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At least 1,639 records · Page 91

Big Data as a Service from an Urban Information System

Big Data has already proven itself as a valuable tool that lets geographers and urban researchers utilize large data re- sources to generate new insights. However, wider adoption of Big Data techniques in these areas is impeded by a number of difficulties in both knowledge discovery and data and sci- ence production. Typically users face such problems as dis- parate and scattered data, data management, spatial search- ing, insufficient computational capacity for data-driven anal- ysis and modelling, and the lack of tools to quickly visual- ize and summarize large data and analysis results. Here we propose an architecture for an Urban Information Sys- tem (UrbIS) that mitigates these problems by utilizing the Big Data as a Service (BDaaS) concept. With technolog- ical roots in High-performance Computing (HPC), BDaaS is based on the idea of outsourcing computations to dif- ferent computing paradigms, scalable to super-computers. UrbIS aims to incorporate federated metadata search, in- tegrated modeling and analysis, and geovisualization into a single seamless workflow. The system is under active devel- opment and is built around various emerging technologies that include hybrid and NoSQL databases, massively par- allel systems, GPGPU computing, and WebGL-based geo- graphic visualization. UrbIS is designed to facilitate using Big Data across multiple cities to better understand how ur- ban areas impact the environment and how climate change and other environmental change impact urban areas.

Sorokine, Alexandre↗

Optimizing I/O Performance of HPC Applications with Autotuning

Parallel Input output is an essential component of modern high-performance computing (HPC). Obtaining good I/O performance for a broad range of applications on diverse HPC platforms is a major challenge, in part, because of complex inter dependencies between I/O middleware and hardware. The parallel file system and I/O middleware layers all offer optimization parameters that can, in theory, result in better I/O performance. Unfortunately, the right combination of parameters is highly dependent on the application, HPC platform, problem size, and concurrency. Scientific application developers do not have the time or expertise to take on the substantial burden of identifying good parameters for each problem configuration. They resort to using system defaults, a choice that frequently results in poor I/O performance. We expect this problem to be compounded on exascale-class machines, which will likely have a deeper software stack with hierarchically arranged hardware resources. We present as a solution to this problem an autotuning system for optimizing I/O performance, I/O performance modeling, I/O tuning, and I/O patterns. We demonstrate the value of this framework across several HPC platforms and applications at scale.

Behzad, Babak↗

Report of the 2014 Programming Models and Environments Summit

Programming models and environments play the essential roles in high performance computing of enabling the conception, design, implementation and execution of science and engineering application codes. Programmer productivity is strongly influenced by the effectiveness of our programming models and environments, as is software sustainability since our codes have lifespans measured in decades, so the advent of new computing architectures, increased concurrency, concerns for resilience, and the increasing demands for high-fidelity, multi-physics, multi-scale and data-intensive computations mean that we have new challenges to address as part of our fundamental R&D requirements. Fortunately, we also have new tools and environments that make design, prototyping and delivery of new programming models easier than ever. The combination of new and challenging requirements and new, powerful toolsets enables significant synergies for the next generation of programming models and environments R&D. This report presents the topics discussed and results from the 2014 DOE Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Programming Models & Environments Summit, and subsequent discussions among the summit participants and contributors to topics in this report.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Nanosystems, Edge Computing, and the Next Generation Computing Systems

