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At least 1,567 records · Page 87

Two-dimensional materials for bio-realistic neuronal computing networks

Two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals materials have found broad utility in a diverse range of applications including electronics, optoelectronics, renewable energy, and quantum information technologies. Meanwhile, exponentially growing digital data coupled with the ubiquity of artificial intelligence algorithms have generated significant interest in edge neuromorphic computing as an alternative to centralized cloud computing. The drive to incorporate neuroscience principles into computing hardware is motivated by the low power consumption, parallel processing, and reconfigurability of the human brain. The diverse library of 2D materials with atomic-level thicknesses, exceptional electrostatic tunability, and integration versatility is particularly well-suited for realizing bio-realistic synaptic and neuronal functionality. Here, we summarize past and present work in this field and outline the frontier challenges that have not yet been overcome. Here we also delineate potential solutions and suggest that the neuroscience principles of criticality and synchrony have the potential to inspire breakthrough applications of 2D materials in neuronal computing networks.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Parallel-In-Time Magnus Integrators

Magnus integrators are a subset of geometric integration methods for the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations that conserve certain invariants in the numerical solution. Our report explores temporal parallelism of Magnus integrators, particularly in the context of nonlinear problems. The method combines the concurrent computation of matrix commutators and exponentials within a time step with a pipelined iteration applied to multiple time steps in parallel. The accuracy and efficiency of time parallel Magnus methods up to order six are highlighted through numerical examples and demonstrate that critical parallel speedup is possible compared to serial methods.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

NWChem: Quantum Chemistry Simulations at Scale

Methods based on quantum mechanics equations have been developed since the 1930's with the purpose of accurately studying the electronic structure of molecules. However, it is only during the last two decades that intense development of new computational algorithms has opened the possibility of performing accurate simulations of challenging molecular processes with high-order many-body methods. A wealth of evidence indicates that the proper inclusion of instantaneous interactions between electrons (or the so-called electron correlation effects) is indispensable for the accurate characterization of chemical reactivity, molecular properties, and interactions of light with matter. The availability of reliable methods for benchmarking of medium-size molecular systems provides also a unique chance to propagate high-level accuracy across spatial scales through the multiscale methodologies. Some of these methods have potential to utilize computational resources in an effi*cient way since they are characterized by high numerical complexity and appropriate level of data granularity, which can be effi*ciently distributed over multi-processor architectures. The broad spectrum of coupled cluster (CC) methods falls into this class of methodologies. Several recent CC implementations clearly demonstrated the scalability of CC formalisms on architectures composed of hundreds thousand computational cores. In this context NWChem provides a collection of Tensor Contraction Engine (TCE) generated parallel implementations of various coupled cluster methods capable of taking advantage of many thousand of cores on leadership class parallel architectures.

chemistry↗

Systems and methods for application performance profiling and improvement

Methods for analyzing and improving a target computer application and corresponding systems and computer-readable mediums. A method includes receiving the target application. The method includes generating a parallel control flow graph (ParCFG) corresponding to the target application. The method includes analyzing the ParCFG by the computer system. The method includes generating and storing the modified ParCFG for the target application.

Leidel, John D.↗

Development of a CPU/GPU portable software library for Lagrangian–Eulerian simulations of liquid sprays

