The InSAR Scientific Computing Environment (ISCE) was first developed under the NASA Advanced Information Systems Technology as a flexible, extensible object-oriented framework for Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) processing. The ISCE framework uses Python 3 at the workflow level, controlling modules of compiled code for functional processing, and managing inputs, outputs, and other flow control services. The currently released version, called ISCE 2.1, is distributed to the research community through the Western North America InSAR Consortium under a research license. The ISCE team is working on the next generation of the code in order to prepare for the NASAISRO SAR (NISAR) mission operational processing. Innovations in this code include augmentation or conversion of the custom Python framework elements in ISCE with the Pyre framework, new workflows for interferometric and polarimetric stack processing, a more intuitive and graphically based user interface, and flow control for hybrid computing environments including CPU/GPU clusters, logging and error tracking facilities, and new more efficient computational modules that exploit graphical processor units (GPUs) when available. The ISCE 3.0 framework is designed to work in an operational environment as well as on a single user’s laptop or compute cluster, with services to discover capabilities and scale computations accordingly.

Buckley, Sean M.↗