Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “Scientific Computing.”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,531 records · Page 85

Final Technical Report for U.S.-Japan Hadronic Physics Exchange Program for Studies of Hadron Structure and QCD

Nuclear physics explores the fundamental properties of matter -- how protons and neutrons emerge as quantum systems of elementary particles, how they form the atomic nuclei, and how they give rise to the wide variety of phenomena and applications at biological, technical, and astronomical scales. It is a global scientific effort centered around large-scale experimental user facilities (particle accelerators and detectors), advanced theoretical methods and concepts, and computational techniques and resources. Exchange of knowledge and ideas, scientific collaboration, and workforce development on a global scale are essential for the future of the field. The nuclear physics program envisaged in the 2023 DOE/NSF NSAC Long-Range Plan and pursued at the U.S. National Labs has strong synergies with programs at other facilities worldwide and will realize significant benefits from international collaboration. Nuclear physics is also recognized for promoting international cooperation in the broadest sense through joint construction and operation of experimental equipment, personal contacts between scientists, and education and training. The U.S.-Japan Hadronic Physics Exchange Program (USJPHE) supported collaborative scientific research in hadronic physics and quantum chromodynamics. USJHPE focused on subject areas related to the programs at current and future experimental facilities in the U.S.\ and Japan and supported both experimental and theoretical studies. USJHPE particularly aimed to realize synergies between the hadronic physics programs at Jefferson Lab 12 GeV and J-PARC resulting from the complementarity of electromagnetic and hadronic probes in the multi-GeV energy range. Subject areas of common interest included the quark-gluon structure of hadrons and nuclei, meson and baryon spectroscopy, strangeness and hypernuclear physics, and other related topics. USJHPE also supported research in hadronic physics and nuclear-physics-enabled tests of fundamental symmetries related to the programs at Brookhaven National Lab, Fermilab, KEK, Spring-8, and university-based facilities in the U.S. and Japan. USJHPE especially promoted collaboration between the U.S. and Japanese nuclear physics communities in developing the physics program and instrumentation for the future Electron-Ion Collider. USJHPE was intended to provide travel grants to U.S.-based scientists (primary institutional affiliation with a U.S.\ university, national laboratory, or other research center) to visit Japanese institutions and conduct collaborative research there. The program supported senior researchers, postdoctoral fellows, and students. Continuing the setup of the preceding grant period, J-PARC served as the Japanese “hub” for U.S. physicists for short- and long-term visits, and JLab served as the corresponding U.S. “hub”. The program was officially managed through the U. of Connecticut in Storrs, CT. Support for Japanese physicists visiting the U.S. was provided through funds from Japanese funding agencies. The USJHPE program promoted the scientific exchange and the collaborative spirit in hadronic physics between the two countries.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Large scale multi-node simulations of $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge theory quantum circuits using Google Cloud Platform

Simulating quantum field theories on a quantum computer is one of the most exciting fundamental physics applications of quantum information science. Dynamical time evolution of quantum fields is a challenge that is beyond the capabilities of classical computing, but it can teach us important lessons about the fundamental fabric of space and time. Whether we may answer scientific questions of interest using near-term quantum computing hardware is an open question that requires a detailed simulation study of quantum noise. Here we present a large scale simulation study powered by a multi-node implementation of qsim using the Google Cloud Platform. We additionally employ newly-developed GPU capabilities in qsim and show how Tensor Processing Units -- Application-specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) specialized for Machine Learning -- may be used to dramatically speed up the simulation of large quantum circuits. We demonstrate the use of high performance cloud computing for simulating $\mathbb{Z}_2$ quantum field theories on system sizes up to 36 qubits. We find this lattice size is not able to simulate our problem and observable combination with sufficient accuracy, implying more challenging observables of interest for this theory are likely beyond the reach of classical computation using exact circuit simulation.