It is widely recognized that nanoscience and nanotechnology and their subfields, such as nanophotonics, nanoelectronics, and nanomechanics, have had a tremendous impact on recent advances in sensing, imaging, and communication, with notable developments, including novel transistors and processor architectures. For example, in addition to being supremely fast, optical and photonic components and devices are capable of operating across multiple orders of magnitude length, power, and spectral scales, encompassing the range from macroscopic device sizes and kW energies to atomic domains and single-photon energies. The extreme versatility of the associated electromagnetic phenomena and applications, both classical and quantum, are therefore highly appealing to the rapidly evolving computing and communication realms, where innovations in both hardware and software are necessary to meet the growing speed and memory requirements. Development of all-optical components, photonic chips, interconnects, and processors will bring the speed of light, photon coherence properties, field confinement and enhancement, information-carrying capacity, and the broad spectrum of light into the high-performance computing, the internet of things, and industries related to cloud, fog, and recently edge computing. Conversely, owing to their extraordinary properties, 0D, 1D, and 2D materials are being explored as a physical basis for the next generation of logic components and processors. Carbon nanotubes, for example, have been recently used to create a new processor beyond proof of principle. These developments, in conjunction with neuromorphic and quantum computing, are envisioned to maintain the growth of computing power beyond the projected plateau for silicon technology. We survey the qualitative figures of merit of technologies of current interest for the next generation computing with an emphasis on edge computing.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations to Predict Oxidation in Heat Recovery Steam Generator Tubes

Heat Recovery Steam Generators (HRSGs) are widely used across United States in combined cycle power plants to recover waste heat from the gas turbine (GT). HRSGs are used either to generate electricity or to produce process steam for industrial applications. The primary components of HRSG consists of a duct and a heat exchanger (HX). It is known across the power industry that the high temperature oxidation and ensuing exfoliation problem is a major cause for the damage of HX materials of HRSG. Alloys and/or coatings that can prevent or mitigate oxidation are very expensive, therefore they must be used or applied on the select regions of the HX tubes where the tendency of oxide formation is the highest. The main goal of this project is to identify such regions through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. Therefore, in this work, we developed a CFD framework using commercial code StarCCM+ for the prediction of the fluid flow and heat transfer in a HRSG and associated oxidation inside the tubes of the HX. The developed CFD framework was verified and validated with experimental data before deployment. We also developed an innovative method to model the effect of the fins on the heat transfer and the pressure drop using a porous media model (PMM) approach to keep the mesh size within reasonable limits. After validation, we performed high-fidelity CFD simulations of a real-scale HRSG using the PMM, with High Performance Computing (HPC) resources of ORNL. From the simulation results, we acquired oxide thickness maps for all the tubes of the select HX sections of HRSG prone to oxidation. These oxide maps can inform regions of the HX tubes that requires oxide-resistant coatings, thereby guiding engineers for cost-efficient manufacturing of the HX that can combat oxidation in HRSGs.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Aerodynamic optimization of supersonic compressor cascade using differential evolution on GPU

Differential Evolution (DE) is a powerful stochastic optimization method. Compared to gradient-based algorithms, DE is able to avoid local minima but requires at the same time more function evaluations. In turbomachinery applications, function evaluations are performed with time-consuming CFD simulation, which results in a long, non affordable, design cycle. Modern High Performance Computing systems, especially Graphic Processing Units (GPUs), are able to alleviate this inconvenience by accelerating the design evaluation itself. In this work we present a validated CFD Solver running on GPUs, able to accelerate the design evaluation and thus the entire design process. An achieved speedup of 20x to 30x enabled the DE algorithm to run on a high-end computer instead of a costly large cluster. The GPU-enhanced DE was used to optimize the aerodynamics of a supersonic compressor cascade, achieving an aerodynamic loss minimization of 20%.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Domi

Domi (Greek for "structure") is a Trilinos package that provides support for multi-dimensional data arrays distributed over multiple processors of a high performance computing system. The software supports data arrays of arbitrary number of dimensions mapped to a multi-dimensional grid of processors. Domi provides local access to the data, as well as the ability to compute global quantities such as norms, maxima and minima. Data arrays can be constructed with boundary and communication padding, necessary for finite difference algorithms, and provides high-level methods for communicating data between processors to update these buffers. The distributed maps and vectors in Domi can be converted to the equivalent data structures in Epetra and Tpetra (both of which assume unstructured data), using view semantics when appropriate, for use with other Trilinos solvers.

