A high performance parallel algorithm for 1-D FFT

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Agarwal, R.C.; Gustavson, F.G.; Zubair, M.

1994-12-31

In this paper the authors propose a parallel high performance FFT algorithm based on a multi-dimensional formulation. They use this to solve a commonly encountered FFT based kernel on a distributed memory parallel machine, the IBM scalable parallel system, SP1. The kernel requires a forward FFT computation of an input sequence, multiplication of the transformed data by a coefficient array, and finally an inverse FFT computation of the resultant data. They show that the multi-dimensional formulation helps in reducing the communication costs and also improves the single node performance by effectively utilizing the memory system of the node. They implementedmore » this kernel on the IBM SP1 and observed a performance of 1.25 GFLOPS on a 64-node machine.« less

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Barrett, Brian; Brightwell, Ronald B.; Grant, Ryan

This report presents a specification for the Portals 4 networ k programming interface. Portals 4 is intended to allow scalable, high-performance network communication betwee n nodes of a parallel computing system. Portals 4 is well suited to massively parallel processing and embedded syste ms. Portals 4 represents an adaption of the data movement layer developed for massively parallel processing platfor ms, such as the 4500-node Intel TeraFLOPS machine. Sandia's Cplant cluster project motivated the development of Version 3.0, which was later extended to Version 3.3 as part of the Cray Red Storm machine and XT line. Version 4 is tarmore » geted to the next generation of machines employing advanced network interface architectures that support enh anced offload capabilities.« less

The Portals 4.0 network programming interface.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Barrett, Brian W.; Brightwell, Ronald Brian; Pedretti, Kevin

2012-11-01

This report presents a specification for the Portals 4.0 network programming interface. Portals 4.0 is intended to allow scalable, high-performance network communication between nodes of a parallel computing system. Portals 4.0 is well suited to massively parallel processing and embedded systems. Portals 4.0 represents an adaption of the data movement layer developed for massively parallel processing platforms, such as the 4500-node Intel TeraFLOPS machine. Sandias Cplant cluster project motivated the development of Version 3.0, which was later extended to Version 3.3 as part of the Cray Red Storm machine and XT line. Version 4.0 is targeted to the next generationmore » of machines employing advanced network interface architectures that support enhanced offload capabilities.« less

Optimizing the way kinematical feed chains with great distance between slides are chosen for CNC machine tools

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lucian, P.; Gheorghe, S.

2017-08-01

This paper presents a new method, based on FRISCO formula, for optimizing the choice of the best control system for kinematical feed chains with great distance between slides used in computer numerical controlled machine tools. Such machines are usually, but not limited to, used for machining large and complex parts (mostly in the aviation industry) or complex casting molds. For such machine tools the kinematic feed chains are arranged in a dual-parallel drive structure that allows the mobile element to be moved by the two kinematical branches and their related control systems. Such an arrangement allows for high speed and high rigidity (a critical requirement for precision machining) during the machining process. A significant issue for such an arrangement it’s the ability of the two parallel control systems to follow the same trajectory accurately in order to address this issue it is necessary to achieve synchronous motion control for the two kinematical branches ensuring that the correct perpendicular position it’s kept by the mobile element during its motion on the two slides.

Communication Studies of DMP and SMP Machines

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sohn, Andrew; Biswas, Rupak; Chancellor, Marisa K. (Technical Monitor)

1997-01-01

Understanding the interplay between machines and problems is key to obtaining high performance on parallel machines. This paper investigates the interplay between programming paradigms and communication capabilities of parallel machines. In particular, we explicate the communication capabilities of the IBM SP-2 distributed-memory multiprocessor and the SGI PowerCHALLENGEarray symmetric multiprocessor. Two benchmark problems of bitonic sorting and Fast Fourier Transform are selected for experiments. Communication-efficient algorithms are developed to exploit the overlapping capabilities of the machines. Programs are written in Message-Passing Interface for portability and identical codes are used for both machines. Various data sizes and message sizes are used to test the machines' communication capabilities. Experimental results indicate that the communication performance of the multiprocessors are consistent with the size of messages. The SP-2 is sensitive to message size but yields a much higher communication overlapping because of the communication co-processor. The PowerCHALLENGEarray is not highly sensitive to message size and yields a low communication overlapping. Bitonic sorting yields lower performance compared to FFT due to a smaller computation-to-communication ratio.

Characterization of robotics parallel algorithms and mapping onto a reconfigurable SIMD machine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Lee, C. S. G.; Lin, C. T.

1989-01-01

The kinematics, dynamics, Jacobian, and their corresponding inverse computations are six essential problems in the control of robot manipulators. Efficient parallel algorithms for these computations are discussed and analyzed. Their characteristics are identified and a scheme on the mapping of these algorithms to a reconfigurable parallel architecture is presented. Based on the characteristics including type of parallelism, degree of parallelism, uniformity of the operations, fundamental operations, data dependencies, and communication requirement, it is shown that most of the algorithms for robotic computations possess highly regular properties and some common structures, especially the linear recursive structure. Moreover, they are well-suited to be implemented on a single-instruction-stream multiple-data-stream (SIMD) computer with reconfigurable interconnection network. The model of a reconfigurable dual network SIMD machine with internal direct feedback is introduced. A systematic procedure internal direct feedback is introduced. A systematic procedure to map these computations to the proposed machine is presented. A new scheduling problem for SIMD machines is investigated and a heuristic algorithm, called neighborhood scheduling, that reorders the processing sequence of subtasks to reduce the communication time is described. Mapping results of a benchmark algorithm are illustrated and discussed.

Productive High Performance Parallel Programming with Auto-tuned Domain-Specific Embedded Languages

DTIC Science & Technology

2013-01-02

Compilation JVM Java Virtual Machine KB Kilobyte KDT Knowledge Discovery Toolbox LAPACK Linear Algebra Package LLVM Low-Level Virtual Machine LOC Lines...different starting points. Leo Meyerovich also helped solidify some of the ideas here in discussions during Par Lab retreats. I would also like to thank...multi-timestep computations by blocking in both time and space. 88 Implementation Output Approx DSL Type Language Language Parallelism LoC Graphite

The portals 4.0.1 network programming interface.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Barrett, Brian W.; Brightwell, Ronald Brian; Pedretti, Kevin

2013-04-01

This report presents a specification for the Portals 4.0 network programming interface. Portals 4.0 is intended to allow scalable, high-performance network communication between nodes of a parallel computing system. Portals 4.0 is well suited to massively parallel processing and embedded systems. Portals 4.0 represents an adaption of the data movement layer developed for massively parallel processing platforms, such as the 4500-node Intel TeraFLOPS machine. Sandias Cplant cluster project motivated the development of Version 3.0, which was later extended to Version 3.3 as part of the Cray Red Storm machine and XT line. Version 4.0 is targeted to the next generationmore » of machines employing advanced network interface architectures that support enhanced offload capabilities. 3« less

Implementation and performance of parallel Prolog interpreter

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Wei, S.; Kale, L.V.; Balkrishna, R.

1988-01-01

In this paper, the authors discuss the implementation of a parallel Prolog interpreter on different parallel machines. The implementation is based on the REDUCE--OR process model which exploits both AND and OR parallelism in logic programs. It is machine independent as it runs on top of the chare-kernel--a machine-independent parallel programming system. The authors also give the performance of the interpreter running a diverse set of benchmark pargrams on parallel machines including shared memory systems: an Alliant FX/8, Sequent and a MultiMax, and a non-shared memory systems: Intel iPSC/32 hypercube, in addition to its performance on a multiprocessor simulation system.

High Performance Distributed Computing in a Supercomputer Environment: Computational Services and Applications Issues

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Kramer, Williams T. C.; Simon, Horst D.

1994-01-01

This tutorial proposes to be a practical guide for the uninitiated to the main topics and themes of high-performance computing (HPC), with particular emphasis to distributed computing. The intent is first to provide some guidance and directions in the rapidly increasing field of scientific computing using both massively parallel and traditional supercomputers. Because of their considerable potential computational power, loosely or tightly coupled clusters of workstations are increasingly considered as a third alternative to both the more conventional supercomputers based on a small number of powerful vector processors, as well as high massively parallel processors. Even though many research issues concerning the effective use of workstation clusters and their integration into a large scale production facility are still unresolved, such clusters are already used for production computing. In this tutorial we will utilize the unique experience made at the NAS facility at NASA Ames Research Center. Over the last five years at NAS massively parallel supercomputers such as the Connection Machines CM-2 and CM-5 from Thinking Machines Corporation and the iPSC/860 (Touchstone Gamma Machine) and Paragon Machines from Intel were used in a production supercomputer center alongside with traditional vector supercomputers such as the Cray Y-MP and C90.

Large-scale Parallel Unstructured Mesh Computations for 3D High-lift Analysis

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mavriplis, Dimitri J.; Pirzadeh, S.

1999-01-01

A complete "geometry to drag-polar" analysis capability for the three-dimensional high-lift configurations is described. The approach is based on the use of unstructured meshes in order to enable rapid turnaround for complicated geometries that arise in high-lift configurations. Special attention is devoted to creating a capability for enabling analyses on highly resolved grids. Unstructured meshes of several million vertices are initially generated on a work-station, and subsequently refined on a supercomputer. The flow is solved on these refined meshes on large parallel computers using an unstructured agglomeration multigrid algorithm. Good prediction of lift and drag throughout the range of incidences is demonstrated on a transport take-off configuration using up to 24.7 million grid points. The feasibility of using this approach in a production environment on existing parallel machines is demonstrated, as well as the scalability of the solver on machines using up to 1450 processors.

A general purpose subroutine for fast fourier transform on a distributed memory parallel machine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dubey, A.; Zubair, M.; Grosch, C. E.

1992-01-01

One issue which is central in developing a general purpose Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) subroutine on a distributed memory parallel machine is the data distribution. It is possible that different users would like to use the FFT routine with different data distributions. Thus, there is a need to design FFT schemes on distributed memory parallel machines which can support a variety of data distributions. An FFT implementation on a distributed memory parallel machine which works for a number of data distributions commonly encountered in scientific applications is presented. The problem of rearranging the data after computing the FFT is also addressed. The performance of the implementation on a distributed memory parallel machine Intel iPSC/860 is evaluated.

Highly parallel sparse Cholesky factorization

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Gilbert, John R.; Schreiber, Robert

1990-01-01

Several fine grained parallel algorithms were developed and compared to compute the Cholesky factorization of a sparse matrix. The experimental implementations are on the Connection Machine, a distributed memory SIMD machine whose programming model conceptually supplies one processor per data element. In contrast to special purpose algorithms in which the matrix structure conforms to the connection structure of the machine, the focus is on matrices with arbitrary sparsity structure. The most promising algorithm is one whose inner loop performs several dense factorizations simultaneously on a 2-D grid of processors. Virtually any massively parallel dense factorization algorithm can be used as the key subroutine. The sparse code attains execution rates comparable to those of the dense subroutine. Although at present architectural limitations prevent the dense factorization from realizing its potential efficiency, it is concluded that a regular data parallel architecture can be used efficiently to solve arbitrarily structured sparse problems. A performance model is also presented and it is used to analyze the algorithms.

Application of high-performance computing to numerical simulation of human movement

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Anderson, F. C.; Ziegler, J. M.; Pandy, M. G.; Whalen, R. T.

1995-01-01

We have examined the feasibility of using massively-parallel and vector-processing supercomputers to solve large-scale optimization problems for human movement. Specifically, we compared the computational expense of determining the optimal controls for the single support phase of gait using a conventional serial machine (SGI Iris 4D25), a MIMD parallel machine (Intel iPSC/860), and a parallel-vector-processing machine (Cray Y-MP 8/864). With the human body modeled as a 14 degree-of-freedom linkage actuated by 46 musculotendinous units, computation of the optimal controls for gait could take up to 3 months of CPU time on the Iris. Both the Cray and the Intel are able to reduce this time to practical levels. The optimal solution for gait can be found with about 77 hours of CPU on the Cray and with about 88 hours of CPU on the Intel. Although the overall speeds of the Cray and the Intel were found to be similar, the unique capabilities of each machine are better suited to different portions of the computational algorithm used. The Intel was best suited to computing the derivatives of the performance criterion and the constraints whereas the Cray was best suited to parameter optimization of the controls. These results suggest that the ideal computer architecture for solving very large-scale optimal control problems is a hybrid system in which a vector-processing machine is integrated into the communication network of a MIMD parallel machine.

Parallel machine architecture and compiler design facilities

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Kuck, David J.; Yew, Pen-Chung; Padua, David; Sameh, Ahmed; Veidenbaum, Alex

1990-01-01

The objective is to provide an integrated simulation environment for studying and evaluating various issues in designing parallel systems, including machine architectures, parallelizing compiler techniques, and parallel algorithms. The status of Delta project (which objective is to provide a facility to allow rapid prototyping of parallelized compilers that can target toward different machine architectures) is summarized. Included are the surveys of the program manipulation tools developed, the environmental software supporting Delta, and the compiler research projects in which Delta has played a role.

Analysis of multigrid methods on massively parallel computers: Architectural implications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Matheson, Lesley R.; Tarjan, Robert E.

1993-01-01

We study the potential performance of multigrid algorithms running on massively parallel computers with the intent of discovering whether presently envisioned machines will provide an efficient platform for such algorithms. We consider the domain parallel version of the standard V cycle algorithm on model problems, discretized using finite difference techniques in two and three dimensions on block structured grids of size 10(exp 6) and 10(exp 9), respectively. Our models of parallel computation were developed to reflect the computing characteristics of the current generation of massively parallel multicomputers. These models are based on an interconnection network of 256 to 16,384 message passing, 'workstation size' processors executing in an SPMD mode. The first model accomplishes interprocessor communications through a multistage permutation network. The communication cost is a logarithmic function which is similar to the costs in a variety of different topologies. The second model allows single stage communication costs only. Both models were designed with information provided by machine developers and utilize implementation derived parameters. With the medium grain parallelism of the current generation and the high fixed cost of an interprocessor communication, our analysis suggests an efficient implementation requires the machine to support the efficient transmission of long messages, (up to 1000 words) or the high initiation cost of a communication must be significantly reduced through an alternative optimization technique. Furthermore, with variable length message capability, our analysis suggests the low diameter multistage networks provide little or no advantage over a simple single stage communications network.