Gustafson, Erik↗

Parallelization of the Physical-Space Statistical Analysis System (PSAS)

Atmospheric data assimilation is a method of combining observations with model forecasts to produce a more accurate description of the atmosphere than the observations or forecast alone can provide. Data assimilation plays an increasingly important role in the study of climate and atmospheric chemistry. The NASA Data Assimilation Office (DAO) has developed the Goddard Earth Observing System Data Assimilation System (GEOS DAS) to create assimilated datasets. The core computational components of the GEOS DAS include the GEOS General Circulation Model (GCM) and the Physical-space Statistical Analysis System (PSAS). The need for timely validation of scientific enhancements to the data assimilation system poses computational demands that are best met by distributed parallel software. PSAS is implemented in Fortran 90 using object-based design principles. The analysis portions of the code solve two equations. The first of these is the "innovation" equation, which is solved on the unstructured observation grid using a preconditioned conjugate gradient (CG) method. The "analysis" equation is a transformation from the observation grid back to a structured grid, and is solved by a direct matrix-vector multiplication. Use of a factored-operator formulation reduces the computational complexity of both the CG solver and the matrix-vector multiplication, rendering the matrix-vector multiplications as a successive product of operators on a vector. Sparsity is introduced to these operators by partitioning the observations using an icosahedral decomposition scheme. PSAS builds a large (approx. 128MB) run-time database of parameters used in the calculation of these operators. Implementing a message passing parallel computing paradigm into an existing yet developing computational system as complex as PSAS is nontrivial. One of the technical challenges is balancing the requirements for computational reproducibility with the need for high performance. The problem of computational reproducibility is well known in the parallel computing community. It is a requirement that the parallel code perform calculations in a fashion that will yield identical results on different configurations of processing elements on the same platform. In some cases this problem can be solved by sacrificing performance. Meeting this requirement and still achieving high performance is very difficult. Topics to be discussed include: current PSAS design and parallelization strategy; reproducibility issues; load balance vs. database memory demands, possible solutions to these problems.

Larson, J. W.↗

From Planetary Imaging to Enzyme Screening

Based in San Diego, KAIROS Scientific develops molecular biology methods, instrumentation, and computer algorithms to create solutions to challenging problems in the medical and chemical industries. company s pioneering efforts in digital imaging spectroscopy (DIS) enable researchers to obtain spectral and/or time-dependent information for each pixel or group of pixels in a two-dimensional scene. In addition to having Yang s NASA experience at its foundation, KAIROS Scientific was established with the support of many government grants and contracts. Its first was a NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, from Ames Research Center, to develop HIRIM, a high-resolution imaging microscope embodying both novel hardware and software that can be used to simultaneously acquire hundreds of individual absorbance spectra from microscopic features. Using HIRIM s graphical user interface, MicroDIS, scientists and engineers are presented with a revolutionary new tool which enables them to point to a feature in an image and recall its associated spectrum in real time.

Source record↗

In situ compression artifact removal in scientific data using deep transfer learning and experience replay

The massive amount of data produced during simulation on high-performance computers has grown exponentially over the past decade, exacerbating the need for streaming compression and decompression methods for efficient storage and transfer of this data---key to realizing the full potential of large-scale computational science. Lossy compression approaches such as JPEG when applied to scientific simulation data realized as a stream of images can achieve good compression rates but at the cost of introducing compression artifacts and loss of information. This paper develops a unified framework for in situ compression artifact removal in which the fully convolutional neural network architectures are combined with scalable training, transfer learning, and experience replay to achieve superior accuracy and efficiency while significantly decreasing the storage footprint as compared with the traditional optimization-based approaches. We demonstrate the proposed approach and compare it with compressed sensing postprocessing and other baseline deep learning models using climate simulations and nuclear reactor simulations, both of which are driven by hyperbolic partial differential equations. Our approach when applied to remove the compression artifacts on the JPEG-compressed nuclear reactor simulation data (using a transfer-trained model that was pretrained on the climate simulation data and updated incrementally as the nuclear reactor simulation progressed), achieved a significant improvement---mean peak signal-to-noise ratio of 42.438 as compared with 27.725 obtained with the compressed sensing approach.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Leveraging interpolation models and error bounds for verifiable scientific machine learning

Effective verification and validation techniques for modern scientific machine learning workflows are challenging to devise. Statistical methods are abundant and easily deployed, but often rely on speculative assumptions about the data and methods involved. Error bounds for classical interpolation techniques can provide mathematically rigorous estimates of accuracy, but often are difficult or impractical to determine computationally. Here, in this work, we present a best-of-both-worlds approach to verifiable scientific machine learning by demonstrating that (1) multiple standard interpolation techniques have informative error bounds that can be computed or estimated efficiently; (2) comparative performance among distinct interpolants can aid in validation goals; (3) deploying interpolation methods on latent spaces generated by deep learning techniques enables some interpretability for black-box models. We present a detailed case study of our approach for predicting lift-drag ratios from airfoil images. Code developed for this work is available in a public Github repository.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Hybrid Approaches for Data Reduction of Spatiotemporal Scientific Applications