Spotz, WilliamF.↗

Climate Modeling: Ocean Cavities below Ice Shelves

The Accelerated Climate Model for Energy (ACME), a new initiative by the U.S. Department of Energy, includes unstructured-mesh ocean, land-ice, and sea-ice components using the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) framework. The ability to run coupled high-resolution global simulations efficiently on large, high-performance computers is a priority for ACME. Sub-ice shelf ocean cavities are a significant new capability in ACME, and will be used to better understand how changing ocean temperature and currents influence glacial melting and retreat. These simulations take advantage of the horizontal variable-resolution mesh and adaptive vertical coordinate in MPAS-Ocean, in order to place high resolution below ice shelves and near grounding lines.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Domi

Domi (Greek for "structure") is a Trilinos package that provides support for multi-dimensional data arrays distributed over multiple processors of a high performance computing system. The software supports data arrays of arbitrary number of dimensions mapped to a multi-dimensional grid of processors. Domi provides local access to the data, as well as the ability to compute global quantities such as norms, maxima and minima. Data arrays can be constructed with boundary and communication padding, necessary for finite difference algorithms, and provides high-level methods for communicating data between processors to update these buffers. The distributed maps and vectors in Domi can be converted to the equivalent data structures in Epetra and Tpetra (both of which assume unstructured data), using view semantics when appropriate, for use with other Trilinos solvers.

Spotz, William F.↗

Defense of Cyber Infrastructures Against Cyber-Physical Attacks Using Game-Theoretic Models

The operation of cyber infrastructures relies on both cyber and physical components, which are subject to incidental and intentional degradations of different kinds. Within the context of network and computing infrastructures, we study the strategic interactions between an attacker and a defender using game-theoretic models that take into account both cyber and physical components. The attacker and defender optimize their individual utilities expressed as sums of cost and system terms. First, we consider a Boolean attack-defense model, wherein the cyber and physical sub-infrastructures may be attacked and reinforced as individual units. Second, we consider a component attack-defense model wherein their components may be attacked and defended, and the infrastructure requires minimum numbers of both to function. We show that the Nash equilibrium under uniform costs in both cases is computable in polynomial time, and it provides high-level deterministic conditions for the infrastructure survival. When probabilities of successful attack and defense, and of incidental failures are incorporated into the models, the results favor the attacker but otherwise remain qualitatively similar. This approach has been motivated and validated by our experiences with UltraScience Net infrastructure, which was built to support high-performance network experiments. In conclusion, the analytical results, however, are more general, and we apply them to simplified models of cloud and high-performance computing infrastructures.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Impressions of the Meson Spectrum: Hybrids & Exotics, present and future

It has long been expected that the spectrum of hadrons in QCD would be far richer and extensive than experiment has so far revealed. While there have been experimental hints of this richness for some time, it is really only in the last few years that dramatic progress has been seen in the exploration both experimentally and in calculations on the lattice. Precision studies enabled by new technology both with detectors and high performance computations are converging on an understanding of the spectrum in strong coupling QCD. These methodologies are laying the foundation for a decade of potential discovery that electro and photoproduction experiments at Jefferson Lab, which when combined with key results on B and charmonium decays from both e+e? and pp colliders, should turn mere impressions of the light meson spectrum into a high definition picture.

Pennington, Michael R.↗

Accelerating Subsurface Transport Simulation on Heterogeneous Clusters

Reactive transport numerical models simulate chemical and microbiological reactions that occur along a flowpath. These models have to compute reactions for a large number of locations. They solve the set of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) that describes the reaction for each location through the Newton-Raphson technique. This technique involves computing a Jacobian matrix and a residual vector for each set of equation, and then solving iteratively the linearized system by performing Gaussian Elimination and LU decomposition until convergence. STOMP, a well known subsurface flow simulation tool, employs matrices with sizes in the order of 100x100 elements and, for numerical accuracy, LU factorization with full pivoting instead of the faster partial pivoting. Modern high performance computing systems are heterogeneous machines whose nodes integrate both CPUs and GPUs, exposing unprecedented amounts of parallelism. To exploit all their computational power, applications must use both the types of processing elements. For the case of subsurface flow simulation, this mainly requires implementing efficient batched LU-based solvers and identifying efficient solutions for enabling load balancing among the different processors of the system. In this paper we discuss two approaches that allows scaling STOMP's performance on heterogeneous clusters. We initially identify the challenges in implementing batched LU-based solvers for small matrices on GPUs, and propose an implementation that fulfills STOMP's requirements. We compare this implementation to other existing solutions. Then, we combine the batched GPU solver with an OpenMP-based CPU solver, and present an adaptive load balancer that dynamically distributes the linear systems to solve between the two components inside a node. We show how these approaches, integrated into the full application, provide speed ups from 6 to 7 times on large problems, executed on up to 16 nodes of a cluster with two AMD Opteron 6272 and a Tesla M2090 per node.