Parallel Computing:. Some Activities in High Energy Physics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Willers, Ian

This paper examines some activities in High Energy Physics that utilise parallel computing. The topic includes all computing from the proposed SIMD front end detectors, the farming applications, high-powered RISC processors and the large machines in the computer centers. We start by looking at the motivation behind using parallelism for general purpose computing. The developments around farming are then described from its simplest form to the more complex system in Fermilab. Finally, there is a list of some developments that are happening close to the experiments.

Data parallel sorting for particle simulation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dagum, Leonardo

1992-01-01

Sorting on a parallel architecture is a communications intensive event which can incur a high penalty in applications where it is required. In the case of particle simulation, only integer sorting is necessary, and sequential implementations easily attain the minimum performance bound of O (N) for N particles. Parallel implementations, however, have to cope with the parallel sorting problem which, in addition to incurring a heavy communications cost, can make the minimun performance bound difficult to attain. This paper demonstrates how the sorting problem in a particle simulation can be reduced to a merging problem, and describes an efficient data parallel algorithm to solve this merging problem in a particle simulation. The new algorithm is shown to be optimal under conditions usual for particle simulation, and its fieldwise implementation on the Connection Machine is analyzed in detail. The new algorithm is about four times faster than a fieldwise implementation of radix sort on the Connection Machine.

Preconditioned implicit solvers for the Navier-Stokes equations on distributed-memory machines

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ajmani, Kumud; Liou, Meng-Sing; Dyson, Rodger W.

1994-01-01

The GMRES method is parallelized, and combined with local preconditioning to construct an implicit parallel solver to obtain steady-state solutions for the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid flow on distributed-memory machines. The new implicit parallel solver is designed to preserve the convergence rate of the equivalent 'serial' solver. A static domain-decomposition is used to partition the computational domain amongst the available processing nodes of the parallel machine. The SPMD (Single-Program Multiple-Data) programming model is combined with message-passing tools to develop the parallel code on a 32-node Intel Hypercube and a 512-node Intel Delta machine. The implicit parallel solver is validated for internal and external flow problems, and is found to compare identically with flow solutions obtained on a Cray Y-MP/8. A peak computational speed of 2300 MFlops/sec has been achieved on 512 nodes of the Intel Delta machine,k for a problem size of 1024 K equations (256 K grid points).

Performance prediction: A case study using a multi-ring KSR-1 machine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sun, Xian-He; Zhu, Jianping

1995-01-01

While computers with tens of thousands of processors have successfully delivered high performance power for solving some of the so-called 'grand-challenge' applications, the notion of scalability is becoming an important metric in the evaluation of parallel machine architectures and algorithms. In this study, the prediction of scalability and its application are carefully investigated. A simple formula is presented to show the relation between scalability, single processor computing power, and degradation of parallelism. A case study is conducted on a multi-ring KSR1 shared virtual memory machine. Experimental and theoretical results show that the influence of topology variation of an architecture is predictable. Therefore, the performance of an algorithm on a sophisticated, heirarchical architecture can be predicted and the best algorithm-machine combination can be selected for a given application.

High-performance Chinese multiclass traffic sign detection via coarse-to-fine cascade and parallel support vector machine detectors

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chang, Faliang; Liu, Chunsheng

2017-09-01

The high variability of sign colors and shapes in uncontrolled environments has made the detection of traffic signs a challenging problem in computer vision. We propose a traffic sign detection (TSD) method based on coarse-to-fine cascade and parallel support vector machine (SVM) detectors to detect Chinese warning and danger traffic signs. First, a region of interest (ROI) extraction method is proposed to extract ROIs using color contrast features in local regions. The ROI extraction can reduce scanning regions and save detection time. For multiclass TSD, we propose a structure that combines a coarse-to-fine cascaded tree with a parallel structure of histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) + SVM detectors. The cascaded tree is designed to detect different types of traffic signs in a coarse-to-fine process. The parallel HOG + SVM detectors are designed to do fine detection of different types of traffic signs. The experiments demonstrate the proposed TSD method can rapidly detect multiclass traffic signs with different colors and shapes in high accuracy.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Yang, C.

Almost every computer architect dreams of achieving high system performance with low implementation costs. A multigauge machine can reconfigure its data-path width, provide parallelism, achieve better resource utilization, and sometimes can trade computational precision for increased speed. A simple experimental method is used here to capture the main characteristics of multigauging. The measurements indicate evidence of near-optimal speedups. Adapting these ideas in designing parallel processors incurs low costs and provides flexibility. Several operational aspects of designing a multigauge machine are discussed as well. Thus, this research reports the technical, economical, and operational feasibility studies of multigauging.

Progressive Vector Quantization on a massively parallel SIMD machine with application to multispectral image data

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Manohar, Mareboyana; Tilton, James C.

1994-01-01

A progressive vector quantization (VQ) compression approach is discussed which decomposes image data into a number of levels using full search VQ. The final level is losslessly compressed, enabling lossless reconstruction. The computational difficulties are addressed by implementation on a massively parallel SIMD machine. We demonstrate progressive VQ on multispectral imagery obtained from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instrument and other Earth observation image data, and investigate the trade-offs in selecting the number of decomposition levels and codebook training method.

Parallel computation for biological sequence comparison: comparing a portable model to the native model for the Intel Hypercube.

PubMed

Nadkarni, P M; Miller, P L

1991-01-01

A parallel program for inter-database sequence comparison was developed on the Intel Hypercube using two models of parallel programming. One version was built using machine-specific Hypercube parallel programming commands. The other version was built using Linda, a machine-independent parallel programming language. The two versions of the program provide a case study comparing these two approaches to parallelization in an important biological application area. Benchmark tests with both programs gave comparable results with a small number of processors. As the number of processors was increased, the Linda version was somewhat less efficient. The Linda version was also run without change on Network Linda, a virtual parallel machine running on a network of desktop workstations.

Design consideration in constructing high performance embedded Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS)

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dalton, Shelly D.; Daley, Philip C.

1988-01-01

As the hardware trends for artificial intelligence (AI) involve more and more complexity, the process of optimizing the computer system design for a particular problem will also increase in complexity. Space applications of knowledge based systems (KBS) will often require an ability to perform both numerically intensive vector computations and real time symbolic computations. Although parallel machines can theoretically achieve the speeds necessary for most of these problems, if the application itself is not highly parallel, the machine's power cannot be utilized. A scheme is presented which will provide the computer systems engineer with a tool for analyzing machines with various configurations of array, symbolic, scaler, and multiprocessors. High speed networks and interconnections make customized, distributed, intelligent systems feasible for the application of AI in space. The method presented can be used to optimize such AI system configurations and to make comparisons between existing computer systems. It is an open question whether or not, for a given mission requirement, a suitable computer system design can be constructed for any amount of money.

Computational Performance of a Parallelized Three-Dimensional High-Order Spectral Element Toolbox

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bosshard, Christoph; Bouffanais, Roland; Clémençon, Christian; Deville, Michel O.; Fiétier, Nicolas; Gruber, Ralf; Kehtari, Sohrab; Keller, Vincent; Latt, Jonas

In this paper, a comprehensive performance review of an MPI-based high-order three-dimensional spectral element method C++ toolbox is presented. The focus is put on the performance evaluation of several aspects with a particular emphasis on the parallel efficiency. The performance evaluation is analyzed with help of a time prediction model based on a parameterization of the application and the hardware resources. A tailor-made CFD computation benchmark case is introduced and used to carry out this review, stressing the particular interest for clusters with up to 8192 cores. Some problems in the parallel implementation have been detected and corrected. The theoretical complexities with respect to the number of elements, to the polynomial degree, and to communication needs are correctly reproduced. It is concluded that this type of code has a nearly perfect speed up on machines with thousands of cores, and is ready to make the step to next-generation petaflop machines.

Reverse time migration: A seismic processing application on the connection machine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Fiebrich, Rolf-Dieter

1987-01-01

The implementation of a reverse time migration algorithm on the Connection Machine, a massively parallel computer is described. Essential architectural features of this machine as well as programming concepts are presented. The data structures and parallel operations for the implementation of the reverse time migration algorithm are described. The algorithm matches the Connection Machine architecture closely and executes almost at the peak performance of this machine.

Automated Coal-Mining System

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Gangal, M. D.; Isenberg, L.; Lewis, E. V.

1985-01-01

Proposed system offers safety and large return on investment. System, operating by year 2000, employs machines and processes based on proven principles. According to concept, line of parallel machines, connected in groups of four to service modules, attacks face of coal seam. High-pressure water jets and central auger on each machine break face. Jaws scoop up coal chunks, and auger grinds them and forces fragments into slurry-transport system. Slurry pumped through pipeline to point of use. Concept for highly automated coal-mining system increases productivity, makes mining safer, and protects health of mine workers.

Parallel computation for biological sequence comparison: comparing a portable model to the native model for the Intel Hypercube.

PubMed Central

Nadkarni, P. M.; Miller, P. L.

1991-01-01

A parallel program for inter-database sequence comparison was developed on the Intel Hypercube using two models of parallel programming. One version was built using machine-specific Hypercube parallel programming commands. The other version was built using Linda, a machine-independent parallel programming language. The two versions of the program provide a case study comparing these two approaches to parallelization in an important biological application area. Benchmark tests with both programs gave comparable results with a small number of processors. As the number of processors was increased, the Linda version was somewhat less efficient. The Linda version was also run without change on Network Linda, a virtual parallel machine running on a network of desktop workstations. PMID:1807632

A Data Parallel Multizone Navier-Stokes Code

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jespersen, Dennis C.; Levit, Creon; Kwak, Dochan (Technical Monitor)

1995-01-01

We have developed a data parallel multizone compressible Navier-Stokes code on the Connection Machine CM-5. The code is set up for implicit time-stepping on single or multiple structured grids. For multiple grids and geometrically complex problems, we follow the "chimera" approach, where flow data on one zone is interpolated onto another in the region of overlap. We will describe our design philosophy and give some timing results for the current code. The design choices can be summarized as: 1. finite differences on structured grids; 2. implicit time-stepping with either distributed solves or data motion and local solves; 3. sequential stepping through multiple zones with interzone data transfer via a distributed data structure. We have implemented these ideas on the CM-5 using CMF (Connection Machine Fortran), a data parallel language which combines elements of Fortran 90 and certain extensions, and which bears a strong similarity to High Performance Fortran (HPF). One interesting feature is the issue of turbulence modeling, where the architecture of a parallel machine makes the use of an algebraic turbulence model awkward, whereas models based on transport equations are more natural. We will present some performance figures for the code on the CM-5, and consider the issues involved in transitioning the code to HPF for portability to other parallel platforms.

Implementation and Characterization of Three-Dimensional Particle-in-Cell Codes on Multiple-Instruction-Multiple-Data Massively Parallel Supercomputers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Lyster, P. M.; Liewer, P. C.; Decyk, V. K.; Ferraro, R. D.

1995-01-01

A three-dimensional electrostatic particle-in-cell (PIC) plasma simulation code has been developed on coarse-grain distributed-memory massively parallel computers with message passing communications. Our implementation is the generalization to three-dimensions of the general concurrent particle-in-cell (GCPIC) algorithm. In the GCPIC algorithm, the particle computation is divided among the processors using a domain decomposition of the simulation domain. In a three-dimensional simulation, the domain can be partitioned into one-, two-, or three-dimensional subdomains ("slabs," "rods," or "cubes") and we investigate the efficiency of the parallel implementation of the push for all three choices. The present implementation runs on the Intel Touchstone Delta machine at Caltech; a multiple-instruction-multiple-data (MIMD) parallel computer with 512 nodes. We find that the parallel efficiency of the push is very high, with the ratio of communication to computation time in the range 0.3%-10.0%. The highest efficiency (> 99%) occurs for a large, scaled problem with 64(sup 3) particles per processing node (approximately 134 million particles of 512 nodes) which has a push time of about 250 ns per particle per time step. We have also developed expressions for the timing of the code which are a function of both code parameters (number of grid points, particles, etc.) and machine-dependent parameters (effective FLOP rate, and the effective interprocessor bandwidths for the communication of particles and grid points). These expressions can be used to estimate the performance of scaled problems--including those with inhomogeneous plasmas--to other parallel machines once the machine-dependent parameters are known.

Implementing Molecular Dynamics for Hybrid High Performance Computers - 1. Short Range Forces

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Brown, W Michael; Wang, Peng; Plimpton, Steven J

The use of accelerators such as general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) have become popular in scientific computing applications due to their low cost, impressive floating-point capabilities, high memory bandwidth, and low electrical power requirements. Hybrid high performance computers, machines with more than one type of floating-point processor, are now becoming more prevalent due to these advantages. In this work, we discuss several important issues in porting a large molecular dynamics code for use on parallel hybrid machines - 1) choosing a hybrid parallel decomposition that works on central processing units (CPUs) with distributed memory and accelerator cores with shared memory,more » 2) minimizing the amount of code that must be ported for efficient acceleration, 3) utilizing the available processing power from both many-core CPUs and accelerators, and 4) choosing a programming model for acceleration. We present our solution to each of these issues for short-range force calculation in the molecular dynamics package LAMMPS. We describe algorithms for efficient short range force calculation on hybrid high performance machines. We describe a new approach for dynamic load balancing of work between CPU and accelerator cores. We describe the Geryon library that allows a single code to compile with both CUDA and OpenCL for use on a variety of accelerators. Finally, we present results on a parallel test cluster containing 32 Fermi GPGPUs and 180 CPU cores.« less

Line-drawing algorithms for parallel machines

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Pang, Alex T.

1990-01-01

The fact that conventional line-drawing algorithms, when applied directly on parallel machines, can lead to very inefficient codes is addressed. It is suggested that instead of modifying an existing algorithm for a parallel machine, a more efficient implementation can be produced by going back to the invariants in the definition. Popular line-drawing algorithms are compared with two alternatives; distance to a line (a point is on the line if sufficiently close to it) and intersection with a line (a point on the line if an intersection point). For massively parallel single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) machines (with thousands of processors and up), the alternatives provide viable line-drawing algorithms. Because of the pixel-per-processor mapping, their performance is independent of the line length and orientation.

Research in Parallel Algorithms and Software for Computational Aerosciences

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Domel, Neal D.