The Lagrangian–Eulerian method is widely used for simulations of fuel sprays in turbulent combustion because of the advantage of treating the spray droplets as discrete points. One challenge of the Lagrangian–Eulerian method is the intense computational requirement when tracking the large number of Lagrangian particles needed for high fidelity. We have developed a performance-portable library, Grit, to track the Lagrangian particles in parallel on central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerated high performance computing (HPC) architectures. Grit is a C++ library which employs Message Passing Interface (MPI) for distributed memory parallelism and Kokkos programming model for on-node shared memory parallelism with performance portability across different architectures of GPUs and multi-core/manycore CPUs. The parallel algorithms, key parallel kernels, and their performances on the pre-exascale supercomputer, Summit, are presented. Grit is coupled with a direct numerical simulation (DNS) solver, S3D, for multiphase simulations. A conservative formulation has been developed and implemented in Grit for phase coupling with thermodynamic consistency. The formulation separates the conservation of mass, momentum and energy from the physical models to prevent accidental violation of conservation laws due to inconsistent models. The formulation also enforces consistent definitions of enthalpies of the fuel for both phases and the latent heat of evaporation. Finally, simulations of turbulent particle-laden flow and the evaporation of dilute turbulent spray jet are performed to verify the software implementation, and to demonstrate the scalability of Grit for large-scale multiphase simulations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Optimizing the performance of reactive molecular dynamics simulations for many-core architectures

Reactive molecular dynamics simulations are computationally demanding. Reaching spatial and temporal scales where interesting scientific phenomena can be observed requires efficient and scalable implementations on modern hardware. In this article, we focus on optimizing the performance of the widely used LAMMPS/ReaxC package for many-core architectures. As hybrid parallelism allows better leverage of the increasing on-node parallelism, we adopt thread parallelism in the construction of bonded and nonbonded lists and in the computation of complex ReaxFF interactions. To mitigate the I/O overheads due to large volumes of trajectory data produced and to save users the burden of post-processing, we also develop a novel in situ tool for molecular species analysis. We analyze the performance of the resulting ReaxC-OMP package on two different architectures: (i) Mira, an IBM Blue Gene/Q system and (ii) Cori-II, a Cray XC-40 sytem with Knights Landing processors. For Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) systems of sizes ranging from 32 thousand to 16.6 million particles, we observe speedups in the range of 1.5-4.5x. We observe sustained performance improvements for up to 262,144 cores (1,048,576 processes) of Mira and a weak scaling efficiency of 91.5% in large simulations containing 16.6 million particles. Finally, the in situ molecular species analysis tool incurs only insignificant overheads across various system sizes and runs configurations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Towards a more general understanding of the algorithmic utility of recurrent connections

Lateral and recurrent connections are ubiquitous in biological neural circuits. Yet while the strong computational abilities of feedforward networks have been extensively studied, our understanding of the role and advantages of recurrent computations that might explain their prevalence remains an important open challenge. Foundational studies by Minsky and Roelfsema argued that computations that require propagation of global information for local computation to take place would particularly benefit from the sequential, parallel nature of processing in recurrent networks. Such “tag propagation” algorithms perform repeated, local propagation of information and were originally introduced in the context of detecting connectedness, a task that is challenging for feedforward networks. Here, we advance the understanding of the utility of lateral and recurrent computation by first performing a large-scale empirical study of neural architectures for the computation of connectedness to explore feedforward solutions more fully and establish robustly the importance of recurrent architectures. In addition, we highlight a tradeoff between computation time and performance and construct hybrid feedforward/recurrent models that perform well even in the presence of varying computational time limitations. We then generalize tag propagation architectures to propagating multiple interacting tags and demonstrate that these are efficient computational substrates for more general computations of connectedness by introducing and solving an abstracted biologically inspired decision-making task. Our work thus clarifies and expands the set of computational tasks that can be solved efficiently by recurrent computation, yielding hypotheses for structure in population activity that may be present in such tasks.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

pcircle - A Suite of Scalable Parallel File System Tools

Most of the software related to file system are written for conventional local file system, they are serialized and can't take advantage of the benefit of a large scale parallel file system. "pcircle" software builds on top of ubiquitous MPI in cluster computing environment and "work-stealing" pattern to provide a scalable, high-performance suite of file system tools. In particular - it implemented parallel data copy and parallel data checksumming, with advanced features such as async progress report, checkpoint and restart, as well as integrity checking.