GPU↗

PV Hosting Capacity Estimation: Experiences with Scalable Framework

Hosting capacity is an indication of the amount of solar photovoltaics (PV) that can be hosted in a distribution system without additional changes to infrastructure or oper-ations. This paper presents a framework for estimating the PV hosting capacity at scale. First, we analyze computational, modeling and other key challenges of performing relevant, large-scale simulations, provided along with the experiences and lessons learned. Then, we develop two open-source Python-based software tools to conduct repeatable distribution analyses: the Distribution Integration Solution Cost Options (DISCO) for configuring and analyzing simulations and the Job Automation and Deployment Engine (JADE) for parallelizing jobs on high-performance computing clusters. A case study of hosting capacity estimation for the SMART-DS San Francisco (SFO) 2000+ synthetic feeders, is used to demonstrate the capability of the developed DISCO+JADE framework and tools. The framework and tools can help utilities assess the overall hosting capacity of their service territory, which can help them better plan for the overall upgrade costs to integrate more PV in the future. The experiences are shared to aid the tool users and researchers to conduct relevant studies and research.

distributed energy resources↗

A Conceptual Architecture for a Quantum-HPC Middleware

Abstract-Quantum computing promises potential for science and industry by solving certain computationally complex problems faster than classical computers. Quantum computing systems evolved from coupled to classical computing nodes (HPC). With the increasing monolithic systems towards modular architectures comprising multiple quantum processing units (QPUs) scale, middleware systems that facilitate the efficient coupling of quantum-classical computing are becoming critical. Through an in-depth analysis of quantum applications, integration patterns and systems, we identified a gap in understanding Quantum HPC middleware systems. We present a conceptual middleware to facilitate reasoning about quantum-classical integration and serve as the basis for a future middleware system. An essential contribution of this paper lies in leveraging well-established high performance computing abstractions for managing workloads, tasks, and resources to integrate quantum computing into HPC systems seamlessly

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Cyber-Power Co-Simulation for End-to-End Synchrophasor Network Analysis and Applications

The resiliency, reliability and security of the next generation cyber-power smart grid depend upon efficiently leveraging advanced communication and computing technologies. Also, developing real-time data-driven applications is critical to enable wide-area monitoring and control of the cyber-power grid given high-resolution data from Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). North American Synchrophasor Initiative Network (NASPlnet) provides guidance for PMU data exchanges. With the advancement in networking and grid operation, it is necessary to evaluate the performance of different data flow architectures suggested by NASPInet and analyze the impact on applications. Therefore, we need a cyber-power co-simulation framework that supports very large-scale co-simulation capable of running in parallel, high-performance computing platforms and capturing real-life network behavior. This work presents an end-to-end automated and user-driven cyber-power co-simulation using NS3 to model communication networks, GridPACK to model the power grid, and HELICS as a co-simulation engine. Comparative analysis of latency in synchrophasor networks and a performance evaluation of a power system stabilizer application utilizing PMU data in an IEEE 39 bus test system is presented using this cosimulation testbed.