1996-01-01

Phase I is complete for the development of a Computational Fluid Dynamics parallel code with automatic grid generation and adaptation for the Euler analysis of flow over complex geometries. SPLITFLOW, an unstructured Cartesian grid code developed at Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems, has been modified for a distributed memory/massively parallel computing environment. The parallel code is operational on an SGI network, Cray J90 and C90 vector machines, SGI Power Challenge, and Cray T3D and IBM SP2 massively parallel machines. Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is the message passing protocol for portability to various architectures. A domain decomposition technique was developed which enforces dynamic load balancing to improve solution speed and memory requirements. A host/node algorithm distributes the tasks. The solver parallelizes very well, and scales with the number of processors. Partially parallelized and non-parallelized tasks consume most of the wall clock time in a very fine grain environment. Timing comparisons on a Cray C90 demonstrate that Parallel SPLITFLOW runs 2.4 times faster on 8 processors than its non-parallel counterpart autotasked over 8 processors.

Research in Parallel Algorithms and Software for Computational Aerosciences

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Domel, Neal D.

1996-01-01

Phase 1 is complete for the development of a computational fluid dynamics CFD) parallel code with automatic grid generation and adaptation for the Euler analysis of flow over complex geometries. SPLITFLOW, an unstructured Cartesian grid code developed at Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems, has been modified for a distributed memory/massively parallel computing environment. The parallel code is operational on an SGI network, Cray J90 and C90 vector machines, SGI Power Challenge, and Cray T3D and IBM SP2 massively parallel machines. Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is the message passing protocol for portability to various architectures. A domain decomposition technique was developed which enforces dynamic load balancing to improve solution speed and memory requirements. A host/node algorithm distributes the tasks. The solver parallelizes very well, and scales with the number of processors. Partially parallelized and non-parallelized tasks consume most of the wall clock time in a very fine grain environment. Timing comparisons on a Cray C90 demonstrate that Parallel SPLITFLOW runs 2.4 times faster on 8 processors than its non-parallel counterpart autotasked over 8 processors.

Quantum information, cognition, and music.

PubMed

Dalla Chiara, Maria L; Giuntini, Roberto; Leporini, Roberto; Negri, Eleonora; Sergioli, Giuseppe

2015-01-01

Parallelism represents an essential aspect of human mind/brain activities. One can recognize some common features between psychological parallelism and the characteristic parallel structures that arise in quantum theory and in quantum computation. The article is devoted to a discussion of the following questions: a comparison between classical probabilistic Turing machines and quantum Turing machines.possible applications of the quantum computational semantics to cognitive problems.parallelism in music.

Quantum information, cognition, and music

PubMed Central

Dalla Chiara, Maria L.; Giuntini, Roberto; Leporini, Roberto; Negri, Eleonora; Sergioli, Giuseppe

2015-01-01

Parallelism represents an essential aspect of human mind/brain activities. One can recognize some common features between psychological parallelism and the characteristic parallel structures that arise in quantum theory and in quantum computation. The article is devoted to a discussion of the following questions: a comparison between classical probabilistic Turing machines and quantum Turing machines.possible applications of the quantum computational semantics to cognitive problems.parallelism in music. PMID:26539139

Resolutions of the Coulomb operator: VIII. Parallel implementation using the modern programming language X10.

PubMed

Limpanuparb, Taweetham; Milthorpe, Josh; Rendell, Alistair P

2014-10-30

Use of the modern parallel programming language X10 for computing long-range Coulomb and exchange interactions is presented. By using X10, a partitioned global address space language with support for task parallelism and the explicit representation of data locality, the resolution of the Ewald operator can be parallelized in a straightforward manner including use of both intranode and internode parallelism. We evaluate four different schemes for dynamic load balancing of integral calculation using X10's work stealing runtime, and report performance results for long-range HF energy calculation of large molecule/high quality basis running on up to 1024 cores of a high performance cluster machine. Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

RAMA: A file system for massively parallel computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Miller, Ethan L.; Katz, Randy H.

1993-01-01

This paper describes a file system design for massively parallel computers which makes very efficient use of a few disks per processor. This overcomes the traditional I/O bottleneck of massively parallel machines by storing the data on disks within the high-speed interconnection network. In addition, the file system, called RAMA, requires little inter-node synchronization, removing another common bottleneck in parallel processor file systems. Support for a large tertiary storage system can easily be integrated in lo the file system; in fact, RAMA runs most efficiently when tertiary storage is used.

Code Optimization and Parallelization on the Origins: Looking from Users' Perspective

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Chang, Yan-Tyng Sherry; Thigpen, William W. (Technical Monitor)

2002-01-01

Parallel machines are becoming the main compute engines for high performance computing. Despite their increasing popularity, it is still a challenge for most users to learn the basic techniques to optimize/parallelize their codes on such platforms. In this paper, we present some experiences on learning these techniques for the Origin systems at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division. Emphasis of this paper will be on a few essential issues (with examples) that general users should master when they work with the Origins as well as other parallel systems.

A compositional reservoir simulator on distributed memory parallel computers

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Rame, M.; Delshad, M.

1995-12-31

This paper presents the application of distributed memory parallel computes to field scale reservoir simulations using a parallel version of UTCHEM, The University of Texas Chemical Flooding Simulator. The model is a general purpose highly vectorized chemical compositional simulator that can simulate a wide range of displacement processes at both field and laboratory scales. The original simulator was modified to run on both distributed memory parallel machines (Intel iPSC/960 and Delta, Connection Machine 5, Kendall Square 1 and 2, and CRAY T3D) and a cluster of workstations. A domain decomposition approach has been taken towards parallelization of the code. Amore » portion of the discrete reservoir model is assigned to each processor by a set-up routine that attempts a data layout as even as possible from the load-balance standpoint. Each of these subdomains is extended so that data can be shared between adjacent processors for stencil computation. The added routines that make parallel execution possible are written in a modular fashion that makes the porting to new parallel platforms straight forward. Results of the distributed memory computing performance of Parallel simulator are presented for field scale applications such as tracer flood and polymer flood. A comparison of the wall-clock times for same problems on a vector supercomputer is also presented.« less

Bilingual parallel programming

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Foster, I.; Overbeek, R.

1990-01-01

Numerous experiments have demonstrated that computationally intensive algorithms support adequate parallelism to exploit the potential of large parallel machines. Yet successful parallel implementations of serious applications are rare. The limiting factor is clearly programming technology. None of the approaches to parallel programming that have been proposed to date -- whether parallelizing compilers, language extensions, or new concurrent languages -- seem to adequately address the central problems of portability, expressiveness, efficiency, and compatibility with existing software. In this paper, we advocate an alternative approach to parallel programming based on what we call bilingual programming. We present evidence that this approach providesmore » and effective solution to parallel programming problems. The key idea in bilingual programming is to construct the upper levels of applications in a high-level language while coding selected low-level components in low-level languages. This approach permits the advantages of a high-level notation (expressiveness, elegance, conciseness) to be obtained without the cost in performance normally associated with high-level approaches. In addition, it provides a natural framework for reusing existing code.« less

Multiphase complete exchange on Paragon, SP2 and CS-2

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bokhari, Shahid H.

1995-01-01

The overhead of interprocessor communication is a major factor in limiting the performance of parallel computer systems. The complete exchange is the severest communication pattern in that it requires each processor to send a distinct message to every other processor. This pattern is at the heart of many important parallel applications. On hypercubes, multiphase complete exchange has been developed and shown to provide optimal performance over varying message sizes. Most commercial multicomputer systems do not have a hypercube interconnect. However, they use special purpose hardware and dedicated communication processors to achieve very high performance communication and can be made to emulate the hypercube quite well. Multiphase complete exchange has been implemented on three contemporary parallel architectures: the Intel Paragon, IBM SP2 and Meiko CS-2. The essential features of these machines are described and their basic interprocessor communication overheads are discussed. The performance of multiphase complete exchange is evaluated on each machine. It is shown that the theoretical ideas developed for hypercubes are also applicable in practice to these machines and that multiphase complete exchange can lead to major savings in execution time over traditional solutions.

Center for Parallel Optimization.

DTIC Science & Technology

1996-03-19

A NEW OPTIMIZATION BASED APPROACH TO IMPROVING GENERALIZATION IN MACHINE LEARNING HAS BEEN PROPOSED AND COMPUTATIONALLY VALIDATED ON SIMPLE LINEAR MODELS AS WELL AS ON HIGHLY NONLINEAR SYSTEMS SUCH AS NEURAL NETWORKS.

An M-step preconditioned conjugate gradient method for parallel computation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Adams, L.

1983-01-01

This paper describes a preconditioned conjugate gradient method that can be effectively implemented on both vector machines and parallel arrays to solve sparse symmetric and positive definite systems of linear equations. The implementation on the CYBER 203/205 and on the Finite Element Machine is discussed and results obtained using the method on these machines are given.

File-access characteristics of parallel scientific workloads

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Nieuwejaar, Nils; Kotz, David; Purakayastha, Apratim; Best, Michael; Ellis, Carla Schlatter

1995-01-01

Phenomenal improvements in the computational performance of multiprocessors have not been matched by comparable gains in I/O system performance. This imbalance has resulted in I/O becoming a significant bottleneck for many scientific applications. One key to overcoming this bottleneck is improving the performance of parallel file systems. The design of a high-performance parallel file system requires a comprehensive understanding of the expected workload. Unfortunately, until recently, no general workload studies of parallel file systems have been conducted. The goal of the CHARISMA project was to remedy this problem by characterizing the behavior of several production workloads, on different machines, at the level of individual reads and writes. The first set of results from the CHARISMA project describe the workloads observed on an Intel iPSC/860 and a Thinking Machines CM-5. This paper is intended to compare and contrast these two workloads for an understanding of their essential similarities and differences, isolating common trends and platform-dependent variances. Using this comparison, we are able to gain more insight into the general principles that should guide parallel file-system design.

Dust Dynamics in Protoplanetary Disks: Parallel Computing with PVM

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

de La Fuente Marcos, Carlos; Barge, Pierre; de La Fuente Marcos, Raúl

2002-03-01

We describe a parallel version of our high-order-accuracy particle-mesh code for the simulation of collisionless protoplanetary disks. We use this code to carry out a massively parallel, two-dimensional, time-dependent, numerical simulation, which includes dust particles, to study the potential role of large-scale, gaseous vortices in protoplanetary disks. This noncollisional problem is easy to parallelize on message-passing multicomputer architectures. We performed the simulations on a cache-coherent nonuniform memory access Origin 2000 machine, using both the parallel virtual machine (PVM) and message-passing interface (MPI) message-passing libraries. Our performance analysis suggests that, for our problem, PVM is about 25% faster than MPI. Using PVM and MPI made it possible to reduce CPU time and increase code performance. This allows for simulations with a large number of particles (N ~ 105-106) in reasonable CPU times. The performances of our implementation of the pa! rallel code on an Origin 2000 supercomputer are presented and discussed. They exhibit very good speedup behavior and low load unbalancing. Our results confirm that giant gaseous vortices can play a dominant role in giant planet formation.

A study on stimulation of DC high voltage power of LCC series parallel resonant in projectile velocity measurement system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lu, Dong-dong; Gu, Jin-liang; Luo, Hong-e.; Xia, Yan

2017-10-01

According to specific requirements of the X-ray machine system for measuring velocity of outfield projectile, a DC high voltage power supply system is designed for the high voltage or the smaller current. The system comprises: a series resonant circuit is selected as a full-bridge inverter circuit; a high-frequency zero-current soft switching of a high-voltage power supply is realized by PWM output by STM32; a nanocrystalline alloy transformer is chosen as a high-frequency booster transformer; and the related parameters of an LCC series-parallel resonant are determined according to the preset parameters of the transformer. The concrete method includes: a LCC series parallel resonant circuit and a voltage doubling circuit are stimulated by using MULTISM and MATLAB; selecting an optimal solution and an optimal parameter of all parts after stimulation analysis; and finally verifying the correctness of the parameter by stimulation of the whole system. Through stimulation analysis, the output voltage of the series-parallel resonant circuit gets to 10KV in 28s: then passing through the voltage doubling circuit, the output voltage gets to 120KV in one hour. According to the system, the wave range of the output voltage is so small as to provide the stable X-ray supply for the X-ray machine for measuring velocity of outfield projectile. It is fast in charging and high in efficiency.

Approximation algorithms for scheduling unrelated parallel machines with release dates

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Avdeenko, T. V.; Mesentsev, Y. A.; Estraykh, I. V.

2017-01-01

In this paper we propose approaches to optimal scheduling of unrelated parallel machines with release dates. One approach is based on the scheme of dynamic programming modified with adaptive narrowing of search domain ensuring its computational effectiveness. We discussed complexity of the exact schedules synthesis and compared it with approximate, close to optimal, solutions. Also we explain how the algorithm works for the example of two unrelated parallel machines and five jobs with release dates. Performance results that show the efficiency of the proposed approach have been given.

Optimisation of a parallel ocean general circulation model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Beare, M. I.; Stevens, D. P.

1997-10-01

This paper presents the development of a general-purpose parallel ocean circulation model, for use on a wide range of computer platforms, from traditional scalar machines to workstation clusters and massively parallel processors. Parallelism is provided, as a modular option, via high-level message-passing routines, thus hiding the technical intricacies from the user. An initial implementation highlights that the parallel efficiency of the model is adversely affected by a number of factors, for which optimisations are discussed and implemented. The resulting ocean code is portable and, in particular, allows science to be achieved on local workstations that could otherwise only be undertaken on state-of-the-art supercomputers.

Parallel integer sorting with medium and fine-scale parallelism

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dagum, Leonardo

1993-01-01

Two new parallel integer sorting algorithms, queue-sort and barrel-sort, are presented and analyzed in detail. These algorithms do not have optimal parallel complexity, yet they show very good performance in practice. Queue-sort designed for fine-scale parallel architectures which allow the queueing of multiple messages to the same destination. Barrel-sort is designed for medium-scale parallel architectures with a high message passing overhead. The performance results from the implementation of queue-sort on a Connection Machine CM-2 and barrel-sort on a 128 processor iPSC/860 are given. The two implementations are found to be comparable in performance but not as good as a fully vectorized bucket sort on the Cray YMP.

RTNN: The New Parallel Machine in Zaragoza

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sijs, A. J. V. D.

I report on the development of RTNN, a parallel computer designed as a 4^4 hypercube of 256 T9000 transputer nodes, each with 8 MB memory. The peak performance of the machine is expected to be 2.5 Gflops.

Parallelization and automatic data distribution for nuclear reactor simulations

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Liebrock, L.M.