Scientists conduct large-scale simulations to compute derived quantities from primary data. Thus, it is crucial that data compression techniques maintain bounded errors on these derived quantities or quantities of interest (QOI). For many spatiotemporal applications, these QOIs are binary in nature and represent presence or absence of a physical phenomenon. In this work, we propose to use a hybrid approah for differential compression for such applications. We use a neural network (NN) approach to determine regions-of-interest (ROIs) where the binary QOIs are going to be prevalent. This is then used with traditional approaches that compress at a lower level (and higher accuracy) for these ROIs as compared to other regions.

Li, Xiao↗

Tool for Analysis and Reduction of Scientific Data

The Automated Scheduling and Planning Environment (ASPEN) computer program has been updated to version 3.0. ASPEN as a whole (up to version 2.0) has been summarized, and selected aspects of ASPEN have been discussed in several previous NASA Tech Briefs articles. Restated briefly, ASPEN is a modular, reconfigurable, application software framework for solving batch problems that involve reasoning about time, activities, states, and resources. Applications of ASPEN can include planning spacecraft missions, scheduling of personnel, and managing supply chains, inventories, and production lines. ASPEN 3.0 can be customized for a wide range of applications and for a variety of computing environments that include various central processing units and randomaccess memories. Domain-specific reasoning modules (e.g., modules for determining orbits for spacecraft) can easily be plugged into ASPEN 3.0. Improvements over other, similar software that have been incorporated into ASPEN 3.0 include a provision for more expressive time-line values, new parsing capabilities afforded by an ASPEN language based on Extensible Markup Language, improved search capabilities, and improved interfaces to other, utility-type software (notably including MATLAB).

James, Mark↗

Tool for Automated Retrieval of Generic Event Tracks (TARGET)

Methods have been developed to identify and track tornado-producing mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) automatically over the continental United States, in order to facilitate systematic studies of these powerful and often destructive events. Several data sources were combined to ensure event identification accuracy. Records of watches and warnings issued by National Weather Service (NWS), and tornado locations and tracks from the Tornado History Project (THP) were used to locate MCSs in high-resolution precipitation observations and GOES infrared (11-micron) Rapid Scan Operation (RSO) imagery. Thresholds are then applied to the latter two data sets to define MCS events and track their developments. MCSs produce a broad range of severe convective weather events that are significantly affecting the living conditions of the populations exposed to them. Understanding how MCSs grow and develop could help scientists improve their weather prediction models, and also provide tools to decision-makers whose goals are to protect populations and their property. Associating storm cells across frames of remotely sensed images poses a difficult problem because storms evolve, split, and merge. Any storm-tracking method should include the following processes: storm identification, storm tracking, and quantification of storm intensity and activity. The spatiotemporal coordinates of the tracks will enable researchers to obtain other coincident observations to conduct more thorough studies of these events. In addition to their tracked locations, their areal extents, precipitation intensities, and accumulations all as functions of their evolutions in time were also obtained and recorded for these events. All parameters so derived can be catalogued into a moving object database (MODB) for custom queries. The purpose of this software is to provide a generalized, cross-platform, pluggable tool for identifying events within a set of scientific data based upon specified criteria with the possibility of storing identified events into a searchable database. The core of the application uses an implementation of the connected component labeling (CCL) algorithm to identify areas of interest, then uses a set of criteria to establish spatial and temporal relationships between identified components. The CCL algorithm is used for identifying objects within images for computer vision. This application applies it to scientific data sets using arbitrary criteria. The most novel concept was applying a generalized CCL implementation to scientific data sets for establishing events both spatially and temporally. The combination of several existing concepts (pluggable components, generalized CCL algorithm, etc.) into one application is also novel. In addition, how the system is designed, i.e., its extensibility with pluggable components, and its configurability with a simple configuration file, is innovative. This allows the system to be applied to new scenarios with ease.

