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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 19 records

HPC I/O innovations in the exascale era

As high performance computing architecture evolves to deliver ever-increasing performance, the middleware tools also need to adapt in order for applications to better use these higher-performance features. Here, the Adaptable Input Output System (ADIOS), which provides scalable IO performance for exascale HPC applications is one such middleware. During the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), key portions of the ADIOS environment were adapted to respond to ongoing developments in exascale computing and the stresses and opportunities inherent in those changes. This paper examines those changes and where appropriate compares them to pre-exascale implementations.

ADIOS↗

The Role of National Research and Education Networks Providing Connectivity and Advanced Network Services to Virtual Communities in Collaborative R&E Projects. CUDI: The Mexican Case Part 1, , In: ISUM 2015: High Performance Computer Applications

This paper describes the role of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and their aim to provide a seamless, large scale, high-speed, low-latency network to accelerate scientific and education discovery for national, regional or global collaborative projects that are dependent on the use of modern high performance distributed computing systems (HPDCS) to process mathematical models, produce new knowledge and drive innovation when resolving complex problems. NRENs have become the mainstream of communication and collaboration to integrate the efforts of large geographically distributed teams of Virtual Communities (VC) that - train, teach and learn-, -create, use and share- knowledge, data, information and communications technology resources (e.g. computer and information systems, middleware, tools, instruments, data sets, repositories, applications and services) building e-infrastructures necessary to meet the collaborative projects’ goals. The paper focuses on the current status of the Mexican NREN: CUDI, its future organization and political support, necessary to provide seamless, large scale, high-speed, low latency and secure national backbone and international links providing connectivity, advanced network services and technical support to VCs and their e-infrastructures in collaborative R&E projects within the country, the LAC region and worldwide.

Computer Science↗

Multicore Architecture-aware Scientific Applications

Modern high performance systems are becoming increasingly complex and powerful due to advancements in processor and memory architecture. In order to keep up with this increasing complexity, applications have to be augmented with certain capabilities to fully exploit such systems. These may be at the application level, such as static or dynamic adaptations or at the system level, like having strategies in place to override some of the default operating system polices, the main objective being to improve computational performance of the application. The current work proposes two such capabilites with respect to multi-threaded scientific applications, in particular a large scale physics application computing ab-initio nuclear structure. The first involves using a middleware tool to invoke dynamic adaptations in the application, so as to be able to adjust to the changing computational resource availability at run-time. The second involves a strategy for effective placement of data in main memory, to optimize memory access latencies and bandwidth. These capabilties when included were found to have a significant impact on the application performance, resulting in average speedups of as much as two to four times.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Scaling the Earth System Grid to 100Gbps Networks

The SC11 demonstration, titled Scaling the Earth System Grid to 100Gbps Networks, showed the ability to use underlying infrastructure for the movement of climate data over 100Gbps network. Climate change research is one of the critical data intensive sciences, and the amount of data is continuously growing. Climate simulation data is geographically distributed over the world, and it needs to be accessed from many sources for fast and efficient analysis and inter-comparison of simulations. We used a 100Gbps link connecting National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). In the demo, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) phase 3 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP-3) dataset was staged into the memory of computing nodes at ANL and ORNL from NERSC over the 100Gbps network for analysis and visualization. In general, climate simulation data consists of relatively small and large files with irregular file size distribution in each dataset. In this demo, we addressed challenges on data management in terms of high bandwidth networks, usability of existing protocols and middleware tools, and how applications can adapt and benefit from next generation networks.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Group-oriented coordination models for distributed client-server computing

This paper describes group-oriented control models for distributed client-server interactions. These models transparently coordinate requests for services that involve multiple servers, such as queries across distributed databases. Specific capabilities include: decomposing and replicating client requests; dispatching request subtasks or copies to independent, networked servers; and combining server results into a single response for the client. The control models were implemented by combining request broker and process group technologies with an object-oriented communication middleware tool. The models are illustrated in the context of a distributed operations support application for space-based systems.