1997-07-01

Detailed attempts at realistic nuclear reactor simulations currently take many times real time to execute on high performance workstations. Even the fastest sequential machine can not run these simulations fast enough to ensure that the best corrective measure is used during a nuclear accident to prevent a minor malfunction from becoming a major catastrophe. Since sequential computers have nearly reached the speed of light barrier, these simulations will have to be run in parallel to make significant improvements in speed. In physical reactor plants, parallelism abounds. Fluids flow, controls change, and reactions occur in parallel with only adjacent components directlymore » affecting each other. These do not occur in the sequentialized manner, with global instantaneous effects, that is often used in simulators. Development of parallel algorithms that more closely approximate the real-world operation of a reactor may, in addition to speeding up the simulations, actually improve the accuracy and reliability of the predictions generated. Three types of parallel architecture (shared memory machines, distributed memory multicomputers, and distributed networks) are briefly reviewed as targets for parallelization of nuclear reactor simulation. Various parallelization models (loop-based model, shared memory model, functional model, data parallel model, and a combined functional and data parallel model) are discussed along with their advantages and disadvantages for nuclear reactor simulation. A variety of tools are introduced for each of the models. Emphasis is placed on the data parallel model as the primary focus for two-phase flow simulation. Tools to support data parallel programming for multiple component applications and special parallelization considerations are also discussed.« less

Tile-based Level of Detail for the Parallel Age

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Niski, K; Cohen, J D

Today's PCs incorporate multiple CPUs and GPUs and are easily arranged in clusters for high-performance, interactive graphics. We present an approach based on hierarchical, screen-space tiles to parallelizing rendering with level of detail. Adapt tiles, render tiles, and machine tiles are associated with CPUs, GPUs, and PCs, respectively, to efficiently parallelize the workload with good resource utilization. Adaptive tile sizes provide load balancing while our level of detail system allows total and independent management of the load on CPUs and GPUs. We demonstrate our approach on parallel configurations consisting of both single PCs and a cluster of PCs.

Portable programming on parallel/networked computers using the Application Portable Parallel Library (APPL)

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Quealy, Angela; Cole, Gary L.; Blech, Richard A.

1993-01-01

The Application Portable Parallel Library (APPL) is a subroutine-based library of communication primitives that is callable from applications written in FORTRAN or C. APPL provides a consistent programmer interface to a variety of distributed and shared-memory multiprocessor MIMD machines. The objective of APPL is to minimize the effort required to move parallel applications from one machine to another, or to a network of homogeneous machines. APPL encompasses many of the message-passing primitives that are currently available on commercial multiprocessor systems. This paper describes APPL (version 2.3.1) and its usage, reports the status of the APPL project, and indicates possible directions for the future. Several applications using APPL are discussed, as well as performance and overhead results.

Highly parallel computation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Denning, Peter J.; Tichy, Walter F.

1990-01-01

Highly parallel computing architectures are the only means to achieve the computation rates demanded by advanced scientific problems. A decade of research has demonstrated the feasibility of such machines and current research focuses on which architectures designated as multiple instruction multiple datastream (MIMD) and single instruction multiple datastream (SIMD) have produced the best results to date; neither shows a decisive advantage for most near-homogeneous scientific problems. For scientific problems with many dissimilar parts, more speculative architectures such as neural networks or data flow may be needed.

Improvement of the COP of the LiBr-Water Double-Effect Absorption Cycles

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shitara, Atsushi

Prevention of the global warming has called for a great necessity for energy saving. This applies to the improvement of the COP of absorption chiller-heaters. We started the development of the high efficiency gas-fired double-effect absorption chiller-heater using LiBr-H2O to achieve target performance in short or middle term. To maintain marketability, the volume of the high efficiency machine has been set below the equal to the conventional machine. The absorption cycle technology for improving the COP and the element technology for downsizing the machine is necessary in this development. In this study, the former is investigated. In this report, first of all the target performance has been set at cooling COP of 1.35(on HHV), which is 0.35 higher than the COP of 1.0 for conventional machines in the market. This COP of 1.35 is practically close to the maximum limit achievable by double-effect absorption chiller-heater. Next, the design condition of each element to achieve the target performance and the effect of each mean to improve the COP are investigated. Moreover, as a result of comparing the various flows(series, parallel, reverse)to which the each mean is applied, it has been found the optimum cycle is the parallel flow.

Legacy Code Modernization

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hribar, Michelle R.; Frumkin, Michael; Jin, Haoqiang; Waheed, Abdul; Yan, Jerry; Saini, Subhash (Technical Monitor)

1998-01-01

Over the past decade, high performance computing has evolved rapidly; systems based on commodity microprocessors have been introduced in quick succession from at least seven vendors/families. Porting codes to every new architecture is a difficult problem; in particular, here at NASA, there are many large CFD applications that are very costly to port to new machines by hand. The LCM ("Legacy Code Modernization") Project is the development of an integrated parallelization environment (IPE) which performs the automated mapping of legacy CFD (Fortran) applications to state-of-the-art high performance computers. While most projects to port codes focus on the parallelization of the code, we consider porting to be an iterative process consisting of several steps: 1) code cleanup, 2) serial optimization,3) parallelization, 4) performance monitoring and visualization, 5) intelligent tools for automated tuning using performance prediction and 6) machine specific optimization. The approach for building this parallelization environment is to build the components for each of the steps simultaneously and then integrate them together. The demonstration will exhibit our latest research in building this environment: 1. Parallelizing tools and compiler evaluation. 2. Code cleanup and serial optimization using automated scripts 3. Development of a code generator for performance prediction 4. Automated partitioning 5. Automated insertion of directives. These demonstrations will exhibit the effectiveness of an automated approach for all the steps involved with porting and tuning a legacy code application for a new architecture.

Performance Comparison of a Matrix Solver on a Heterogeneous Network Using Two Implementations of MPI: MPICH and LAM

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Phillips, Jennifer K.

1995-01-01

Two of the current and most popular implementations of the Message-Passing Standard, Message Passing Interface (MPI), were contrasted: MPICH by Argonne National Laboratory, and LAM by the Ohio Supercomputer Center at Ohio State University. A parallel skyline matrix solver was adapted to be run in a heterogeneous environment using MPI. The Message-Passing Interface Forum was held in May 1994 which lead to a specification of library functions that implement the message-passing model of parallel communication. LAM, which creates it's own environment, is more robust in a highly heterogeneous network. MPICH uses the environment native to the machine architecture. While neither of these free-ware implementations provides the performance of native message-passing or vendor's implementations, MPICH begins to approach that performance on the SP-2. The machines used in this study were: IBM RS6000, 3 Sun4, SGI, and the IBM SP-2. Each machine is unique and a few machines required specific modifications during the installation. When installed correctly, both implementations worked well with only minor problems.

Proteus: a reconfigurable computational network for computer vision

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Haralick, Robert M.; Somani, Arun K.; Wittenbrink, Craig M.; Johnson, Robert; Cooper, Kenneth; Shapiro, Linda G.; Phillips, Ihsin T.; Hwang, Jenq N.; Cheung, William; Yao, Yung H.; Chen, Chung-Ho; Yang, Larry; Daugherty, Brian; Lorbeski, Bob; Loving, Kent; Miller, Tom; Parkins, Larye; Soos, Steven L.

1992-04-01

The Proteus architecture is a highly parallel MIMD, multiple instruction, multiple-data machine, optimized for large granularity tasks such as machine vision and image processing The system can achieve 20 Giga-flops (80 Giga-flops peak). It accepts data via multiple serial links at a rate of up to 640 megabytes/second. The system employs a hierarchical reconfigurable interconnection network with the highest level being a circuit switched Enhanced Hypercube serial interconnection network for internal data transfers. The system is designed to use 256 to 1,024 RISC processors. The processors use one megabyte external Read/Write Allocating Caches for reduced multiprocessor contention. The system detects, locates, and replaces faulty subsystems using redundant hardware to facilitate fault tolerance. The parallelism is directly controllable through an advanced software system for partitioning, scheduling, and development. System software includes a translator for the INSIGHT language, a parallel debugger, low and high level simulators, and a message passing system for all control needs. Image processing application software includes a variety of point operators neighborhood, operators, convolution, and the mathematical morphology operations of binary and gray scale dilation, erosion, opening, and closing.

Concurrent computation of attribute filters on shared memory parallel machines.

PubMed

Wilkinson, Michael H F; Gao, Hui; Hesselink, Wim H; Jonker, Jan-Eppo; Meijster, Arnold

2008-10-01

Morphological attribute filters have not previously been parallelized, mainly because they are both global and non-separable. We propose a parallel algorithm that achieves efficient parallelism for a large class of attribute filters, including attribute openings, closings, thinnings and thickenings, based on Salembier's Max-Trees and Min-trees. The image or volume is first partitioned in multiple slices. We then compute the Max-trees of each slice using any sequential Max-Tree algorithm. Subsequently, the Max-trees of the slices can be merged to obtain the Max-tree of the image. A C-implementation yielded good speed-ups on both a 16-processor MIPS 14000 parallel machine, and a dual-core Opteron-based machine. It is shown that the speed-up of the parallel algorithm is a direct measure of the gain with respect to the sequential algorithm used. Furthermore, the concurrent algorithm shows a speed gain of up to 72 percent on a single-core processor, due to reduced cache thrashing.

A real-time MPEG software decoder using a portable message-passing library

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Kwong, Man Kam; Tang, P.T. Peter; Lin, Biquan

1995-12-31

We present a real-time MPEG software decoder that uses message-passing libraries such as MPL, p4 and MPI. The parallel MPEG decoder currently runs on the IBM SP system but can be easil ported to other parallel machines. This paper discusses our parallel MPEG decoding algorithm as well as the parallel programming environment under which it uses. Several technical issues are discussed, including balancing of decoding speed, memory limitation, 1/0 capacities, and optimization of MPEG decoding components. This project shows that a real-time portable software MPEG decoder is feasible in a general-purpose parallel machine.

Solution of a tridiagonal system of equations on the finite element machine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bostic, S. W.

1984-01-01

Two parallel algorithms for the solution of tridiagonal systems of equations were implemented on the Finite Element Machine. The Accelerated Parallel Gauss method, an iterative method, and the Buneman algorithm, a direct method, are discussed and execution statistics are presented.

PISCES: An environment for parallel scientific computation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Pratt, T. W.

1985-01-01

The parallel implementation of scientific computing environment (PISCES) is a project to provide high-level programming environments for parallel MIMD computers. Pisces 1, the first of these environments, is a FORTRAN 77 based environment which runs under the UNIX operating system. The Pisces 1 user programs in Pisces FORTRAN, an extension of FORTRAN 77 for parallel processing. The major emphasis in the Pisces 1 design is in providing a carefully specified virtual machine that defines the run-time environment within which Pisces FORTRAN programs are executed. Each implementation then provides the same virtual machine, regardless of differences in the underlying architecture. The design is intended to be portable to a variety of architectures. Currently Pisces 1 is implemented on a network of Apollo workstations and on a DEC VAX uniprocessor via simulation of the task level parallelism. An implementation for the Flexible Computing Corp. FLEX/32 is under construction. An introduction to the Pisces 1 virtual computer and the FORTRAN 77 extensions is presented. An example of an algorithm for the iterative solution of a system of equations is given. The most notable features of the design are the provision for several granularities of parallelism in programs and the provision of a window mechanism for distributed access to large arrays of data.

Scheduling Jobs with Variable Job Processing Times on Unrelated Parallel Machines

PubMed Central

Zhang, Guang-Qian; Wang, Jian-Jun; Liu, Ya-Jing

2014-01-01

m unrelated parallel machines scheduling problems with variable job processing times are considered, where the processing time of a job is a function of its position in a sequence, its starting time, and its resource allocation. The objective is to determine the optimal resource allocation and the optimal schedule to minimize a total cost function that dependents on the total completion (waiting) time, the total machine load, the total absolute differences in completion (waiting) times on all machines, and total resource cost. If the number of machines is a given constant number, we propose a polynomial time algorithm to solve the problem. PMID:24982933

Implementation of a parallel unstructured Euler solver on the CM-5

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Morano, Eric; Mavriplis, D. J.

1995-01-01

An efficient unstructured 3D Euler solver is parallelized on a Thinking Machine Corporation Connection Machine 5, distributed memory computer with vectoring capability. In this paper, the single instruction multiple data (SIMD) strategy is employed through the use of the CM Fortran language and the CMSSL scientific library. The performance of the CMSSL mesh partitioner is evaluated and the overall efficiency of the parallel flow solver is discussed.

Performance of a plasma fluid code on the Intel parallel computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Lynch, V. E.; Carreras, B. A.; Drake, J. B.; Leboeuf, J. N.; Liewer, P.

1992-01-01

One approach to improving the real-time efficiency of plasma turbulence calculations is to use a parallel algorithm. A parallel algorithm for plasma turbulence calculations was tested on the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube and the Touchtone Delta machine. Using the 128 processors of the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube, a factor of 5 improvement over a single-processor CRAY-2 is obtained. For the Touchtone Delta machine, the corresponding improvement factor is 16. For plasma edge turbulence calculations, an extrapolation of the present results to the Intel (sigma) machine gives an improvement factor close to 64 over the single-processor CRAY-2.

On the suitability of the connection machine for direct particle simulation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dagum, Leonard

1990-01-01

The algorithmic structure was examined of the vectorizable Stanford particle simulation (SPS) method and the structure is reformulated in data parallel form. Some of the SPS algorithms can be directly translated to data parallel, but several of the vectorizable algorithms have no direct data parallel equivalent. This requires the development of new, strictly data parallel algorithms. In particular, a new sorting algorithm is developed to identify collision candidates in the simulation and a master/slave algorithm is developed to minimize communication cost in large table look up. Validation of the method is undertaken through test calculations for thermal relaxation of a gas, shock wave profiles, and shock reflection from a stationary wall. A qualitative measure is provided of the performance of the Connection Machine for direct particle simulation. The massively parallel architecture of the Connection Machine is found quite suitable for this type of calculation. However, there are difficulties in taking full advantage of this architecture because of lack of a broad based tradition of data parallel programming. An important outcome of this work has been new data parallel algorithms specifically of use for direct particle simulation but which also expand the data parallel diction.

Using Multiple Big Datasets and Machine Learning to Produce a New Global Particulate Dataset: A Technology Challenge Case Study

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lary, D. J.

2013-12-01

A BigData case study is described where multiple datasets from several satellites, high-resolution global meteorological data, social media and in-situ observations are combined using machine learning on a distributed cluster using an automated workflow. The global particulate dataset is relevant to global public health studies and would not be possible to produce without the use of the multiple big datasets, in-situ data and machine learning.To greatly reduce the development time and enhance the functionality a high level language capable of parallel processing has been used (Matlab). A key consideration for the system is high speed access due to the large data volume, persistence of the large data volumes and a precise process time scheduling capability.