WANG, FEIYI↗

pcircle - A Suite of Scalable Parallel File System Tools

Most of the software related to file system are written for conventional local file system, they are serialized and can't take advantage of the benefit of a large scale parallel file system. "pcircle" software builds on top of ubiquitous MPI in cluster computing environment and "work-stealing" pattern to provide a scalable, high-performance suite of file system tools. In particular - it implemented parallel data copy and parallel data checksumming, with advanced features such as async progress report, checkpoint and restart, as well as integrity checking.

WANG, FEIYI↗

A fast band–Krylov eigensolver for macromolecular functional motion simulation on multicore architectures and graphics processors

We introduce a new iterative Krylov subspace-based eigensolver for the simulation of macromolecular motions on desktop multithreaded platforms equipped with multicore processors and, possibly, a graphics accelerator (GPU). The method consists of two stages, with the original problem first reduced into a simpler band-structured form by means of a high-performance compute-intensive procedure. This is followed by a memory-intensive but low-cost Krylov iteration, which is off-loaded to be computed on the GPU by means of an efficient data-parallel kernel. The experimental results reveal the performance of the new eigensolver. Concretely, when applied to the simulation of macromolecules with a few thousands degrees of freedom and the number of eigenpairs to be computed is small to moderate, the new solver outperforms other methods implemented as part of high-performance numerical linear algebra packages for multithreaded architectures.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

First-Principles Simulations of Functional Materials for Energy Conversion

Computational modeling has become a very effective approach in predicting properties of materials, and in designing functional materials with targeted structural, thermal, or optical properties. Many electronic structure methods have been developed, including density functional theory. Among them, DFT has been widely used in physics and materials science because it is computationally cheaper than other methods but still gives desired accuracy. It also provides a good starting point for higher levels of theory, such as many-body perturbation theory and quantum Monte Carlo. In parallel to these electronic structure method developments, a dramatic increase in computing capabilities over the last decade has enabled large-scale electronic structure calculations to address leading-edge materials science problems. In particular, with Theta at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), our early science project investigated large-scale nanostructured materials for energy conversion and storage using two open-source electronic structure codes Qbox (http://qboxcode.org) and WEST (http://west-code.org). Qbox is an ab-initio molecular dynamics code based on plane wave DFT, and WEST is a post-DFT code for excited state calculations within many-body perturbation theory.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

FROSch Preconditioners for Land Ice Simulations of Greenland and Antarctica

Numerical simulations of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets involve the solution of large-scale highly nonlinear systems of equations on complex shallow geometries. This work is concerned with the construction of Schwarz preconditioners for the solution of the associated tangent problems, which are challenging for solvers mainly because of the strong anisotropy of the meshes and wildly changing boundary conditions that can lead to poorly constrained problems on large portions of the domain. In this study, two-level generalized Dryja--Smith--Widlund (GDSW)--type Schwarz preconditioners are applied to different land ice problems, i.e., a velocity problem, a temperature problem, as well as the coupling of the former two problems. We employ the message passing interface (MPI)--parallel implementation of multilevel Schwarz preconditioners provided by the package FROSch (fast and robust Schwarz) from the Trilinos library. The strength of the proposed preconditioner is that it yields out-of-the-box scalable and robust preconditioners for the single physics problems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time two-level Schwarz preconditioners have been applied to the ice sheet problem and a scalable preconditioner has been used for the coupled problem. The preconditioner for the coupled problem differs from previous monolithic GDSW preconditioners in the sense that decoupled extension operators are used to compute the values in the interior of the subdomains. Additionally, several approaches for improving the performance, such as reuse strategies and shared memory OpenMP parallelization, are explored. In our numerical study we target both uniform meshes of varying resolution for the Antarctic ice sheet as well as nonuniform meshes for the Greenland ice sheet. We present several weak and strong scaling studies confirming the robustness of the approach and the parallel scalability of the FROSch implementation. Among the highlights of the numerical results are a weak scaling study for up to 32,K processor cores (8,K MPI ranks and 4 OpenMP threads) and 566,M degrees of freedom for the velocity problem as well as a strong scaling study for up to 4,K processor cores (and MPI ranks) and 68,M degrees of freedom for the coupled problem.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