Adler, Richard M.↗

The State of NASA's Information Power Grid

This viewgraph presentation transfers the concept of the power grid to information sharing in the NASA community. An information grid of this sort would be characterized as comprising tools, middleware, and services for the facilitation of interoperability, distribution of new technologies, human collaboration, and data management. While a grid would increase the ability of information sharing, it would not necessitate it. The onus of utilizing the grid would rest with the users.

Johnston, William E.↗

A Path to Operating System and Runtime Support for Extreme Scale Tools

In this project, we cast distributed resource access as operations on files in a global name space and developed a common, scalable solution for group operations on distributed processes and files. The resulting solution enables tool and middleware developers to quickly create new scalable software or easily improve the scalability of existing software. The cornerstone of the project was the design of a new programming idiom called group file operations that eliminates iterative behavior when a single process must apply the same set of file operations to a group of related files. To demonstrate our novel and scalable ideas for group file operations and global name space composition, we developed a group file system called TBON-FS that leverages a tree-based overlay network (TBON), specifically MRNet, for logarithmic communication and distributed data aggregation. We also developed proc++, a new synthetic file system co-designed for use in scalable group file operations. Over the course of the project, we evaluated the utility and performance of group file operations, global name space composition, TBON-FS, and proc++ in three case studies. The first study focused on the ease in using group file operations and TBON-FS to quickly develop several new scalable tools for distributed system administration and monitoring. The second study evaluated the integration of group file operation and TBON-FS within the Ganglia Distributed Monitoring System to improve its scalability for clusters. The final study involved the integration of group file operations, TBON-FS, and proc++ within TotalView, the widely-used parallel debugger. For this project, the work of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) team occurred primarily in two directions: bringing the MRNet tree-based overlay network (TBON) implementation to the Cray XT platform, and investigating techniques for predicting the performance of MRNet topologies on such systems. Rogue Wave Software (RWS), formerly TotalView Technologies Inc., worked with the University ofWisconsin (UW) team on the design and prototyping of a scalable version of the TotalView debugger. RWS assisted UW with their "proc++" design effort. RWS assisted UW with strategy for integrating proc++ into TotalView.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Information Power Grid (IPG) Tutorial 2003

For NASA and the general community today Grid middleware: a) provides tools to access/use data sources (databases, instruments, ...); b) provides tools to access computing (unique and generic); c) Is an enabler of large scale collaboration. Dynamically responding to needs is a key selling point of a grid. Independent resources can be joined as appropriate to solve a problem. Provide tools to enable the building of a frameworks for application. Provide value added service to the NASA user base for utilizing resources on the grid in new and more efficient ways. Provides tools for development of Frameworks.

Meyers, George↗

The Multicore-Aware Data Transfer Middleware Project

Existing data movement tools are still bound by major inefficiencies when running on multicore systems. To address these inefficiencies and limitations, DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) office has funded Fermilab and Brookhaven National Laboratory to collaboratively work on the Multicore-Aware Data Transfer Middleware (MDTM) project. MDTM aims to accelerate data movement toolkits on multicore systems. A prototype version of MDTM is currently undergoing evaluation and enhancement.

Wu, Wenji↗

An Integrated Software Package to Enable Predictive Simulation Capabilities

The power grid is increasing in complexity due to the deployment of smart grid technologies. Such technologies vastly increase the size and complexity of power grid systems for simulation and modeling. This increasing complexity necessitates not only the use of high-performance-computing (HPC) techniques, but a smooth, well-integrated interplay between HPC applications. This paper presents a new integrated software package that integrates HPC applications and a web-based visualization tool based on a middleware framework. This framework can support the data communication between different applications. Case studies with a large power system demonstrate the predictive capability brought by the integrated software package, as well as the better situational awareness provided by the web-based visualization tool in a live mode. Test results validate the effectiveness and usability of the integrated software package.