Study on Parallel 2-DOF Rotation Machanism in Radar

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jiang, Ming; Hu, Xuelong; Liu, Lei; Yu, Yunfei

The spherical parallel machine has become the world's academic and industrial focus of the field in recent years due to its simple and economical manufacture as well as its structural compactness especially suitable for areas where space gesture changes. This paper dwells upon its present research and development home and abroad. The newer machine (RGRR-II) can rotate around the axis z within 360° and the axis y1 from -90° to +90°. It has the advantages such as less moving parts (only 3 parts), larger ratio of work space to machine size, zero mechanic coupling, no singularity. Constructing rotation machine with spherical parallel 2-DOF rotation join (RGRR-II) may realize semispherical movement with zero dead point and extent the range. Control card (PA8000NT Series CNC) is installed in the computer. The card can run the corresponding software which realizes radar movement control. The machine meets the need of radars in plane and satellite which require larger detection range, lighter weight and compacter structure.

Paging memory from random access memory to backing storage in a parallel computer

DOEpatents

Archer, Charles J; Blocksome, Michael A; Inglett, Todd A; Ratterman, Joseph D; Smith, Brian E

2013-05-21

Paging memory from random access memory (`RAM`) to backing storage in a parallel computer that includes a plurality of compute nodes, including: executing a data processing application on a virtual machine operating system in a virtual machine on a first compute node; providing, by a second compute node, backing storage for the contents of RAM on the first compute node; and swapping, by the virtual machine operating system in the virtual machine on the first compute node, a page of memory from RAM on the first compute node to the backing storage on the second compute node.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Li, Ang; Song, Shuaiwen; Brugel, Eric

To continuously comply with Moore’s Law, modern parallel machines become increasingly complex. Effectively tuning application performance for these machines therefore becomes a daunting task. Moreover, identifying performance bottlenecks at application and architecture level, as well as evaluating various optimization strategies, are becoming extremely difficult when the entanglement of numerous correlated factors is being presented. To tackle these challenges, we present a visual analytical model named “X”. It is intuitive and sufficiently flexible to track all the typical features of a parallel machine.

An integrated runtime and compile-time approach for parallelizing structured and block structured applications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Agrawal, Gagan; Sussman, Alan; Saltz, Joel

1993-01-01

Scientific and engineering applications often involve structured meshes. These meshes may be nested (for multigrid codes) and/or irregularly coupled (called multiblock or irregularly coupled regular mesh problems). A combined runtime and compile-time approach for parallelizing these applications on distributed memory parallel machines in an efficient and machine-independent fashion was described. A runtime library which can be used to port these applications on distributed memory machines was designed and implemented. The library is currently implemented on several different systems. To further ease the task of application programmers, methods were developed for integrating this runtime library with compilers for HPK-like parallel programming languages. How this runtime library was integrated with the Fortran 90D compiler being developed at Syracuse University is discussed. Experimental results to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach are presented. A multiblock Navier-Stokes solver template and a multigrid code were experimented with. Our experimental results show that our primitives have low runtime communication overheads. Further, the compiler parallelized codes perform within 20 percent of the code parallelized by manually inserting calls to the runtime library.

The BLAZE language: A parallel language for scientific programming

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mehrotra, P.; Vanrosendale, J.

1985-01-01

A Pascal-like scientific programming language, Blaze, is described. Blaze contains array arithmetic, forall loops, and APL-style accumulation operators, which allow natural expression of fine grained parallelism. It also employs an applicative or functional procedure invocation mechanism, which makes it easy for compilers to extract coarse grained parallelism using machine specific program restructuring. Thus Blaze should allow one to achieve highly parallel execution on multiprocessor architectures, while still providing the user with onceptually sequential control flow. A central goal in the design of Blaze is portability across a broad range of parallel architectures. The multiple levels of parallelism present in Blaze code, in principle, allow a compiler to extract the types of parallelism appropriate for the given architecture while neglecting the remainder. The features of Blaze are described and shows how this language would be used in typical scientific programming.

Efficiently modeling neural networks on massively parallel computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Farber, Robert M.

1993-01-01

Neural networks are a very useful tool for analyzing and modeling complex real world systems. Applying neural network simulations to real world problems generally involves large amounts of data and massive amounts of computation. To efficiently handle the computational requirements of large problems, we have implemented at Los Alamos a highly efficient neural network compiler for serial computers, vector computers, vector parallel computers, and fine grain SIMD computers such as the CM-2 connection machine. This paper describes the mapping used by the compiler to implement feed-forward backpropagation neural networks for a SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) architecture parallel computer. Thinking Machines Corporation has benchmarked our code at 1.3 billion interconnects per second (approximately 3 gigaflops) on a 64,000 processor CM-2 connection machine (Singer 1990). This mapping is applicable to other SIMD computers and can be implemented on MIMD computers such as the CM-5 connection machine. Our mapping has virtually no communications overhead with the exception of the communications required for a global summation across the processors (which has a sub-linear runtime growth on the order of O(log(number of processors)). We can efficiently model very large neural networks which have many neurons and interconnects and our mapping can extend to arbitrarily large networks (within memory limitations) by merging the memory space of separate processors with fast adjacent processor interprocessor communications. This paper will consider the simulation of only feed forward neural network although this method is extendable to recurrent networks.

Automated Solar Module Assembly Line

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bycer, M.

1979-01-01

The gathering of information that led to the design approach of the machine, and a summary of the findings in the areas of study along with a description of each station of the machine are discussed. The machine is a cell stringing and string applique machine which is flexible in design, capable of handling a variety of cells and assembling strings of cells which can then be placed in a matrix up to 4 ft x 2 ft. in series or parallel arrangement. The target machine cycle is to be 5 seconds per cell. This machine is primarily adapted to 100 MM round cells with one or two tabs between cells. It places finished strings of up to twelve cells in a matrix of up to six such strings arranged in series or in parallel.

The Fortran-P Translator: Towards Automatic Translation of Fortran 77 Programs for Massively Parallel Processors

DOE PAGES

O'keefe, Matthew; Parr, Terence; Edgar, B. Kevin; ...

1995-01-01

Massively parallel processors (MPPs) hold the promise of extremely high performance that, if realized, could be used to study problems of unprecedented size and complexity. One of the primary stumbling blocks to this promise has been the lack of tools to translate application codes to MPP form. In this article we show how applications codes written in a subset of Fortran 77, called Fortran-P, can be translated to achieve good performance on several massively parallel machines. This subset can express codes that are self-similar, where the algorithm applied to the global data domain is also applied to each subdomain. Wemore » have found many codes that match the Fortran-P programming style and have converted them using our tools. We believe a self-similar coding style will accomplish what a vectorizable style has accomplished for vector machines by allowing the construction of robust, user-friendly, automatic translation systems that increase programmer productivity and generate fast, efficient code for MPPs.« less

Precision Parameter Estimation and Machine Learning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wandelt, Benjamin D.

2008-12-01

I discuss the strategy of ``Acceleration by Parallel Precomputation and Learning'' (AP-PLe) that can vastly accelerate parameter estimation in high-dimensional parameter spaces and costly likelihood functions, using trivially parallel computing to speed up sequential exploration of parameter space. This strategy combines the power of distributed computing with machine learning and Markov-Chain Monte Carlo techniques efficiently to explore a likelihood function, posterior distribution or χ2-surface. This strategy is particularly successful in cases where computing the likelihood is costly and the number of parameters is moderate or large. We apply this technique to two central problems in cosmology: the solution of the cosmological parameter estimation problem with sufficient accuracy for the Planck data using PICo; and the detailed calculation of cosmological helium and hydrogen recombination with RICO. Since the APPLe approach is designed to be able to use massively parallel resources to speed up problems that are inherently serial, we can bring the power of distributed computing to bear on parameter estimation problems. We have demonstrated this with the CosmologyatHome project.

Highly fault-tolerant parallel computation

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Spielman, D.A.

We re-introduce the coded model of fault-tolerant computation in which the input and output of a computational device are treated as words in an error-correcting code. A computational device correctly computes a function in the coded model if its input and output, once decoded, are a valid input and output of the function. In the coded model, it is reasonable to hope to simulate all computational devices by devices whose size is greater by a constant factor but which are exponentially reliable even if each of their components can fail with some constant probability. We consider fine-grained parallel computations inmore » which each processor has a constant probability of producing the wrong output at each time step. We show that any parallel computation that runs for time t on w processors can be performed reliably on a faulty machine in the coded model using w log{sup O(l)} w processors and time t log{sup O(l)} w. The failure probability of the computation will be at most t {center_dot} exp(-w{sup 1/4}). The codes used to communicate with our fault-tolerant machines are generalized Reed-Solomon codes and can thus be encoded and decoded in O(n log{sup O(1)} n) sequential time and are independent of the machine they are used to communicate with. We also show how coded computation can be used to self-correct many linear functions in parallel with arbitrarily small overhead.« less

Applications and accuracy of the parallel diagonal dominant algorithm

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sun, Xian-He

1993-01-01

The Parallel Diagonal Dominant (PDD) algorithm is a highly efficient, ideally scalable tridiagonal solver. In this paper, a detailed study of the PDD algorithm is given. First the PDD algorithm is introduced. Then the algorithm is extended to solve periodic tridiagonal systems. A variant, the reduced PDD algorithm, is also proposed. Accuracy analysis is provided for a class of tridiagonal systems, the symmetric, and anti-symmetric Toeplitz tridiagonal systems. Implementation results show that the analysis gives a good bound on the relative error, and the algorithm is a good candidate for the emerging massively parallel machines.

Efficient Parallel Algorithm For Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Flows

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Moitra, Stuti; Gatski, Thomas B.

1997-01-01

A distributed algorithm for a high-order-accurate finite-difference approach to the direct numerical simulation (DNS) of transition and turbulence in compressible flows is described. This work has two major objectives. The first objective is to demonstrate that parallel and distributed-memory machines can be successfully and efficiently used to solve computationally intensive and input/output intensive algorithms of the DNS class. The second objective is to show that the computational complexity involved in solving the tridiagonal systems inherent in the DNS algorithm can be reduced by algorithm innovations that obviate the need to use a parallelized tridiagonal solver.

Machine learning for Big Data analytics in plants.

PubMed

Ma, Chuang; Zhang, Hao Helen; Wang, Xiangfeng

2014-12-01

Rapid advances in high-throughput genomic technology have enabled biology to enter the era of 'Big Data' (large datasets). The plant science community not only needs to build its own Big-Data-compatible parallel computing and data management infrastructures, but also to seek novel analytical paradigms to extract information from the overwhelming amounts of data. Machine learning offers promising computational and analytical solutions for the integrative analysis of large, heterogeneous and unstructured datasets on the Big-Data scale, and is gradually gaining popularity in biology. This review introduces the basic concepts and procedures of machine-learning applications and envisages how machine learning could interface with Big Data technology to facilitate basic research and biotechnology in the plant sciences. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Optimized Hypervisor Scheduler for Parallel Discrete Event Simulations on Virtual Machine Platforms

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Yoginath, Srikanth B; Perumalla, Kalyan S

2013-01-01

With the advent of virtual machine (VM)-based platforms for parallel computing, it is now possible to execute parallel discrete event simulations (PDES) over multiple virtual machines, in contrast to executing in native mode directly over hardware as is traditionally done over the past decades. While mature VM-based parallel systems now offer new, compelling benefits such as serviceability, dynamic reconfigurability and overall cost effectiveness, the runtime performance of parallel applications can be significantly affected. In particular, most VM-based platforms are optimized for general workloads, but PDES execution exhibits unique dynamics significantly different from other workloads. Here we first present results frommore » experiments that highlight the gross deterioration of the runtime performance of VM-based PDES simulations when executed using traditional VM schedulers, quantitatively showing the bad scaling properties of the scheduler as the number of VMs is increased. The mismatch is fundamental in nature in the sense that any fairness-based VM scheduler implementation would exhibit this mismatch with PDES runs. We also present a new scheduler optimized specifically for PDES applications, and describe its design and implementation. Experimental results obtained from running PDES benchmarks (PHOLD and vehicular traffic simulations) over VMs show over an order of magnitude improvement in the run time of the PDES-optimized scheduler relative to the regular VM scheduler, with over 20 reduction in run time of simulations using up to 64 VMs. The observations and results are timely in the context of emerging systems such as cloud platforms and VM-based high performance computing installations, highlighting to the community the need for PDES-specific support, and the feasibility of significantly reducing the runtime overhead for scalable PDES on VM platforms.« less

Ion beam figuring of highly steep mirrors with a 5-axis hybrid machine tool

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yin, Xiaolin; Tang, Wa; Hu, Haixiang; Zeng, Xuefeng; Wang, Dekang; Xue, Donglin; Zhang, Feng; Deng, Weijie; Zhang, Xuejun

2018-02-01

Ion beam figuring (IBF) is an advanced and deterministic method for optical mirror surface processing. The removal function of IBF varies with the different incident angles of ion beam. Therefore, for the curved surface especially the highly steep one, the Ion Beam Source (IBS) should be equipped with 5-axis machining capability to remove the material along the normal direction of the mirror surface, so as to ensure the stability of the removal function. Based on the 3-RPS parallel mechanism and two dimensional displacement platform, a new type of 5-axis hybrid machine tool for IBF is presented. With the hybrid machine tool, the figuring process of a highly steep fused silica spherical mirror is introduced. The R/# of the mirror is 0.96 and the aperture is 104mm. The figuring result shows that, PV value of the mirror surface error is converged from 121.1nm to32.3nm, and RMS value 23.6nm to 3.4nm.

Fast Fourier Transform algorithm design and tradeoffs

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Kamin, Ray A., III; Adams, George B., III

1988-01-01

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a mainstay of certain numerical techniques for solving fluid dynamics problems. The Connection Machine CM-2 is the target for an investigation into the design of multidimensional Single Instruction Stream/Multiple Data (SIMD) parallel FFT algorithms for high performance. Critical algorithm design issues are discussed, necessary machine performance measurements are identified and made, and the performance of the developed FFT programs are measured. Fast Fourier Transform programs are compared to the currently best Cray-2 FFT program.

Genetic Parallel Programming: design and implementation.