Clune, Thomas↗

2020 Exascale Computing Project Annual Meeting (Executive Summary Report)

The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) delivers specific applications, software products, and outcomes on DOE computing facilities. Integration across these elements for specific hardware technologies for exascale system instantiations is fundamental to ECP success. The outcome of the ECP is the delivery of a capable exascale computing ecosystem to provide breakthrough solutions addressing our most critical challenges in scientific discovery, energy assurance, economic competitiveness, and national security. This outcome is not a matter of ensuring more powerful computing systems. The ECP is designed to create more valuable and rapid insights from a wide variety of applications (“capable”), which requires a much higher level of inherent efficacy in all methods, software tools, and ECP-enabled computing technologies to be acquired by DOE laboratories (“ecosystem”). The ECP annual meeting provides a unique opportunity for the core technical expertise in the United States focused on achieving this next plateau of computational science and computing performance to engage in direct discussions on project execution. Face-to-face gatherings in technical communities like this are common and needed for the exchange of scientific ideas and technical performance. The ECP annual meeting stands apart from other technical conferences and meetings in the computing community as it is uniquely and solely focused on the execution of the ECP and the integration of technical activities leading to the creation of the exascale computing ecosystem for the future. The direct interaction of key critical technical staff, who are leaders in their respective fields, and the resulting give-and-take between software, applications, and hardware and the technical co-design therein, is unique and essential to the effective execution of the ECP. The first annual meeting was held in Knoxville, Tennessee, January 31 – February 2, 2017 and brought together, for the first time, a diverse collection of researchers from 16 DOE national laboratories as well as university computer and computational science researchers to discuss shared problems and joint solutions for the development of a capable exascale computing ecosystem. These interactions resulted in focused technical plans and an energized community centered on advances for ECP. The second annual meeting was held in Knoxville, Tennessee, February 5–9, 2018. It included 643 individual thought leaders and performers in application development, software research and deployment, and hardware research and integrators, all of whom are part of the multifaceted, billion dollar HPC community. This meeting provided a platform to discuss and disseminate numerous examples where researchers with common goals and synergistic solutions came together for the first time to deliver tangible results. Additionally, at the 2018 meeting, ECP researchers had the opportunity to digest all US HPC vendor R&D product roadmaps pointing to exascale – not only to learn how their research can play a role, but, more importantly, to influence those roadmaps to ensure successful delivery on DOE applications that will contribute to (if not solve) problems of national interest in national security, science, energy, and health, as well as growing security threats. The third annual meeting was held in Houston, Texas, January 14–17, 2019. With a 19% increase in the number of registrations (768 people), and the change in location, the third annual meeting was considered the most impactful of the three at the time. The new website provided a better platform for the dissemination of the content, the new venue as a meeting hotel instead of a conference center facilitated interactions and discussions after event hours, and the addition of an award-winning mobile event conference app (Whova) transformed dramatically the attendee experience at the event. This fourth annual meeting was held in Houston, Texas, February 3-7, 2020. This meeting had an increase in the number of attendees for a total of 824 people registered (782 attendees) and included numerous enhancements based on feedback and lessons learned from previous meetings, some of which are listed here: Improved quality of the sessions, their material and the whole program.; Had more industry participation and addition of external collaborators from overseas.; Published the full agenda earlier to better accommodate attendance and travel plans based on schedule.; Centralized all sessions in one venue.; Provided additional hotels and room blocks for the attendees.; Improved communication with the audience (links, material, directions, notifications, etc.) to go paperless.; Enhanced side meeting scheduling, management and user experience.; Made available additional space and tables for impromptu meetings and side discussions.; Improved IT and A/V solutions for speakers. In addition, our final survey captured the following points as opportunities for improvement in future meetings: consider a different meeting location that is more pedestrian friendly, reduce talks during working meals to allow more collaboration and informal time, adapt the agenda to acknowledge attendees from different timezones, consider recording some of the tutorials and/or sessions to share broadly with the HPC community, have a larger poster room, provide additional power strips, and improve the WiFi.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Characterization and identification of HPC applications at leadership computing facility