Chen, Yousu↗

Re-Engineering the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Satellite Utilizing Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Mission Services Center (GMSEC) Middleware Based Technology to Enable Lights Out Operations and Autonomous Re-Dump of Lost Telemetry Data

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) spacecraft was launched in November of 1996 in order to obtain unique three dimensional radar cross sectional observations of cloud structures with particular interest in hurricanes. The TRMM mission life was recently extended with current estimates that operations will continue through the 2012-2013 timeframe. Faced with this extended mission profile, the project has embarked on a technology refresh and re-engineering effort. TRMM has recently implemented a re-engineering effort to expand a middleware based messaging architecture to enable fully redundant lights-out of flight operations activities. The middleware approach is based on the Goddard Mission Services Evolution Center (GMSEC) architecture, tools and associated open-source Applications Programming Interface (API). Middleware based messaging systems are useful in spacecraft operations and automation systems because private node based knowledge (such as that within a telemetry and command system) can be broadcast on the middleware messaging bus and hence enable collaborative decisions to be made by multiple subsystems. In this fashion, private data is made public and distributed within the local area network and multiple nodes can remain synchronized with other nodes. This concept is useful in a fully redundant architecture whereby one node is monitoring the processing of the 'prime' node so that in the event of a failure the backup node can assume operations of the prime, without loss of state knowledge. This paper will review and present the experiences, architecture, approach and lessons learned of the TRMM re-engineering effort centered on the GMSEC middleware architecture and tool suite. Relevant information will be presented that relates to the dual redundant parallel nature of the Telemetry and Command (T and C) and Front-End systems and how these systems can interact over a middleware bus to achieve autonomous operations including autonomous commanding to recover missing science data during the same spacecraft contact.

Marius, Julio L.↗

High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) Middleware Update

High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) is a joint project between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to develop a high-performance multi-core radiation hardened flight processor. HPSC offers a new flight computing architecture to meet the needs of NASA missions through 2030 and beyond. Providing on the order of 100X the computational capacity of current flight processors for the same amount of power, the multicore architecture of the HPSC processor, or "Chiplet" provides unprecedented flexibility in a flight computing system by enabling the operating point to be set dynamically, trading among needs for computational performance, energy management and fault tolerance. The HPSC Chiplet is being developed by Boeing under contract to NASA, and is expected to provide prototypes, an evaluation board, system emulators, comprehensive system software, and a software development kit. In addition to the vendor deliverables, the AFRL is funding the development of a flexible Middleware to be developed by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The HPSC Middleware provides a suite of thirteen high level services to manage the compute, memory and I/O resources of this complex device.This presentation will provide an HPSC project update, an overview of the latest HPSC System Software release, an overview of HPSC Middleware Release 2, and a preview of the third HPSC Middleware release. The presentation will begin with a project update that will provide a look at the high-level changes since the project was introduced at the Flight Software Workshop last year. Next, the presentation will provide an overview of the current suite of HPSC System Software which includes the vendor provided bootloaders, operating systems, emulator, and development tools. Next, the HPSC Middleware progress will be presented, which includes an overview of the features and capabilities of HPSC Middleware Release 2, followed by a look at the reference flight software applications which utilize the Middleware. Finally, the presentation will give a preview of the HPSC Middleware Release 3.