PubMed

Cheang, Sin Man; Leung, Kwong Sak; Lee, Kin Hong

2006-01-01

This paper presents a novel Genetic Parallel Programming (GPP) paradigm for evolving parallel programs running on a Multi-Arithmetic-Logic-Unit (Multi-ALU) Processor (MAP). The MAP is a Multiple Instruction-streams, Multiple Data-streams (MIMD), general-purpose register machine that can be implemented on modern Very Large-Scale Integrated Circuits (VLSIs) in order to evaluate genetic programs at high speed. For human programmers, writing parallel programs is more difficult than writing sequential programs. However, experimental results show that GPP evolves parallel programs with less computational effort than that of their sequential counterparts. It creates a new approach to evolving a feasible problem solution in parallel program form and then serializes it into a sequential program if required. The effectiveness and efficiency of GPP are investigated using a suite of 14 well-studied benchmark problems. Experimental results show that GPP speeds up evolution substantially.

The BLAZE language - A parallel language for scientific programming

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mehrotra, Piyush; Van Rosendale, John

1987-01-01

A Pascal-like scientific programming language, BLAZE, is described. BLAZE contains array arithmetic, forall loops, and APL-style accumulation operators, which allow natural expression of fine grained parallelism. It also employs an applicative or functional procedure invocation mechanism, which makes it easy for compilers to extract coarse grained parallelism using machine specific program restructuring. Thus BLAZE should allow one to achieve highly parallel execution on multiprocessor architectures, while still providing the user with conceptually sequential control flow. A central goal in the design of BLAZE is portability across a broad range of parallel architectures. The multiple levels of parallelism present in BLAZE code, in principle, allow a compiler to extract the types of parallelism appropriate for the given architecture while neglecting the remainder. The features of BLAZE are described and it is shown how this language would be used in typical scientific programming.

Applications of Parallel Computation in Micro-Mechanics and Finite Element Method

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Tan, Hui-Qian

1996-01-01

This project discusses the application of parallel computations related with respect to material analyses. Briefly speaking, we analyze some kind of material by elements computations. We call an element a cell here. A cell is divided into a number of subelements called subcells and all subcells in a cell have the identical structure. The detailed structure will be given later in this paper. It is obvious that the problem is "well-structured". SIMD machine would be a better choice. In this paper we try to look into the potentials of SIMD machine in dealing with finite element computation by developing appropriate algorithms on MasPar, a SIMD parallel machine. In section 2, the architecture of MasPar will be discussed. A brief review of the parallel programming language MPL also is given in that section. In section 3, some general parallel algorithms which might be useful to the project will be proposed. And, combining with the algorithms, some features of MPL will be discussed in more detail. In section 4, the computational structure of cell/subcell model will be given. The idea of designing the parallel algorithm for the model will be demonstrated. Finally in section 5, a summary will be given.

The R package "sperrorest" : Parallelized spatial error estimation and variable importance assessment for geospatial machine learning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Schratz, Patrick; Herrmann, Tobias; Brenning, Alexander

2017-04-01

Computational and statistical prediction methods such as the support vector machine have gained popularity in remote-sensing applications in recent years and are often compared to more traditional approaches like maximum-likelihood classification. However, the accuracy assessment of such predictive models in a spatial context needs to account for the presence of spatial autocorrelation in geospatial data by using spatial cross-validation and bootstrap strategies instead of their now more widely used non-spatial equivalent. The R package sperrorest by A. Brenning [IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 1, 374 (2012)] provides a generic interface for performing (spatial) cross-validation of any statistical or machine-learning technique available in R. Since spatial statistical models as well as flexible machine-learning algorithms can be computationally expensive, parallel computing strategies are required to perform cross-validation efficiently. The most recent major release of sperrorest therefore comes with two new features (aside from improved documentation): The first one is the parallelized version of sperrorest(), parsperrorest(). This function features two parallel modes to greatly speed up cross-validation runs. Both parallel modes are platform independent and provide progress information. par.mode = 1 relies on the pbapply package and calls interactively (depending on the platform) parallel::mclapply() or parallel::parApply() in the background. While forking is used on Unix-Systems, Windows systems use a cluster approach for parallel execution. par.mode = 2 uses the foreach package to perform parallelization. This method uses a different way of cluster parallelization than the parallel package does. In summary, the robustness of parsperrorest() is increased with the implementation of two independent parallel modes. A new way of partitioning the data in sperrorest is provided by partition.factor.cv(). This function gives the user the possibility to perform cross-validation at the level of some grouping structure. As an example, in remote sensing of agricultural land uses, pixels from the same field contain nearly identical information and will thus be jointly placed in either the test set or the training set. Other spatial sampling resampling strategies are already available and can be extended by the user.

Parallel performance investigations of an unstructured mesh Navier-Stokes solver

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mavriplis, Dimitri J.

2000-01-01

A Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solver based on unstructured mesh techniques for analysis of high-lift configurations is described. The method makes use of an agglomeration multigrid solver for convergence acceleration. Implicit line-smoothing is employed to relieve the stiffness associated with highly stretched meshes. A GMRES technique is also implemented to speed convergence at the expense of additional memory usage. The solver is cache efficient and fully vectorizable, and is parallelized using a two-level hybrid MPI-OpenMP implementation suitable for shared and/or distributed memory architectures, as well as clusters of shared memory machines. Convergence and scalability results are illustrated for various high-lift cases.

Parallelized direct execution simulation of message-passing parallel programs

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dickens, Phillip M.; Heidelberger, Philip; Nicol, David M.

1994-01-01

As massively parallel computers proliferate, there is growing interest in findings ways by which performance of massively parallel codes can be efficiently predicted. This problem arises in diverse contexts such as parallelizing computers, parallel performance monitoring, and parallel algorithm development. In this paper we describe one solution where one directly executes the application code, but uses a discrete-event simulator to model details of the presumed parallel machine such as operating system and communication network behavior. Because this approach is computationally expensive, we are interested in its own parallelization specifically the parallelization of the discrete-event simulator. We describe methods suitable for parallelized direct execution simulation of message-passing parallel programs, and report on the performance of such a system, Large Application Parallel Simulation Environment (LAPSE), we have built on the Intel Paragon. On all codes measured to date, LAPSE predicts performance well typically within 10 percent relative error. Depending on the nature of the application code, we have observed low slowdowns (relative to natively executing code) and high relative speedups using up to 64 processors.

System software for the finite element machine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Crockett, T. W.; Knott, J. D.

1985-01-01

The Finite Element Machine is an experimental parallel computer developed at Langley Research Center to investigate the application of concurrent processing to structural engineering analysis. This report describes system-level software which has been developed to facilitate use of the machine by applications researchers. The overall software design is outlined, and several important parallel processing issues are discussed in detail, including processor management, communication, synchronization, and input/output. Based on experience using the system, the hardware architecture and software design are critiqued, and areas for further work are suggested.

Solving the Cauchy-Riemann equations on parallel computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Fatoohi, Raad A.; Grosch, Chester E.

1987-01-01

Discussed is the implementation of a single algorithm on three parallel-vector computers. The algorithm is a relaxation scheme for the solution of the Cauchy-Riemann equations; a set of coupled first order partial differential equations. The computers were chosen so as to encompass a variety of architectures. They are: the MPP, and SIMD machine with 16K bit serial processors; FLEX/32, an MIMD machine with 20 processors; and CRAY/2, an MIMD machine with four vector processors. The machine architectures are briefly described. The implementation of the algorithm is discussed in relation to these architectures and measures of the performance on each machine are given. Simple performance models are used to describe the performance. These models highlight the bottlenecks and limiting factors for this algorithm on these architectures. Conclusions are presented.

Parallel implementation of D-Phylo algorithm for maximum likelihood clusters.

PubMed

Malik, Shamita; Sharma, Dolly; Khatri, Sunil Kumar

2017-03-01

This study explains a newly developed parallel algorithm for phylogenetic analysis of DNA sequences. The newly designed D-Phylo is a more advanced algorithm for phylogenetic analysis using maximum likelihood approach. The D-Phylo while misusing the seeking capacity of k -means keeps away from its real constraint of getting stuck at privately conserved motifs. The authors have tested the behaviour of D-Phylo on Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image(Hardware Virtual Machine)i2.4xlarge, six central processing unit, 122 GiB memory, 8  ×  800 Solid-state drive Elastic Block Store volume, high network performance up to 15 processors for several real-life datasets. Distributing the clusters evenly on all the processors provides us the capacity to accomplish a near direct speed if there should arise an occurrence of huge number of processors.

DCL System Using Deep Learning Approaches for Land-based or Ship-based Real-Time Recognition and Localization of Marine Mammals

DTIC Science & Technology

2012-09-30

platform (HPC) was developed, called the HPC-Acoustic Data Accelerator, or HPC-ADA for short. The HPC-ADA was designed based on fielded systems [1-4...software (Detection cLassificaiton for MAchine learning - High Peformance Computing). The software package was designed to utilize parallel and...Sedna [7] and is designed using a parallel architecture2, allowing existing algorithms to distribute to the various processing nodes with minimal changes

Execution models for mapping programs onto distributed memory parallel computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sussman, Alan

1992-01-01

The problem of exploiting the parallelism available in a program to efficiently employ the resources of the target machine is addressed. The problem is discussed in the context of building a mapping compiler for a distributed memory parallel machine. The paper describes using execution models to drive the process of mapping a program in the most efficient way onto a particular machine. Through analysis of the execution models for several mapping techniques for one class of programs, we show that the selection of the best technique for a particular program instance can make a significant difference in performance. On the other hand, the results of benchmarks from an implementation of a mapping compiler show that our execution models are accurate enough to select the best mapping technique for a given program.

Parallel computing using a Lagrangian formulation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Liou, May-Fun; Loh, Ching Yuen

1991-01-01

A new Lagrangian formulation of the Euler equation is adopted for the calculation of 2-D supersonic steady flow. The Lagrangian formulation represents the inherent parallelism of the flow field better than the common Eulerian formulation and offers a competitive alternative on parallel computers. The implementation of the Lagrangian formulation on the Thinking Machines Corporation CM-2 Computer is described. The program uses a finite volume, first-order Godunov scheme and exhibits high accuracy in dealing with multidimensional discontinuities (slip-line and shock). By using this formulation, a better than six times speed-up was achieved on a 8192-processor CM-2 over a single processor of a CRAY-2.

Parallel computing using a Lagrangian formulation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Liou, May-Fun; Loh, Ching-Yuen

1992-01-01

This paper adopts a new Lagrangian formulation of the Euler equation for the calculation of two dimensional supersonic steady flow. The Lagrangian formulation represents the inherent parallelism of the flow field better than the common Eulerian formulation and offers a competitive alternative on parallel computers. The implementation of the Lagrangian formulation on the Thinking Machines Corporation CM-2 Computer is described. The program uses a finite volume, first-order Godunov scheme and exhibits high accuracy in dealing with multidimensional discontinuities (slip-line and shock). By using this formulation, we have achieved better than six times speed-up on a 8192-processor CM-2 over a single processor of a CRAY-2.

Parallel computing works

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Not Available

An account of the Caltech Concurrent Computation Program (C{sup 3}P), a five year project that focused on answering the question: Can parallel computers be used to do large-scale scientific computations '' As the title indicates, the question is answered in the affirmative, by implementing numerous scientific applications on real parallel computers and doing computations that produced new scientific results. In the process of doing so, C{sup 3}P helped design and build several new computers, designed and implemented basic system software, developed algorithms for frequently used mathematical computations on massively parallel machines, devised performance models and measured the performance of manymore » computers, and created a high performance computing facility based exclusively on parallel computers. While the initial focus of C{sup 3}P was the hypercube architecture developed by C. Seitz, many of the methods developed and lessons learned have been applied successfully on other massively parallel architectures.« less

Parallel multigrid smoothing: polynomial versus Gauss-Seidel

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Adams, Mark; Brezina, Marian; Hu, Jonathan; Tuminaro, Ray

2003-07-01

Gauss-Seidel is often the smoother of choice within multigrid applications. In the context of unstructured meshes, however, maintaining good parallel efficiency is difficult with multiplicative iterative methods such as Gauss-Seidel. This leads us to consider alternative smoothers. We discuss the computational advantages of polynomial smoothers within parallel multigrid algorithms for positive definite symmetric systems. Two particular polynomials are considered: Chebyshev and a multilevel specific polynomial. The advantages of polynomial smoothing over traditional smoothers such as Gauss-Seidel are illustrated on several applications: Poisson's equation, thin-body elasticity, and eddy current approximations to Maxwell's equations. While parallelizing the Gauss-Seidel method typically involves a compromise between a scalable convergence rate and maintaining high flop rates, polynomial smoothers achieve parallel scalable multigrid convergence rates without sacrificing flop rates. We show that, although parallel computers are the main motivation, polynomial smoothers are often surprisingly competitive with Gauss-Seidel smoothers on serial machines.

Scheduling for Parallel Supercomputing: A Historical Perspective of Achievable Utilization

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jones, James Patton; Nitzberg, Bill

1999-01-01

The NAS facility has operated parallel supercomputers for the past 11 years, including the Intel iPSC/860, Intel Paragon, Thinking Machines CM-5, IBM SP-2, and Cray Origin 2000. Across this wide variety of machine architectures, across a span of 10 years, across a large number of different users, and through thousands of minor configuration and policy changes, the utilization of these machines shows three general trends: (1) scheduling using a naive FIFO first-fit policy results in 40-60% utilization, (2) switching to the more sophisticated dynamic backfilling scheduling algorithm improves utilization by about 15 percentage points (yielding about 70% utilization), and (3) reducing the maximum allowable job size further increases utilization. Most surprising is the consistency of these trends. Over the lifetime of the NAS parallel systems, we made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small changes to hardware, software, and policy, yet, utilization was affected little. In particular these results show that the goal of achieving near 100% utilization while supporting a real parallel supercomputing workload is unrealistic.