Mustafa, Hussain M.↗

SEPATH: benchmarking the search for pathogens in human tissue whole genome sequence data leads to template pipelines

Background: Human tissue is increasingly being whole genome sequenced as we transition into an era of genomic medicine. With this arises the potential to detect sequences originating from microorganisms, including pathogens amid the plethora of human sequencing reads. In cancer research, the tumorigenic ability of pathogens is being recognized, for example, Helicobacter pylori and human papillomavirus in the cases of gastric non-cardia and cervical carcinomas, respectively. As of yet, no benchmark has been carried out on the performance of computational approaches for bacterial and viral detection within host-dominated sequence data. Results: We present the results of benchmarking over 70 distinct combinations of tools and parameters on 100 simulated cancer datasets spiked with realistic proportions of bacteria. mOTUs2 and Kraken are the highest performing individual tools achieving median genus-level F1 scores of 0.90 and 0.91, respectively. mOTUs2 demonstrates a high performance in estimating bacterial proportions. Employing Kraken on unassembled sequencing reads produces a good but variable performance depending on post-classification filtering parameters. These approaches are investigated on a selection of cervical and gastric cancer whole genome sequences where Alphapapillomavirus and Helicobacter are detected in addition to a variety of other interesting genera. Conclusions: We provide the top-performing pipelines from this benchmark in a unifying tool called SEPATH, which is amenable to high throughput sequencing studies across a range of high-performance computing clusters. SEPATH provides a benchmarked and convenient approach to detect pathogens in tissue sequence data helping to determine the relationship between metagenomics and disease.

Viral↗

Improving Memory Error Handling Using Linux

As supercomputers continue to get faster and more powerful in the future, they will also have more nodes. If nothing is done, then the amount of memory in supercomputer clusters will soon grow large enough that memory failures will be unmanageable to deal with by manually replacing memory DIMMs. "Improving Memory Error Handling Using Linux" is a process oriented method to solve this problem by using the Linux kernel to disable (offline) faulty memory pages containing bad addresses, preventing them from being used again by a process. The process of offlining memory pages simplifies error handling and results in reducing both hardware and manpower costs required to run Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) clusters. This process will be necessary for the future of supercomputing to allow the development of exascale computers. It will not be feasible without memory error handling to manually replace the number of DIMMs that will fail daily on a machine consisting of 32-128 petabytes of memory. Testing reveals the process of offlining memory pages works and is relatively simple to use. As more and more testing is conducted, the entire process will be automated within the high-performance computing (HPC) monitoring software, Zenoss, at LANL.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

ExaWind: Open‐source CFD for hybrid‐RANS/LES geometry‐resolved wind turbine simulations in atmospheric flows

Abstract Predictive high‐fidelity modeling of wind turbines with computational fluid dynamics, wherein turbine geometry is resolved in an atmospheric boundary layer, is important to understanding complex flow accounting for design strategies and operational phenomena such as blade erosion, pitch‐control, stall/vortex‐induced vibrations, and aftermarket add‐ons. The biggest challenge with high‐fidelity modeling is the realization of numerical algorithms that can capture the relevant physics in detail through effective use of high‐performance computing. For modern supercomputers, that means relying on GPUs for acceleration. In this paper, we present ExaWind, a GPU‐enabled open‐source incompressible‐flow hybrid‐computational fluid dynamics framework, comprising the near‐body unstructured grid solver Nalu‐Wind, and the off‐body block‐structured‐grid solver AMR‐Wind, which are coupled using the Topology Independent Overset Grid Assembler. Turbine simulations employ either a pure Reynolds‐averaged Navier–Stokes turbulence model or hybrid turbulence modeling wherein Reynolds‐averaged Navier–Stokes is used for near‐body flow and large eddy simulation is used for off‐body flow. Being two‐way coupled through overset grids, the two solvers enable simulation of flows across a huge range of length scales, for example, 10 orders of magnitude going from O(μm) boundary layers along the blades to O(10 km) across a wind farm. In this paper, we describe the numerical algorithms for geometry‐resolved turbine simulations in atmospheric boundary layers using ExaWind. We present verification studies using canonical flow problems. Validation studies are presented using megawatt‐scale turbines established in literature. Additionally presented are demonstration simulations of a small wind farm under atmospheric inflow with different stability states.

17 WIND ENERGY↗