High Performance Computing (HPC) is an important method for scientific discovery via large-scale simulation, data analysis, or artificial intelligence. Leadership-class supercomputers are expensive, but essential to run large HPC applications. The Petascale era of supercomputers began in 2008, with the first machines achieving performance in excess of one petaflops, and with the advent of new supercomputers in 2021 (e.g., Aurora, Frontier), the Exascale era will soon begin. However, the high theoretical computing capability (i.e., peak FLOPS) of a machine is not the only meaningful target when designing a supercomputer, as the resources demand of applications varies. A deep understanding of the characterization of applications that run on a leadership supercomputer is one of the most important ways for planning its design, development and operation. In order to improve our understanding of HPC applications, user demands and resource usage characteristics, we perform correlative analysis of various logs for different subsystems of a leadership supercomputer. This analysis reveals surprising, sometimes counter-intuitive patterns, which, in some cases, conflicts with existing assumptions, and have important implications for future system designs as well as supercomputer operations. For example, our analysis shows that while the applications spend significant time on MPI, most applications spend very little time on file I/O. Combined analysis of hardware event logs and task failure logs show that the probability of a hardware FATAL event causing task failure is low. Combined analysis of control system logs and file I/O logs reveals that pure POSIX I/O is used more widely than higher level parallel I/O. Based on holistic insights of the application gained through combined and co-analysis of multiple logs from different perspectives and general intuition, we engineer features to "fingerprint" HPC applications. We use t-SNE (a machine learning technique for dimensionality reduction) to validate the explainability of our features and finally train machine learning models to identify HPC applications or group those with similar characteristic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that combines logs on file I/O, computing, and inter-node communication for insightful analysis of HPC applications in production.

Liu, Zhengchun↗

The interaction of reactants, intermediates and products with Cu ions in Cu-SSZ-13 NH3 SCR catalysts: An energetic and ab initio X-ray absorption modeling study

Copper-exchanged SSZ-13 (Cu-SSZ-13) provides excellent catalytic activity and hydrothermal stability in the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of NOx by using NH3 as a reductant. In this contribution, we compare the most likely positions for Cu with a single charge compensating Al atom (ZCu), including the effect of the adsorption of reactants, intermediates and products of a NH3 SCR reaction by using first-principles calculations based on density functional theory. We find that the 6-membered ring (6MR) site is the most energetically favorable while the 8-membered ring (8MR) sites are less favorable with energy differences about 0.5 eV with respect to the 6MR site. Upon molecular adsorption, the energy differences between Cu in the 8MR and 6MR sites decreases and almost disappears, which means that the thermodynamic stability of ZCu with molecularly adsorbed species is nearly identical for Cu in different sites. Considering more complicated scenarios of NO (or CO) adsorption, we find that the co-adsorption of 2 NO (or 2 CO) molecules weakens their interaction with Cu, as well as their co-adsorption with OH and H2O. The X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) of Cu in Cu-SSZ-13 under different conditions was also modeled from first principles. We find that the pre-edge feature in the K-edge XANES of Cu in clean Cu-SSZ-13 with Cu in a 8MR site is induced by a 1s to 4s transition while there is no pre-edge peak when Cu is in a 6MR site. Molecular adsorption onto Cu in a 6MR or a 8MR site results in the same K-edge XANES. When NO is adsorbed onto Cu in SSZ-13, we find that the origin of the small pre-edge peak in the K-edge XANES lies in a 1s to 3d electron transition. On the other hand, when CO or N2 is adsorbed onto an isolated Cu atom in SSZ-13, a transition from the 1s state to the hybridized state of 3d and 4p results in a pre-edge peak in the K-edge of the XANES spectrum. It is also found that the edge position and intensity of the maximum peak of Cu K-edge XANES depend on the Cu locations and the adsorbed molecules. By studying the Cu K-edge XANES of ZCu with adsorption of species of different oxidizing power, we conclude that a higher oxidation state of Cu will result in a higher energy edge position in the Cu K-edge XANES. These results are expected to greatly aid our understanding of Cu-SSZ-13 SCR catalysts. This work was supported by institutional funds provided to JSM from the Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering. Financial support was also provided by the National Science Foundation GOALI program under contract Nos. CBET-1258717, CBET-1258715 and CBET-1258690. We thank Prof. Fabio Ribeiro, Mr. Atish Parekh, Prof. W. F. Schneider, Mr. Christopher Paolucci, Mr. Trunjoyo Anggara and Prof. Jeff Miller for stimulating discussions on the modeling of the XANES spectrum and Ms. Alyssa Hensley for her comments on the manuscript. J.Sz. acknowledges the financial support of this work by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Vehicle Technologies Program. A portion of the computer time for the computational work was performed using EMSL, a national scientific user facility sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research and located at PNNL. PNNL is a multi-program national laboratory operated for the US DOE by Battelle.