Specification and Analysis of Parallel Machine Architecture

DTIC Science & Technology

1990-03-17

Parallel Machine Architeture C.V. Ramamoorthy Computer Science Division Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of California...capacity. (4) Adaptive: The overhead in resolution of deadlocks, etc. should be in proportion to their frequency. (5) Avoid rollbacks: Rollbacks can be...snapshots of system state graphically at a rate proportional to simulation time. Some of the examples are as follow: (1) When the simulation clock of

Trajectory Tracking of a Planer Parallel Manipulator by Using Computed Force Control Method

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bayram, Atilla

2017-03-01

Despite small workspace, parallel manipulators have some advantages over their serial counterparts in terms of higher speed, acceleration, rigidity, accuracy, manufacturing cost and payload. Accordingly, this type of manipulators can be used in many applications such as in high-speed machine tools, tuning machine for feeding, sensitive cutting, assembly and packaging. This paper presents a special type of planar parallel manipulator with three degrees of freedom. It is constructed as a variable geometry truss generally known planar Stewart platform. The reachable and orientation workspaces are obtained for this manipulator. The inverse kinematic analysis is solved for the trajectory tracking according to the redundancy and joint limit avoidance. Then, the dynamics model of the manipulator is established by using Virtual Work method. The simulations are performed to follow the given planar trajectories by using the dynamic equations of the variable geometry truss manipulator and computed force control method. In computed force control method, the feedback gain matrices for PD control are tuned with fixed matrices by trail end error and variable ones by means of optimization with genetic algorithm.

Supercomputing on massively parallel bit-serial architectures

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Iobst, Ken

1985-01-01

Research on the Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) suggests that high-level parallel languages are practical and can be designed with powerful new semantics that allow algorithms to be efficiently mapped to the real machines. For the MPP these semantics include parallel/associative array selection for both dense and sparse matrices, variable precision arithmetic to trade accuracy for speed, micro-pipelined train broadcast, and conditional branching at the processing element (PE) control unit level. The preliminary design of a FORTRAN-like parallel language for the MPP has been completed and is being used to write programs to perform sparse matrix array selection, min/max search, matrix multiplication, Gaussian elimination on single bit arrays and other generic algorithms. A description is given of the MPP design. Features of the system and its operation are illustrated in the form of charts and diagrams.

Runtime support for parallelizing data mining algorithms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jin, Ruoming; Agrawal, Gagan

2002-03-01

With recent technological advances, shared memory parallel machines have become more scalable, and offer large main memories and high bus bandwidths. They are emerging as good platforms for data warehousing and data mining. In this paper, we focus on shared memory parallelization of data mining algorithms. We have developed a series of techniques for parallelization of data mining algorithms, including full replication, full locking, fixed locking, optimized full locking, and cache-sensitive locking. Unlike previous work on shared memory parallelization of specific data mining algorithms, all of our techniques apply to a large number of common data mining algorithms. In addition, we propose a reduction-object based interface for specifying a data mining algorithm. We show how our runtime system can apply any of the technique we have developed starting from a common specification of the algorithm.

Architectures for reasoning in parallel

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hall, Lawrence O.

1989-01-01

The research conducted has dealt with rule-based expert systems. The algorithms that may lead to effective parallelization of them were investigated. Both the forward and backward chained control paradigms were investigated in the course of this work. The best computer architecture for the developed and investigated algorithms has been researched. Two experimental vehicles were developed to facilitate this research. They are Backpac, a parallel backward chained rule-based reasoning system and Datapac, a parallel forward chained rule-based reasoning system. Both systems have been written in Multilisp, a version of Lisp which contains the parallel construct, future. Applying the future function to a function causes the function to become a task parallel to the spawning task. Additionally, Backpac and Datapac have been run on several disparate parallel processors. The machines are an Encore Multimax with 10 processors, the Concert Multiprocessor with 64 processors, and a 32 processor BBN GP1000. Both the Concert and the GP1000 are switch-based machines. The Multimax has all its processors hung off a common bus. All are shared memory machines, but have different schemes for sharing the memory and different locales for the shared memory. The main results of the investigations come from experiments on the 10 processor Encore and the Concert with partitions of 32 or less processors. Additionally, experiments have been run with a stripped down version of EMYCIN.

A parallel-machine scheduling problem with two competing agents

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lee, Wen-Chiung; Chung, Yu-Hsiang; Wang, Jen-Ya

2017-06-01

Scheduling with two competing agents has become popular in recent years. Most of the research has focused on single-machine problems. This article considers a parallel-machine problem, the objective of which is to minimize the total completion time of jobs from the first agent given that the maximum tardiness of jobs from the second agent cannot exceed an upper bound. The NP-hardness of this problem is also examined. A genetic algorithm equipped with local search is proposed to search for the near-optimal solution. Computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed genetic algorithm.

On the relationship between parallel computation and graph embedding

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Gupta, A.K.

1989-01-01

The problem of efficiently simulating an algorithm designed for an n-processor parallel machine G on an m-processor parallel machine H with n > m arises when parallel algorithms designed for an ideal size machine are simulated on existing machines which are of a fixed size. The author studies this problem when every processor of H takes over the function of a number of processors in G, and he phrases the simulation problem as a graph embedding problem. New embeddings presented address relevant issues arising from the parallel computation environment. The main focus centers around embedding complete binary trees into smaller-sizedmore » binary trees, butterflies, and hypercubes. He also considers simultaneous embeddings of r source machines into a single hypercube. Constant factors play a crucial role in his embeddings since they are not only important in practice but also lead to interesting theoretical problems. All of his embeddings minimize dilation and load, which are the conventional cost measures in graph embeddings and determine the maximum amount of time required to simulate one step of G on H. His embeddings also optimize a new cost measure called ({alpha},{beta})-utilization which characterizes how evenly the processors of H are used by the processors of G. Ideally, the utilization should be balanced (i.e., every processor of H simulates at most (n/m) processors of G) and the ({alpha},{beta})-utilization measures how far off from a balanced utilization the embedding is. He presents embeddings for the situation when some processors of G have different capabilities (e.g. memory or I/O) than others and the processors with different capabilities are to be distributed uniformly among the processors of H. Placing such conditions on an embedding results in an increase in some of the cost measures.« less

Parallel Preconditioning for CFD Problems on the CM-5

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Simon, Horst D.; Kremenetsky, Mark D.; Richardson, John; Lasinski, T. A. (Technical Monitor)

1994-01-01

Up to today, preconditioning methods on massively parallel systems have faced a major difficulty. The most successful preconditioning methods in terms of accelerating the convergence of the iterative solver such as incomplete LU factorizations are notoriously difficult to implement on parallel machines for two reasons: (1) the actual computation of the preconditioner is not very floating-point intensive, but requires a large amount of unstructured communication, and (2) the application of the preconditioning matrix in the iteration phase (i.e. triangular solves) are difficult to parallelize because of the recursive nature of the computation. Here we present a new approach to preconditioning for very large, sparse, unsymmetric, linear systems, which avoids both difficulties. We explicitly compute an approximate inverse to our original matrix. This new preconditioning matrix can be applied most efficiently for iterative methods on massively parallel machines, since the preconditioning phase involves only a matrix-vector multiplication, with possibly a dense matrix. Furthermore the actual computation of the preconditioning matrix has natural parallelism. For a problem of size n, the preconditioning matrix can be computed by solving n independent small least squares problems. The algorithm and its implementation on the Connection Machine CM-5 are discussed in detail and supported by extensive timings obtained from real problem data.

T.Node, industrial version of supernode

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Flieller, Sylvain

1989-12-01

The Esprit I P1085 "SuperNode" project developed a modular reconfigurable archtecture, based on transputers. This highly parallel machine is now marketed by Telmat Informatique under the name T.Node. This paper presents the P1085 project, the architecture of SuperNode, its industrial implementation and its software enviroment.

By Hand or Not By-Hand: A Case Study of Alternative Approaches to Parallelize CFD Applications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Yan, Jerry C.; Bailey, David (Technical Monitor)

1997-01-01

While parallel processing promises to speed up applications by several orders of magnitude, the performance achieved still depends upon several factors, including the multiprocessor architecture, system software, data distribution and alignment, as well as the methods used for partitioning the application and mapping its components onto the architecture. The existence of the Gorden Bell Prize given out at Supercomputing every year suggests that while good performance can be attained for real applications on general purpose multiprocessors, the large investment in man-power and time still has to be repeated for each application-machine combination. As applications and machine architectures become more complex, the cost and time-delays for obtaining performance by hand will become prohibitive. Computer users today can turn to three possible avenues for help: parallel libraries, parallel languages and compilers, interactive parallelization tools. The success of these methodologies, in turn, depends on proper application of data dependency analysis, program structure recognition and transformation, performance prediction as well as exploitation of user supplied knowledge. NASA has been developing multidisciplinary applications on highly parallel architectures under the High Performance Computing and Communications Program. Over the past six years, the transition of underlying hardware and system software have forced the scientists to spend a large effort to migrate and recede their applications. Various attempts to exploit software tools to automate the parallelization process have not produced favorable results. In this paper, we report our most recent experience with CAPTOOL, a package developed at Greenwich University. We have chosen CAPTOOL for three reasons: 1. CAPTOOL accepts a FORTRAN 77 program as input. This suggests its potential applicability to a large collection of legacy codes currently in use. 2. CAPTOOL employs domain decomposition to obtain parallelism. Although the fact that not all kinds of parallelism are handled may seem unappealing, many NASA applications in computational aerosciences as well as earth and space sciences are amenable to domain decomposition. 3. CAPTOOL generates code for a large variety of environments employed across NASA centers: MPI/PVM on network of workstations to the IBS/SP2 and CRAY/T3D.

Multi-objective problem of the modified distributed parallel machine and assembly scheduling problem (MDPMASP) with eligibility constraints

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Amallynda, I.; Santosa, B.

2017-11-01

This paper proposes a new generalization of the distributed parallel machine and assembly scheduling problem (DPMASP) with eligibility constraints referred to as the modified distributed parallel machine and assembly scheduling problem (MDPMASP) with eligibility constraints. Within this generalization, we assume that there are a set non-identical factories or production lines, each one with a set unrelated parallel machine with different speeds in processing them disposed to a single assembly machine in series. A set of different products that are manufactured through an assembly program of a set of components (jobs) according to the requested demand. Each product requires several kinds of jobs with different sizes. Beside that we also consider to the multi-objective problem (MOP) of minimizing mean flow time and the number of tardy products simultaneously. This is known to be NP-Hard problem, is important to practice, as the former criterions to reflect the customer's demand and manufacturer's perspective. This is a realistic and complex problem with wide range of possible solutions, we propose four simple heuristics and two metaheuristics to solve it. Various parameters of the proposed metaheuristic algorithms are discussed and calibrated by means of Taguchi technique. All proposed algorithms are tested by Matlab software. Our computational experiments indicate that the proposed problem and fourth proposed algorithms are able to be implemented and can be used to solve moderately-sized instances, and giving efficient solutions, which are close to optimum in most cases.

Computer-Aided Parallelizer and Optimizer

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jin, Haoqiang

2011-01-01

The Computer-Aided Parallelizer and Optimizer (CAPO) automates the insertion of compiler directives (see figure) to facilitate parallel processing on Shared Memory Parallel (SMP) machines. While CAPO currently is integrated seamlessly into CAPTools (developed at the University of Greenwich, now marketed as ParaWise), CAPO was independently developed at Ames Research Center as one of the components for the Legacy Code Modernization (LCM) project. The current version takes serial FORTRAN programs, performs interprocedural data dependence analysis, and generates OpenMP directives. Due to the widely supported OpenMP standard, the generated OpenMP codes have the potential to run on a wide range of SMP machines. CAPO relies on accurate interprocedural data dependence information currently provided by CAPTools. Compiler directives are generated through identification of parallel loops in the outermost level, construction of parallel regions around parallel loops and optimization of parallel regions, and insertion of directives with automatic identification of private, reduction, induction, and shared variables. Attempts also have been made to identify potential pipeline parallelism (implemented with point-to-point synchronization). Although directives are generated automatically, user interaction with the tool is still important for producing good parallel codes. A comprehensive graphical user interface is included for users to interact with the parallelization process.

An efficient 3-dim FFT for plane wave electronic structure calculations on massively parallel machines composed of multiprocessor nodes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Goedecker, Stefan; Boulet, Mireille; Deutsch, Thierry

2003-08-01

Three-dimensional Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) are the main computational task in plane wave electronic structure calculations. Obtaining a high performance on a large numbers of processors is non-trivial on the latest generation of parallel computers that consist of nodes made up of a shared memory multiprocessors. A non-dogmatic method for obtaining high performance for such 3-dim FFTs in a combined MPI/OpenMP programming paradigm will be presented. Exploiting the peculiarities of plane wave electronic structure calculations, speedups of up to 160 and speeds of up to 130 Gflops were obtained on 256 processors.

Seeing the forest for the trees: Networked workstations as a parallel processing computer

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Breen, J. O.; Meleedy, D. M.

1992-01-01

Unlike traditional 'serial' processing computers in which one central processing unit performs one instruction at a time, parallel processing computers contain several processing units, thereby, performing several instructions at once. Many of today's fastest supercomputers achieve their speed by employing thousands of processing elements working in parallel. Few institutions can afford these state-of-the-art parallel processors, but many already have the makings of a modest parallel processing system. Workstations on existing high-speed networks can be harnessed as nodes in a parallel processing environment, bringing the benefits of parallel processing to many. While such a system can not rival the industry's latest machines, many common tasks can be accelerated greatly by spreading the processing burden and exploiting idle network resources. We study several aspects of this approach, from algorithms to select nodes to speed gains in specific tasks. With ever-increasing volumes of astronomical data, it becomes all the more necessary to utilize our computing resources fully.

A fast sorting algorithm for a hypersonic rarefied flow particle simulation on the connection machine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dagum, Leonardo

1989-01-01

The data parallel implementation of a particle simulation for hypersonic rarefied flow described by Dagum associates a single parallel data element with each particle in the simulation. The simulated space is divided into discrete regions called cells containing a variable and constantly changing number of particles. The implementation requires a global sort of the parallel data elements so as to arrange them in an order that allows immediate access to the information associated with cells in the simulation. Described here is a very fast algorithm for performing the necessary ranking of the parallel data elements. The performance of the new algorithm is compared with that of the microcoded instruction for ranking on the Connection Machine.

Performance Comparison of a Set of Periodic and Non-Periodic Tridiagonal Solvers on SP2 and Paragon Parallel Computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sun, Xian-He; Moitra, Stuti

1996-01-01

Various tridiagonal solvers have been proposed in recent years for different parallel platforms. In this paper, the performance of three tridiagonal solvers, namely, the parallel partition LU algorithm, the parallel diagonal dominant algorithm, and the reduced diagonal dominant algorithm, is studied. These algorithms are designed for distributed-memory machines and are tested on an Intel Paragon and an IBM SP2 machines. Measured results are reported in terms of execution time and speedup. Analytical study are conducted for different communication topologies and for different tridiagonal systems. The measured results match the analytical results closely. In addition to address implementation issues, performance considerations such as problem sizes and models of speedup are also discussed.