IOPro: a parallel I/O profiling and visualization framework for high-performance storage systems

Efficient execution of large-scale scientific applications requires high-performance computing systems designed to meet the I/O requirements. To achieve high-performance, such data-intensive parallel applications use a multi-layer layer I/O software stack, which consists of high-level I/O libraries such as PnetCDF and HDF5, the MPI library, and parallel file systems. To design efficient parallel scientific applications, understanding the complicated flow of I/O operations and the involved interactions among the libraries is quintessential. Such comprehension helps identify I/O bottlenecks and thus exploits the potential performance in different layers of the storage hierarchy. To profile the performance of individual components in the I/O stack and to understand complex interactions among them, we have implemented a GUI-based integrated profiling and analysis framework, IOPro. IOPro automatically generates an instrumented I/O stack, runs applications on it, and visualizes detailed statistics based on the user-specified metrics of interest. We present experimental results from two different real-life applications and show how our framework can be used in practice. By generating an end-to-end trace of the whole I/O stack and pinpointing I/O interference, IOPro aids in understanding I/O behavior and improving the I/O performance significantly.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Methods, apparatus and system for selective duplication of subtasks

A method for selective duplication of subtasks in a high-performance computing system includes: monitoring a health status of one or more nodes in a high-performance computing system, where one or more subtasks of a parallel task execute on the one or more nodes; identifying one or more nodes as having a likelihood of failure which exceeds a first prescribed threshold; selectively duplicating the one or more subtasks that execute on the one or more nodes having a likelihood of failure which exceeds the first prescribed threshold; and notifying a messaging library that one or more subtasks were duplicated.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Approximate Computing Techniques for Iterative Graph Algorithms

Approximate computing enables processing of large-scale graphs by trading off quality for performance. Approximate computing techniques have become critical not only due to the emergence of parallel architectures but also the availability of large scale datasets enabling data-driven discovery. Using two prototypical graph algorithms, PageRank and community detection, we present several approximate computing heuristics to scale the performance with minimal loss of accuracy. We present several heuristics including loop perforation, data caching, incomplete graph coloring and synchronization, and evaluate their efficiency. We demonstrate performance improvements of up to 83% for PageRank and up to 450x for community detection, with low impact of accuracy for both the algorithms. We expect the proposed approximate techniques will enable scalable graph analytics on data of importance to several applications in science and their subsequent adoption to scale similar graph algorithms.

Panyala, Ajay R.↗

Parallel-in-time quantum simulation via Page and Wootters quantum time

In the past few decades, researchers have created a veritable zoo of quantum algorithms by drawing inspiration from classical computing, information theory, and even from physical phenomena. Here, we present quantum algorithms for parallel-in-time simulations that are inspired by the Page and Wootters formalism. In this framework, and thus in our algorithms, the classical time variable of quantum mechanics is promoted to the quantum realm by introducing a Hilbert space of “clock” qubits that are then entangled with the “system” qubits. We show that our algorithms can compute temporal properties over 𝑁 different times of many-body systems by only using log⁡(𝑁) clock qubits. As such, we achieve an exponential trade-off between time and spatial complexities. In addition, we rigorously prove that the entanglement created between the system qubits and the clock qubits has operational meaning, as it encodes valuable information about the system’s dynamics. We also provide a circuit depth estimation of all the protocols, showing a running time advantage in computation times over traditional sequential-in-time algorithms. In particular, for the case when the dynamics are determined by the Aubry-Andre model, we present a hybrid method for which our algorithms have a depth that only scales as 𝒪⁡(log⁡(𝑁)⁢𝑛). As a by-product, we can relate the previous schemes to the problem of equilibration of an isolated quantum system, thus indicating that our framework enables a new dimension for studying dynamical properties of many-body systems.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