Zhang, Renqin↗

Computing in space: Issues and answers

Future plans for space exploration call for scientific instruments whose data is increasingly voluminous, far exceeding constraints set by telemetry rates, and therefore, an increased role for spaceborne computing. Three issues that greatly influence the realization of spaceborne computing systems are addressed. The first involves the identification of those research problems which are unique to space computing. Resources must be expended on these problems if efforts are to add value to, and have impact on, the technology of computing in space. The second addresses the transfer of new technology from the research laboratory to use in space. What can be done to expedite this process and shrink the technology gap that separates Earth and space based systems must be assessed. The third issue involves the user's point of view of what is required of new space computing systems. That is, what are the driving forces that most influence customers' decisions to use or not use new technology? Issues of design environment for spaceborne computers, tools for modeling and evaluation of flight systems, and validation of space flight hardware and software are also discussed.

Davidson, John M.↗

Toward a Seamless Integration of Computing, Experimental, and Observational Science Facilities: A Blueprint to Accelerate Discovery

The Department of Energy, Office of Science operates world-leading facilities for experimental, observational, and computational science. DOE supercomputing facilities will reach performance at the scale of ExaFLOPs in the coming years, enabling new vistas of scale and precision for large scale simulations and data analysis. Experimental scientific facilities are undergoing similar upgrades that will lead to higher data rates and correspondingly larger computational demands, and will increase the need for near-real-time processing and resilient support for more complex workflows. A transformation of science is underway, with workloads at supercomputing facilities increasingly driven by this explosion of data from instruments and experimental facilities, as well as the accelerating use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a tool for scientific discovery. A seamless integration of computing, networking, instruments, and experimental facilities is required to support these emerging workloads and open up a new frontier of U.S. leadership in scientific discovery. We propose to accomplish this by providing frictionless access to the ASCR supercomputing facilities. We describe our vision of combining the power of ASCR supercomputers and networking infrastructure into an integrated scalable fabric, available to end user scientists via interfaces that aim to automate and simplify access to high performance computing systems. This will enable unprecedented computational science capabilities for experimental and observational facilities, and will create new opportunities to combine large simulations and modeling with experimental facility data analysis. This blueprint for creating an integrated network of computational and experimental facilities will provide an enriched discovery environment and open doors for new scientific communities to access the DOE’s world-leading computing and networking capabilities.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Lithographic quantum dots for quantum computation and quantum simulation

Lithographic quantum dots (QDs) are highly controllable few-level quantum systems created in semiconductor nanoelectronic devices, with a variety of scientific applications. These include technologically-driven applications like quantum computing and more fundamental applications in which they serve as a platform for exploring basic many-body physics. This document is a brief summary of my Ph.D. research so far and the directions with which I intend to continue it. Highlights include theoretical efforts to understand and design qubits in germanium hole QDs, as well as explorations of the possibility of using QDs coupled to nearby baths for analog simulation of quantum impurity models.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Integrated System and Application Continuous Performance Monitoring and Analysis Capability (Final)

Scientific applications run on high-performance computing (HPC) systems are critical for many national security missions within Sandia and the NNSA complex. However, these applications often face performance degradation and even failures that are challenging to diagnose. To provide unprecedented insight into these issues, the HPC Development, HPC Systems, Computational Science, and Plasma Theory & Simulation departments at Sandia crafted and completed their FY21 ASC Level 2 milestone entitled "Integrated System and Application Continuous Performance Monitoring and Analysis Capability." The milestone created a novel integrated HPC system and application monitoring and analysis capability by extending Sandia’s Kokkos application portability framework, Lightweight Distributed Metric Service (LDMS) monitoring tool, and scalable storage, analysis, and visualization pipeline. The extensions to Kokkos and LDMS enable collection and storage of application data during run time, as it is generated, with negligible overhead. This data is combined with HPC system data within the extended analysis pipeline to present relevant visualizations of derived system and application metrics that can be viewed at run time or post run. This new capability was evaluated using several week-long, 290-node runs of Sandia’s ElectroMagnetic Plasma In Realistic Environments (EMPIRE) modeling and design tool and resulted in 1TB of application data and 50TB of system data. EMPIRE developers remarked this capability was incredibly helpful for quickly assessing application health and performance alongside system state. In short, this milestone work built the foundation for expansive HPC system and application data collection, storage, analysis, visualization, and feedback framework that will increase total scientific output of Sandia’s HPC users.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Editorial: Neuroscience, computing, performance, and benchmarks: Why it matters to neuroscience how fast we can compute

