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At least 145 records · Page 8

F.T. spectroscopy of OH produced in a microwave surface plasma

Emission spectra of the hydroxyl radical have been recorded between 450 and 4200/cm at 0.0027/cm unapodized resolution from an air+oxygen+water vapor plasma, using a surface microwave discharge. The characteristics of the source are described. The emission spectra were recorded with the F.T. spectrometer using a GeCu detector and KCl beams plitter. High J values were observed both for the pure rotational transition in v=0 and v=1 vibrational levels, and for the rovibrational transition in the 0-1 and 1-2 bands. The set of line intensity data will be used to compute the electric dipole moment function of OH.

Benidar, A.↗

Finite Element Analysis of Reverberation Chambers

The primary motivating factor behind the initiation of this work was to provide a deterministic means of establishing the validity of the statistical methods that are recommended for the determination of fields that interact in -an avionics system. The application of finite element analysis to reverberation chambers is the initial step required to establish a reasonable course of inquiry in this particularly data-intensive study. The use of computational electromagnetics provides a high degree of control of the "experimental" parameters that can be utilized in a simulation of reverberating structures. As the work evolved there were four primary focus areas they are: 1. The eigenvalue problem for the source free problem. 2. The development of a complex efficient eigensolver. 3. The application of a source for the TE and TM fields for statistical characterization. 4. The examination of shielding effectiveness in a reverberating environment. One early purpose of this work was to establish the utility of finite element techniques in the development of an extended low frequency statistical model for reverberation phenomena. By employing finite element techniques, structures of arbitrary complexity can be analyzed due to the use of triangular shape functions in the spatial discretization. The effects of both frequency stirring and mechanical stirring are presented. It is suggested that for the low frequency operation the typical tuner size is inadequate to provide a sufficiently random field and that frequency stirring should be used. The results of the finite element analysis of the reverberation chamber illustrate io-W the potential utility of a 2D representation for enhancing the basic statistical characteristics of the chamber when operating in a low frequency regime. The basic field statistics are verified for frequency stirring over a wide range of frequencies. Mechanical stirring is shown to provide an effective frequency deviation.

Bunting, Charles F.↗

Radiation Tolerant Intelligent Memory Stack (RTIMS)

The Radiation Tolerant Intelligent Memory Stack (RTIMS), suitable for both geostationary and low earth orbit missions, has been developed. The memory module is fully functional and undergoing environmental and radiation characterization. A self-contained flight-like module is expected to be completed in 2006. RTIMS provides reconfigurable circuitry and 2 gigabits of error corrected or 1 gigabit of triple redundant digital memory in a small package. RTIMS utilizes circuit stacking of heterogeneous components and radiation shielding technologies. A reprogrammable field programmable gate array (FPGA), six synchronous dynamic random access memories, linear regulator, and the radiation mitigation circuitries are stacked into a module of 42.7mm x 42.7mm x 13.00mm. Triple module redundancy, current limiting, configuration scrubbing, and single event function interrupt detection are employed to mitigate radiation effects. The mitigation techniques significantly simplify system design. RTIMS is well suited for deployment in real-time data processing, reconfigurable computing, and memory intensive applications.

Ng, Tak-kwong↗

Combining Model-Based and Feature-Driven Diagnosis Approaches - A Case Study on Electromechanical Actuators

Model-based diagnosis typically uses analytical redundancy to compare predictions from a model against observations from the system being diagnosed. However this approach does not work very well when it is not feasible to create analytic relations describing all the observed data, e.g., for vibration data which is usually sampled at very high rates and requires very detailed finite element models to describe its behavior. In such cases, features (in time and frequency domains) that contain diagnostic information are extracted from the data. Since this is a computationally intensive process, it is not efficient to extract all the features all the time. In this paper we present an approach that combines the analytic model-based and feature-driven diagnosis approaches. The analytic approach is used to reduce the set of possible faults and then features are chosen to best distinguish among the remaining faults. We describe an implementation of this approach on the Flyable Electro-mechanical Actuator (FLEA) test bed.