Cudmore, Alan↗

WLCG and IPv6 - The HEPiX IPv6 working group

The HEPiX (http://www.hepix.org) IPv6 Working Group has been investigating the many issues which feed into the decision on the timetable for the use of IPv6 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2460.txt) networking protocols in High Energy Physics (HEP) Computing, in particular in the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid (WLCG). RIPE NCC, the European Regional Internet Registry (RIR), ran out ofIPv4 addresses in September 2012. The North and South America RIRs are expected to run out soon. In recent months it has become more clear that some WLCG sites, including CERN, are running short of IPv4 address space, now without the possibility of applying for more. This has increased the urgency for the switch-on of dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 on all outward facing WLCG services to allow for the eventual support of IPv6-only clients. The activities of the group include the analysis and testing of the readiness for IPv6 and the performance of many required components, including the applications, middleware, management and monitoring tools essential for HEP computing. Many WLCG Tier 1/2 sites are participants in the group's distributed IPv6 testbed and the major LHC experiment collaborations are engaged in the testing. We are constructing a group web/wiki which will contain useful information on the IPv6 readiness of the various software components and a knowledge base (http://hepix-ipv6.web.cern.ch/knowledge-base). Furthermore, this paper describes the work done by the working group and its future plans.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Automated Cache Performance Analysis And Optimization

While there is no lack of performance counter tools for coarse-grained measurement of cache activity, there is a critical lack of tools for relating data layout to cache behavior to application performance. Generally, any nontrivial optimizations are either not done at all, or are done ”by hand” requiring significant time and expertise. To the best of our knowledge no tool available to users measures the latency of memory reference instructions for particular addresses and makes this information available to users in an easy-to-use and intuitive way. In this project, we worked to enable the Open|SpeedShop performance analysis tool to gather memory reference latency information for specific instructions and memory addresses, and to gather and display this information in an easy-to-use and intuitive way to aid performance analysts in identifying problematic data structures in their codes. This tool was primarily designed for use in the supercomputer domain as well as grid, cluster, cloud-based parallel e-commerce, and engineering systems and middleware. Ultimately, we envision a tool to automate optimization of application cache layout and utilization in the Open|SpeedShop performance analysis tool. To commercialize this software, we worked to develop core capabilities for gathering enhanced memory usage performance data from applications and create and apply novel methods for automatic data structure layout optimizations, tailoring the overall approach to support existing supercomputer and cluster programming models and constraints. In this Phase I project, we focused on infrastructure necessary to gather performance data and present it in an intuitive way to users. With the advent of enhanced Precise Event-Based Sampling (PEBS) counters on recent Intel processor architectures and equivalent technology on AMD processors, we are now in a position to access memory reference information for particular addresses. Prior to the introduction of PEBS counters, cache behavior could only be measured reliably in the aggregate across tens or hundreds of thousands of instructions. With the newest iteration of PEBS technology, cache events can be tied to a tuple of instruction pointer, target address (for both loads and stores), memory hierarchy, and observed latency. With this information we can now begin asking questions regarding the efficiency of not only regions of code, but how these regions interact with particular data structures and how these interactions evolve over time. In the short term, this information will be vital for performance analysts understanding and optimizing the behavior of their codes for the memory hierarchy. In the future, we can begin to ask how data layouts might be changed to improve performance and, for a particular application, what the theoretical optimal performance might be. The overall benefit to be produced by this effort was a commercial quality easy-to- use and scalable performance tool that will allow both beginner and experienced parallel programmers to automatically tune their applications for optimal cache usage. Effective use of such a tool can literally save weeks of performance tuning effort. Easy to use. With the proposed innovations, finding and fixing memory performance issues would be more automated and hide most to all of the performance engineer expertise ”under the hood” of the Open|SpeedShop performance tool. One of the biggest public benefits from the proposed innovations is that it makes performance analysis more usable to a larger group of application developers. Intuitive reporting of results. The Open|SpeedShop performance analysis tool has a rich set of intuitive, yet detailed reports for presenting performance results to application developers. Our goal was to leverage this existing technology to present the results from our memory performance addition to Open|SpeedShop. Suitable for experts as well as novices. Application performance is getting more difficult to measure as the hardware platforms they run on become more complicated. This makes life difficult for the application developer, in that they need to know more about the hardware platform, including the memory system hierarchy, in order to understand the performance of their application. Some application developers are comfortable in that sceario, while others want to do their scientific research and not have to understand all the nuances in the hardware platform they are running their application on. Our proposed innovations were aimed to support both experts and novice performance analysts. Useful in many markets. The enhancement to Open|SpeedShop would appeal to a broader market space, as it will be useful in scientific, commercial, and cloud computing environments. Our goal was to use technology developed initially at the and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory combined with the development and commercial software experience of the Argo Navis Technologies, LLC (ANT) to form a powerful combination to delivery these objectives.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Enabling Event Tracing at Leadership-Class Scale through I/O Forwarding Middleware