At the turn of the millennium the computational neuroscience community realized that neuroscience was in a software crisis: software development was no longer progressing as expected and reproducibility declined. The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) was inaugurated in 2007 as an initiative to improve this situation. The INCF has since pursued its mission to help the development of standards and best practices. In a community paper published this very same year, Brette et al. tried to assess the state of the field and to establish a scientific approach to simulation technology, addressing foundational topics, such as which simulation schemes are best suited for the types of models we see in neuroscience. In 2015, a Frontiers Research Topic “Python in neuroscience” by Muller et al. triggered and documented a revolution in the neuroscience community, namely in the usage of the scripting language Python as a common language for interfacing with simulation codes and connecting between applications. The review by Einevoll et al. documented that simulation tools have since further matured and become reliable research instruments used by many scientific groups for their respective questions. Open source and community standard simulators today allow research groups to focus on their scientific questions and leave the details of the computational work to the community of simulator developers. A parallel development has occurred, which has been barely visible in neuroscientific circles beyond the community of simulator developers: Supercomputers used for large and complex scientific calculations have increased their performance from ~10 TeraFLOPS (10 13 floating point operations per second) in the early 2000s to above 1 ExaFLOPS (10 18 floating point operations per second) in the year 2022. This represents a 100,000-fold increase in our computational capabilities, or almost 17 doublings of computational capability in 22 years. Moore's law (the observation that it is economically viable to double the number of transistors in an integrated circuit every other 18–24 months) explains a part of this; our ability and willingness to build and operate physically larger computers, explains another part. It should be clear, however, that such a technological advancement requires software adaptations and under the hood, simulators had to reinvent themselves and change substantially to embrace this technological opportunity. It actually is quite remarkable that—apart from the change in semantics for the parallelization—this has mostly happened without the users knowing. The current Research Topic was motivated by the wish to assemble an update on the state of neuroscientific software (mostly simulators) in 2022, to assess whether we can see more clearly which scientific questions can (or cannot) be asked due to our increased capability of simulation, and also to anticipate whether and for how long we can expect this increase of computational capabilities to continue.

biophysically detailed models↗

Finalizing Transition to the New Data Center at BNL

Computational science, data management and analysis have been key factors in the success of Brookhaven National Laboratory's scientific programs at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS-II), the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), and in biological, atmospheric, and energy systems science, Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) and Materials Science, as well as our participation in international research collaborations, such as the ATLAS Experiment at Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Switzerland) and the Belle II Experiment at KEK (Japan). The construction of a new data center is an acknowledgement of the increasing demand for computing and storage services at BNL in the near term and enable the Lab to address the needs of the future experiments at the High-Luminosity LHC at CERN and the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at BNL in the long term. The Computing Facility Revitalization (CFR) project is aimed at repurposing the former National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS-I) building as the new data center for BNL. The construction of the new data center was finished in 2021Q3, and it was delivered for production in early FY2022 for all collaborations supported by the Scientific Data and Computing Center (SDCC), including STAR, PHENIX and sPHENIX experiments at RHIC collider at BNL, the Belle II Experiment at KEK (Japan), and the Computational Science Initiative at BNL (CSI). This paper highlights the key mechanical, electrical, and networking components of the new data center in its final configuration as used in production since 2021Q4 and gives an overview for the extension of the central network systems into the new data center and the migration of a significant portion of IT load and services from the old data center to the new data center carried out in 20212023, with expected completion of the main phase of the gradual IT equipment replacement and migration from the old data center into the new one set to the end of FY2023 (Sep 30, 2023).

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