Narasimhan, Sriram↗

A digital Seasat SAR correlation-simulation program

A correlation-simulation program for processing Seasat SAR data is presented, featuring the use of FORTRAN code to allow simple transference to another computer. The highest attainable azimuthal resolution for Seasat SAR experiments and the ability to generate images with varying quality by varying resolution or the number of looks are additional features. A fiber optics link transfers the Seasat data from high intensity digital tapes to an SEL 32/55 computer, and the least significant bits of the 5 bit data samples are truncated, thus the input data have 4 bits per sample. A total 8192 echoes are processed each time and stored on 8 separate data files on the disk. In addition, a program operating on 1-look high resolution images for performance simulations of proposed radar systems and processing schemes has been completed. Finally, the coding is simple, and 8 hours are required to process one image using this program.

Li, F.↗

Uniform-in-phase-space data selection with iterative normalizing flows

Improvements in computational and experimental capabilities are rapidly increasing the amount of scientific data that are routinely generated. In applications that are constrained by memory and computational intensity, excessively large datasets may hinder scientific discovery, making data reduction a critical component of data-driven methods. Datasets are growing in two directions: the number of data points and their dimensionality. Whereas dimension reduction typically aims at describing each data sample on lower-dimensional space, the focus here is on reducing the number of data points. A strategy is proposed to select data points such that they uniformly span the phase-space of the data. The algorithm proposed relies on estimating the probability map of the data and using it to construct an acceptance probability. An iterative method is used to accurately estimate the probability of the rare data points when only a small subset of the dataset is used to construct the probability map. Instead of binning the phase-space to estimate the probability map, its functional form is approximated with a normalizing flow. Therefore, the method naturally extends to high-dimensional datasets. The proposed framework is demonstrated as a viable pathway to enable data-efficient machine learning when abundant data are available.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Performance Model of In-Situ Techniques

The computational capacity of High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems increases continuously with the rapid development of central processing units (CPUs) and graphic processing units (GPUs), while the in-/output (IO) subsystem develops relatively slowly and storage capacity is also limited. Data-intensive applications, which are designed to leverage the high computational capacity of HPC resources, typically generate a considerable amount of data for post-processing visualizations and data analytics. The limited IO speed and storage space could lead to constraints in the actual performance of these applications and, therefore, scientific discovery. In-situ techniques, where data is visualized/analysed while still in memory rather than through disk, can contribute to alleviating these problems as they can reduce or even fully avoid data writing/reading through the IO subsystem to/from storage. However, the overall efficiency of insitu techniques crucially depends on the characteristics of both the in-situ tasks and the applications, and the resource distribution among them. Therefore, choosing the right in-situ approach (synchronous, asynchronous, or hybrid) and resource allocation is essential to minimize overhead and maximize the benefits of concurrent execution. In this paper, we present a performance model of in-situ techniques to find the most beneficial in-situ approach and the preferred resource configuration. We verify the high accuracy of our approach with over 6800 measurements and provide use cases with different applications.

Ju, Yi [Max Planck Computing and Data Facility, Ga↗

Transformation of OODT CAS to Perform Larger Tasks

A computer program denoted OODT CAS has been transformed to enable performance of larger tasks that involve greatly increased data volumes and increasingly intensive processing of data on heterogeneous, geographically dispersed computers. Prior to the transformation, OODT CAS (also alternatively denoted, simply, 'CAS') [wherein 'OODT' signifies 'Object-Oriented Data Technology' and 'CAS' signifies 'Catalog and Archive Service'] was a proven software component used to manage scientific data from spaceflight missions. In the transformation, CAS was split into two separate components representing its canonical capabilities: file management and workflow management. In addition, CAS was augmented by addition of a resource-management component. This third component enables CAS to manage heterogeneous computing by use of diverse resources, including high-performance clusters of computers, commodity computing hardware, and grid computing infrastructures. CAS is now more easily maintainable, evolvable, and reusable. These components can be used separately or, taking advantage of synergies, can be used together. Other elements of the transformation included addition of a separate Web presentation layer that supports distribution of data products via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, and provision for full Resource Description Framework (RDF) exports of metadata.