Event tracing is an important tool for understanding the performance of parallel applications. As concurrency increases in leadership-class computing systems, the quantity of performance log data can overload the parallel file system, perturbing the application being observed. In this work we present a solution for event tracing at leadership scales. We enhance the I/O forwarding system software to aggregate and reorganize log data prior to writing to the storage system, significantly reducing the burden on the underlying file system for this type of traffic. Furthermore, we augment the I/O forwarding system with a write buffering capability to limit the impact of artificial perturbations from log data accesses on traced applications. To validate the approach, we modify the Vampir tracing tool to take advantage of this new capability and show that the approach increases the maximum traced application size by a factor of 5x to more than 200,000 processors.

Ilsche, Thomas↗

Extending Skel to Support the Development and Optimization of Next Generation I/O Systems

As the memory and storage hierarchy get deeper and more complex, it is important to have new benchmarks and evaluation tools that allow us to explore the emerging middleware solutions to use this hierarchy. Skel is a tool aimed at automating and refining this process of studying HPC I/O performance. It works by generating application I/O kernel/benchmarks as determined by a domain-specific model. This paper provides some techniques for extending Skel to address new situations and to answer new research questions. For example, we document use cases as diverse as using Skel to troubleshoot I/O performance issues for remote users, refining an I/O system model, and facilitating the development and testing of a mechanism for runtime monitoring and performance analytics. We also discuss data oriented extensions to Skel to support the study of compression techniques for Exascale scientific data management.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Middleware Evaluation and Benchmarking for Use in Mission Operations Centers

Middleware technologies have been promoted as timesaving, cost-cutting alternatives to the point-to-point communication used in traditional mission operations systems. However, missions have been slow to adopt the new technology. The lack of existing middleware-based missions has given rise to uncertainty about middleware's ability to perform in an operational setting. Most mission architects are also unfamiliar with the technology and do not know the benefits and detriments to architectural choices - or even what choices are available. We will present the findings of a study that evaluated several middleware options specifically for use in a mission operations system. We will address some common misconceptions regarding the applicability of middleware-based architectures, and we will identify the design decisions and tradeoffs that must be made when choosing a middleware solution. The Middleware Comparison and Benchmark Study was conducted at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to comprehensively evaluate candidate middleware products, compare and contrast the performance of middleware solutions with the traditional point- to-point socket approach, and assess data delivery and reliability strategies. The study focused on requirements of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, validating the potential use of middleware in the GPM mission ground system. The study was jointly funded by GPM and the Goddard Mission Services Evolution Center (GMSEC), a virtual organization for providing mission enabling solutions and promoting the use of appropriate new technologies for mission support. The study was broken into two phases. To perform the generic middleware benchmarking and performance analysis, a network was created with data producers and consumers passing data between themselves. The benchmark monitored the delay, throughput, and reliability of the data as the characteristics were changed. Measurements were taken under a variety of topologies, data demands, and data characteristics, using several middleware products. All results were compared to systems using traditional point-to-point socket communication. By comparing performance results under Merent settings, inferences could be made about each middleware's ability to meet certain requirements of the GPM mission. The second phase simulated a middleware-based mission operations center. Actual mission support tools were either used or simulated to create real world demands on the middleware. Network and computer demands were watched closely to verify that no specific idiosyncrasies of mission operations activities would prove unsupportable by the middleware. In our presentation, we will address some commonly accepted misconceptions concerning middleware in mission support architectures. Specifically, we will focus on the perception that middleware solutions are too slow or impose too much overhead for real-time mission operations, and that middleware solutions are too expensive for small

Antonucci, Rob↗