Mattmann, Chris↗

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↗

BraggNN : fast X-ray Bragg peak analysis using deep learning

X-ray diffraction based microscopy techniques such as high-energy diffraction microscopy (HEDM) rely on knowledge of the position of diffraction peaks with high precision. These positions are typically computed by fitting the observed intensities in detector data to a theoretical peak shape such as pseudo-Voigt. As experiments become more complex and detector technologies evolve, the computational cost of such peak-shape fitting becomes the biggest hurdle to the rapid analysis required for real-time feedback in experiments. To this end, we propose BraggNN, a deep-learning based method that can determine peak positions much more rapidly than conventional pseudo-Voigt peak fitting. When applied to a test dataset, peak center-of-mass positions obtained from BraggNN deviate less than 0.29 and 0.57 pixels for 75 and 95% of the peaks, respectively, from positions obtained using conventional pseudo-Voigt fitting (Euclidean distance). When applied to a real experimental dataset and using grain positions from near-field HEDM reconstruction as ground-truth, grain positions using BraggNN result in 15% smaller errors compared with those calculated using pseudo-Voigt. Recent advances in deep-learning method implementations and special-purpose model inference accelerators allow BraggNN to deliver enormous performance improvements relative to the conventional method, running, for example, more than 200 times faster on a consumer-class GPU card with out-of-the-box software.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Accelerating Science Impact through Big Data Workflow Management and Supercomputing

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), operating at the international CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, is leading Big Data driven scientific explorations. ATLAS, one of the largest collaborations ever assembled in the the history of science, is at the forefront of research at the LHC. To address an unprecedented multi-petabyte data processing challenge, the ATLAS experiment is relying on a heterogeneous distributed computational infrastructure. To manage the workflow for all data processing on hundreds of data centers the PanDA (Production and Distributed Analysis)Workload Management System is used. An ambitious program to expand PanDA to all available computing resources, including opportunistic use of commercial and academic clouds and Leadership Computing Facilities (LCF), is realizing within BigPanDA and megaPanDA projects. These projects are now exploring how PanDA might be used for managing computing jobs that run on supercomputers including OLCF’s Titan and NRC-KI HPC2. The main idea is to reuse, as much as possible, existing components of the PanDA system that are already deployed on the LHC Grid for analysis of physics data. The next generation of PanDA will allow many data-intensive sciences employing a variety of computing platforms to benefit from ATLAS experience and proven tools in highly scalable processing.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Expanding Repository Data Available For Sharing and Knowledge Discovery

Some of the hardest space biology and space health challenges require data-intensive, bioinformatic, meta-analytical, and computer-assisted research approaches. These challenges include examining interdisciplinary space life science research across experiments and across interacting spaceflight hazards (radiation, altered gravity, confinement, hostile-closed environments, distance-duration from Earth). The approaches to confront these challenges involve mining multiple datasets simultaneously from various hierarchical organizations of biological complexity, all while concurrently evaluating how experimental design factors affect endpoints of standard assays. To enable this field, it is essential that principal investigators (PIs) submit data in a structure so it can be maximally re-used. The purpose of the NASA Ames Life Sciences Data Archive (ALSDA) is to collect, curate, and make publicly available all non-human space-relevant biological data. ALSDA must also ensure data are open-access, and maximally findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). The scope of ALSDA data collected and submitted by PIs include subject and study design metadata, assay metadata parameters, raw and processed assay data, assay imagery/video, and subject-experienced mission data telemetry (radiation, temperature, humidity, acoustics, vibrations, etc.). ALSDA recently integrated into a collaborative group of Open Science projects to facilitate a suite of new tools and workflows that will improve data submission, accessibility, and reusability by implementing digital data submission agreements, and adopting the data management system originally developed by NASA GeneLab. ALSDA intends to bring current biological repository data and all future collected data into this new scientific data reuse reality. This new suite of tools will enable ALSDA to deploy a science curation system using scientific assay configurations for the data submission portal. It will capture essential assay parameters according to established standards 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. Data submissions can be brought into cutting-edge informatic analysis portals to enable mining of physiological, behavioral, biochemical, and imaging datasets in conjunction with ‘omics-level datasets. As ALSDA datasets are submitted, curated, and published (e.g., micro-computed tomography, histology, pulse oximetry, serum metabolites, magnetic resonance imaging, intraocular pressure, novel object recognition, etc.), the merging together of spaceflight data along this multi-hierarchical complexity of biology will enable informatics and data-intensive approaches resulting in knowledge discoveries across missions, space hazards, and biological disciplines.

Biology↗

Expanding Repository Data Available For Sharing And Knowledge Discovery

Some of the hardest space biology and space health challenges require data-intensive, bioinformatic, meta-analytical, and computer-assisted research approaches. These challenges include examining interdisciplinary space life science research across experiments and across interacting spaceflight hazards (radiation, altered gravity, confinement, hostile-closed environments, distance-duration from Earth). The approaches to confront these challenges involve mining multiple datasets simultaneously from various hierarchical organizations of biological complexity, all while concurrently evaluating how experimental design factors affect endpoints of standard assays. To enable this field, it is essential that principal investigators (PIs) submit data in a structure so it can be maximally re-used. The purpose of the NASA Ames Life Sciences Data Archive (ALSDA) is to collect, curate, and make publicly available all non-human space-relevant biological data. ALSDA must also ensure data are open-access, and maximally findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). The scope of ALSDA data collected and submitted by PIs include subject and study design metadata, assay metadata parameters, raw and processed assay data, assay imagery/video, and subject-experienced mission data telemetry (radiation, temperature, humidity, acoustics, vibrations, etc.). ALSDA recently integrated into a collaborative group of Open Science projects to facilitate a suite of new tools and workflows that will improve data submission, accessibility, and reusability by implementing digital data submission agreements, and adopting the data management system originally developed by NASA GeneLab. ALSDA intends to bring current biological repository data and all future collected data into this new scientific data reuse reality. This new suite of tools will enable ALSDA to deploy a science curation system using scientific assay configurations for the data submission portal. It will capture essential assay parameters according to established standards 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. Data submissions can be brought into cutting-edge informatic analysis portals to enable mining of physiological, behavioral, biochemical, and imaging datasets in conjunction with ‘omics-level datasets. As ALSDA datasets are submitted, curated, and published (e.g., micro-computed tomography, histology, pulse oximetry, serum metabolites, magnetic resonance imaging, intraocular pressure, novel object recognition, etc.), the merging together of spaceflight data along this multi-hierarchical complexity of biology will enable informatics and data-intensive approaches resulting in knowledge discoveries across missions, space hazards, and biological disciplines.

life science↗

Sensitivity of the curve-to-growth technique utilized in rocket experiments to determine the line shape of solar He I resonance lines

The sensitivity of the curve-of-growth (COG) technique utilized in rocket measurements to determine the line profiles of the solar He I resonance emissions is theoretically examined with attention to the possibility of determining the line core shape using this technique. The line at 584.334 A is chosen as an illustration. Various possible source functions of the solar line have been assumed in the computation of the integrated transmitted intensity. A recent observational data set obtained by the present researchers is used as the constraint of the computation. It is confirmed that the COG technique can indeed provide a good measurement of the solar line width. However, to obtain detailed knowledge of the solar profile at line center and in the core region, (1) it is necessary to be able to carry out relative solar flux measurements with a 1-percent or better precision, and (2) it must be possible to measure the He gas pressure in the absorption cell to lower than 0.1 mtorr. While these numbers apply specifically to the present geometry, the results are readily scaled to other COG measurements using other experimental parameters.

Wu, C. Y. R.↗

Diversity in computing technologies and strategies for dynamic resource allocation

Here, High Energy Physics (HEP) is a very data intensive and trivially parallelizable science discipline. HEP is probing nature at increasingly finer details requiring ever increasing computational resources to process and analyze experimental data. In this paper, we discuss how HEP provisioned resources so far using Grid technologies, how HEP is starting to include new resource providers like commercial Clouds and HPC installations, and how HEP is transparently provisioning resources at these diverse providers.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

FLASH: FPGA-Accelerated Smart Switches with GCN Case Study

Some communication switches, e.g., the Mellanox SHArP and those in the IBM BlueGene clusters, are augmented to process packets at the application level with fixed-function collectives. This approach, however, lacks flexibility, which limits their applicability in diverse and dynamic workloads. Recently, a new type of programmable packet processor, which uses high-level languages, e.g., P4, has emerged as possible candidates. P4-based switches, however, fall short in certain applications, including machine learning, where capabilities not currently supported by P4 are needed. These include more complex calculation, such as sparse computation and fused multiply-accumulate, data-intensive floating point operations, data reuse, and significant memory. The problem addressed here is that such a switch augmentation needs to support: a large amount of state, significant flexible compute capability, and ease of programming, all while maintaining full functionality, including ensuring high throughput, and demonstrating utility. In this work, we propose a programmable look-aside-type accelerator that can be embedded into, or attached to, existing communication switch pipelines and that is capable of processing packets at line-rate. The proposed in-switch accelerator is based on mixing an ISA (subset of RISC-V instructions) with dataflow graphs (found in CGRAs). To augment performance, vector instructions are also supported. To facilitate usability, we have developed a complete toolchain to compile user-provided C/C++ codes to appropriate back-end instructions for configuring the accelerator. While this approach is flexible enough to support various workloads, in this paper, we consider Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) as a case study. Experimental results show that this approach considerably improves the performance of distributed GCN applications.

Haghi, Pouya↗

Xavier: High-Performance X-Drop Adaptive Banded Pairwise Alignment (Xavier) v1.0

Pairwise sequence alignment is one of the most compute-intense challenges for the analysis of genomics data and it can account for more than 90% of the runtime depending on the application. Despite the effort to reduce the computational cost introducing heuristics such as banded and x-drop alignment, the performance of state-of-the-art software is often unsatisfactory for long sequences. Recent advances in single-molecule sequencing technologies keep increasing the length of the sequences to align at the cost of higher error rates b ranging from 5% to 15% b, emphasizing the need for fast and accurate software. Our long-read alignment software, named Xavier, computes high-performance x-drop adaptive banded pairwise alignment exploiting instruction-level parallelism via Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) operations. Xavier uses a narrow bandwidth that appreciably improves performance reducing the search space for the optimal alignment. In our experiment, the adaptive mechanism enables Xavier to find the optimal alignment between related sequences even when the error rate is as high as 50%. Xavier achieves speed-up up to 5X over competitor software when enabling the x-drop termination and up to 415X when disabling it, with negligible accuracy loss.

Guidi, Giulia↗

Further Investigation of Employing Binomial Small-Sample Estimator in M-LROM

Reduced Order Modeling (ROM) is essential to enable the identification of the so-called active parameter subspace for high-fidelity models that are employed in computationally intensive analyses such as uncertainty characterization and data assimilation. Given the complexity of models for real-world application, brute force methods to identify the active subspace may not be computationally efficient to realize the value of reduction, since in realistic problems, the full scale model must be executed few hundred times, which may be computationally taxing. Earlier work has introduced a new approach, which represents a further development of our previous work on ROM, referred to as multi-level ROM (M-LROM). In M-LROM, approximate models are employed to identify the active subspace instead of the full scale model. In this summary, we present our recent results on M-LROM, specifically in regard to the construction of reliable error metrics that can bound the errors resulting from the reduction. The idea is to employ a lower fidelity model, i.e., an approximation of the full scale or high fidelity model, to build the active subspace, and via the proposed error bound, the quality of the active subspace can be determined by calculating an upper bound on the errors resulting from the reduction. For this approach to be practical, the error bound must be realistic, implying that it should be close to the actual errors expected, and not much higher. Therefore, an important goal of this summary is to compare different error bounds in terms of the relation between their estimated bounds to the actual errors. In particular, we compare the proposed error bound which numerically construct an estimator using binomial distribution to the widely used small-sample norm estimators. Unlike most probabilistic error estimation methods, the proposed bound employs a binomial distribution to construct the estimator whereas in other conventional methods, the distribution employed is typically the standard Gaussian, normalized over a unit hypersphere as initially proposed by the seminal paper of J. Dixon on random matrix theory. Previous publications provided evidence that the binomial distribution calculates more realistic bounds as compared to the Gaussian distribution, which tends to be conservative, implying that the bound is much bigger than the actual errors, which diminishes the value of the reduction, as now must increase the size of the active subspace to reach the desired upper bound on the reduction errors. This work has provided a rigorous approach by which error bounds on the reduction errors can be established without having to execute the high fidelity model during the construction of the active subspace. The high fidelity model is only need to test the error bound using small number of executions. This methodology paves the way for a more efficient application of ROM to complex engineering models, where standard ROM techniques may be too taxing to optimally realize their value in practical situations. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