Single product lot-sizing on unrelated parallel machines with non-decreasing processing times

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Eremeev, A.; Kovalyov, M.; Kuznetsov, P.

2018-01-01

We consider a problem in which at least a given quantity of a single product has to be partitioned into lots, and lots have to be assigned to unrelated parallel machines for processing. In one version of the problem, the maximum machine completion time should be minimized, in another version of the problem, the sum of machine completion times is to be minimized. Machine-dependent lower and upper bounds on the lot size are given. The product is either assumed to be continuously divisible or discrete. The processing time of each machine is defined by an increasing function of the lot volume, given as an oracle. Setup times and costs are assumed to be negligibly small, and therefore, they are not considered. We derive optimal polynomial time algorithms for several special cases of the problem. An NP-hard case is shown to admit a fully polynomial time approximation scheme. An application of the problem in energy efficient processors scheduling is considered.

A parallel finite-difference method for computational aerodynamics

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Swisshelm, Julie M.

1989-01-01

A finite-difference scheme for solving complex three-dimensional aerodynamic flow on parallel-processing supercomputers is presented. The method consists of a basic flow solver with multigrid convergence acceleration, embedded grid refinements, and a zonal equation scheme. Multitasking and vectorization have been incorporated into the algorithm. Results obtained include multiprocessed flow simulations from the Cray X-MP and Cray-2. Speedups as high as 3.3 for the two-dimensional case and 3.5 for segments of the three-dimensional case have been achieved on the Cray-2. The entire solver attained a factor of 2.7 improvement over its unitasked version on the Cray-2. The performance of the parallel algorithm on each machine is analyzed.

A performance study of sparse Cholesky factorization on INTEL iPSC/860

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Zubair, M.; Ghose, M.

1992-01-01

The problem of Cholesky factorization of a sparse matrix has been very well investigated on sequential machines. A number of efficient codes exist for factorizing large unstructured sparse matrices. However, there is a lack of such efficient codes on parallel machines in general, and distributed machines in particular. Some of the issues that are critical to the implementation of sparse Cholesky factorization on a distributed memory parallel machine are ordering, partitioning and mapping, load balancing, and ordering of various tasks within a processor. Here, we focus on the effect of various partitioning schemes on the performance of sparse Cholesky factorization on the Intel iPSC/860. Also, a new partitioning heuristic for structured as well as unstructured sparse matrices is proposed, and its performance is compared with other schemes.

FEM analysis of an single stator dual PM rotors axial synchronous machine

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tutelea, L. N.; Deaconu, S. I.; Popa, G. N.

2017-01-01

The actual e - continuously variable transmission (e-CVT) solution for the parallel Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) requires two electric machines, two inverters, and a planetary gear. A distinct electric generator and a propulsion electric motor, both with full power converters, are typical for a series HEV. In an effort to simplify the planetary-geared e-CVT for the parallel HEV or the series HEV we hereby propose to replace the basically two electric machines and their two power converters by a single, axial-air-gap, electric machine central stator, fed from a single PWM converter with dual frequency voltage output and two independent PM rotors. The proposed topologies, the magneto-motive force analysis and quasi 3D-FEM analysis are the core of the paper.

Machining heavy plastic sections

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Stalkup, O. M.

1967-01-01

Machining technique produces consistently satisfactory plane-parallel optical surfaces for pressure windows, made of plexiglass, required to support a photographic study of liquid rocket combustion processes. The surfaces are machined and polished to the required tolerances and show no degradation from stress relaxation over periods as long as 6 months.

The science of computing - The evolution of parallel processing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Denning, P. J.

1985-01-01

The present paper is concerned with the approaches to be employed to overcome the set of limitations in software technology which impedes currently an effective use of parallel hardware technology. The process required to solve the arising problems is found to involve four different stages. At the present time, Stage One is nearly finished, while Stage Two is under way. Tentative explorations are beginning on Stage Three, and Stage Four is more distant. In Stage One, parallelism is introduced into the hardware of a single computer, which consists of one or more processors, a main storage system, a secondary storage system, and various peripheral devices. In Stage Two, parallel execution of cooperating programs on different machines becomes explicit, while in Stage Three, new languages will make parallelism implicit. In Stage Four, there will be very high level user interfaces capable of interacting with scientists at the same level of abstraction as scientists do with each other.

Parallel processors and nonlinear structural dynamics algorithms and software

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Belytschko, Ted; Gilbertsen, Noreen D.; Neal, Mark O.; Plaskacz, Edward J.

1989-01-01

The adaptation of a finite element program with explicit time integration to a massively parallel SIMD (single instruction multiple data) computer, the CONNECTION Machine is described. The adaptation required the development of a new algorithm, called the exchange algorithm, in which all nodal variables are allocated to the element with an exchange of nodal forces at each time step. The architectural and C* programming language features of the CONNECTION Machine are also summarized. Various alternate data structures and associated algorithms for nonlinear finite element analysis are discussed and compared. Results are presented which demonstrate that the CONNECTION Machine is capable of outperforming the CRAY XMP/14.

High-Density Liquid-State Machine Circuitry for Time-Series Forecasting.

PubMed

Rosselló, Josep L; Alomar, Miquel L; Morro, Antoni; Oliver, Antoni; Canals, Vincent

2016-08-01

Spiking neural networks (SNN) are the last neural network generation that try to mimic the real behavior of biological neurons. Although most research in this area is done through software applications, it is in hardware implementations in which the intrinsic parallelism of these computing systems are more efficiently exploited. Liquid state machines (LSM) have arisen as a strategic technique to implement recurrent designs of SNN with a simple learning methodology. In this work, we show a new low-cost methodology to implement high-density LSM by using Boolean gates. The proposed method is based on the use of probabilistic computing concepts to reduce hardware requirements, thus considerably increasing the neuron count per chip. The result is a highly functional system that is applied to high-speed time series forecasting.

Job Management Requirements for NAS Parallel Systems and Clusters

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Saphir, William; Tanner, Leigh Ann; Traversat, Bernard

1995-01-01

A job management system is a critical component of a production supercomputing environment, permitting oversubscribed resources to be shared fairly and efficiently. Job management systems that were originally designed for traditional vector supercomputers are not appropriate for the distributed-memory parallel supercomputers that are becoming increasingly important in the high performance computing industry. Newer job management systems offer new functionality but do not solve fundamental problems. We address some of the main issues in resource allocation and job scheduling we have encountered on two parallel computers - a 160-node IBM SP2 and a cluster of 20 high performance workstations located at the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation facility. We describe the requirements for resource allocation and job management that are necessary to provide a production supercomputing environment on these machines, prioritizing according to difficulty and importance, and advocating a return to fundamental issues.

Implementation and analysis of a Navier-Stokes algorithm on parallel computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Fatoohi, Raad A.; Grosch, Chester E.

1988-01-01

The results of the implementation of a Navier-Stokes algorithm on three parallel/vector computers are presented. The object of this research is to determine how well, or poorly, a single numerical algorithm would map onto three different architectures. The algorithm is a compact difference scheme for the solution of the incompressible, two-dimensional, time-dependent Navier-Stokes equations. The computers were chosen so as to encompass a variety of architectures. They are the following: the MPP, an SIMD machine with 16K bit serial processors; Flex/32, an MIMD machine with 20 processors; and Cray/2. The implementation of the algorithm is discussed in relation to these architectures and measures of the performance on each machine are given. The basic comparison is among SIMD instruction parallelism on the MPP, MIMD process parallelism on the Flex/32, and vectorization of a serial code on the Cray/2. Simple performance models are used to describe the performance. These models highlight the bottlenecks and limiting factors for this algorithm on these architectures. Finally, conclusions are presented.

NAS Applications and Advanced Algorithms

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bailey, David H.; Biswas, Rupak; VanDerWijngaart, Rob; Kutler, Paul (Technical Monitor)

1997-01-01

This paper examines the applications most commonly run on the supercomputers at the Numerical Aerospace Simulation (NAS) facility. It analyzes the extent to which such applications are fundamentally oriented to vector computers, and whether or not they can be efficiently implemented on hierarchical memory machines, such as systems with cache memories and highly parallel, distributed memory systems.

NAS Experiences of Porting CM Fortran Codes to HPF on IBM SP2 and SGI Power Challenge

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Saini, Subhash

1995-01-01

Current Connection Machine (CM) Fortran codes developed for the CM-2 and the CM-5 represent an important class of parallel applications. Several users have employed CM Fortran codes in production mode on the CM-2 and the CM-5 for the last five to six years, constituting a heavy investment in terms of cost and time. With Thinking Machines Corporation's decision to withdraw from the hardware business and with the decommissioning of many CM-2 and CM-5 machines, the best way to protect the substantial investment in CM Fortran codes is to port the codes to High Performance Fortran (HPF) on highly parallel systems. HPF is very similar to CM Fortran and thus represents a natural transition. Conversion issues involved in porting CM Fortran codes on the CM-5 to HPF are presented. In particular, the differences between data distribution directives and the CM Fortran Utility Routines Library, as well as the equivalent functionality in the HPF Library are discussed. Several CM Fortran codes (Cannon algorithm for matrix-matrix multiplication, Linear solver Ax=b, 1-D convolution for 2-D datasets, Laplace's Equation solver, and Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) codes have been ported to Subset HPF on the IBM SP2 and the SGI Power Challenge. Speedup ratios versus number of processors for the Linear solver and DSMC code are presented.

New machining method of high precision infrared window part

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yang, Haicheng; Su, Ying; Xu, Zengqi; Guo, Rui; Li, Wenting; Zhang, Feng; Liu, Xuanmin

2016-10-01

Most of the spherical shell of the photoelectric multifunctional instrument was designed as multi optical channel mode to adapt to the different band of the sensor, there were mainly TV, laser and infrared channels. Without affecting the optical diameter, wind resistance and pneumatic performance of the optical system, the overall layout of the spherical shell was optimized to save space and reduce weight. Most of the shape of the optical windows were special-shaped, each optical window directly participated in the high resolution imaging of the corresponding sensor system, and the optical axis parallelism of each sensor needed to meet the accuracy requirement of 0.05mrad.Therefore precision machining of optical window parts quality will directly affect the photoelectric system's pointing accuracy and interchangeability. Processing and testing of the TV and laser window had been very mature, while because of the special nature of the material, transparent and high refractive rate, infrared window parts had the problems of imaging quality and the control of the minimum focal length and second level parallel in the processing. Based on years of practical experience, this paper was focused on how to control the shape and parallel difference precision of infrared window parts in the processing. Single pass rate was increased from 40% to more than 95%, the processing efficiency was significantly enhanced, an effective solution to the bottleneck problem in the actual processing, which effectively solve the bottlenecks in research and production.

Cardiac imaging: working towards fully-automated machine analysis & interpretation.

PubMed

Slomka, Piotr J; Dey, Damini; Sitek, Arkadiusz; Motwani, Manish; Berman, Daniel S; Germano, Guido

2017-03-01

Non-invasive imaging plays a critical role in managing patients with cardiovascular disease. Although subjective visual interpretation remains the clinical mainstay, quantitative analysis facilitates objective, evidence-based management, and advances in clinical research. This has driven developments in computing and software tools aimed at achieving fully automated image processing and quantitative analysis. In parallel, machine learning techniques have been used to rapidly integrate large amounts of clinical and quantitative imaging data to provide highly personalized individual patient-based conclusions. Areas covered: This review summarizes recent advances in automated quantitative imaging in cardiology and describes the latest techniques which incorporate machine learning principles. The review focuses on the cardiac imaging techniques which are in wide clinical use. It also discusses key issues and obstacles for these tools to become utilized in mainstream clinical practice. Expert commentary: Fully-automated processing and high-level computer interpretation of cardiac imaging are becoming a reality. Application of machine learning to the vast amounts of quantitative data generated per scan and integration with clinical data also facilitates a move to more patient-specific interpretation. These developments are unlikely to replace interpreting physicians but will provide them with highly accurate tools to detect disease, risk-stratify, and optimize patient-specific treatment. However, with each technological advance, we move further from human dependence and closer to fully-automated machine interpretation.

A Pervasive Parallel Processing Framework for Data Visualization and Analysis at Extreme Scale

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Moreland, Kenneth; Geveci, Berk

2014-11-01

The evolution of the computing world from teraflop to petaflop has been relatively effortless, with several of the existing programming models scaling effectively to the petascale. The migration to exascale, however, poses considerable challenges. All industry trends infer that the exascale machine will be built using processors containing hundreds to thousands of cores per chip. It can be inferred that efficient concurrency on exascale machines requires a massive amount of concurrent threads, each performing many operations on a localized piece of data. Currently, visualization libraries and applications are based off what is known as the visualization pipeline. In the pipelinemore » model, algorithms are encapsulated as filters with inputs and outputs. These filters are connected by setting the output of one component to the input of another. Parallelism in the visualization pipeline is achieved by replicating the pipeline for each processing thread. This works well for today’s distributed memory parallel computers but cannot be sustained when operating on processors with thousands of cores. Our project investigates a new visualization framework designed to exhibit the pervasive parallelism necessary for extreme scale machines. Our framework achieves this by defining algorithms in terms of worklets, which are localized stateless operations. Worklets are atomic operations that execute when invoked unlike filters, which execute when a pipeline request occurs. The worklet design allows execution on a massive amount of lightweight threads with minimal overhead. Only with such fine-grained parallelism can we hope to fill the billions of threads we expect will be necessary for efficient computation on an exascale machine.« less

Modelling parallel programs and multiprocessor architectures with AXE

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Yan, Jerry C.; Fineman, Charles E.

1991-01-01

AXE, An Experimental Environment for Parallel Systems, was designed to model and simulate for parallel systems at the process level. It provides an integrated environment for specifying computation models, multiprocessor architectures, data collection, and performance visualization. AXE is being used at NASA-Ames for developing resource management strategies, parallel problem formulation, multiprocessor architectures, and operating system issues related to the High Performance Computing and Communications Program. AXE's simple, structured user-interface enables the user to model parallel programs and machines precisely and efficiently. Its quick turn-around time keeps the user interested and productive. AXE models multicomputers. The user may easily modify various architectural parameters including the number of sites, connection topologies, and overhead for operating system activities. Parallel computations in AXE are represented as collections of autonomous computing objects known as players. Their use and behavior is described. Performance data of the multiprocessor model can be observed on a color screen. These include CPU and message routing bottlenecks, and the dynamic status of the software.

Ordered fast fourier transforms on a massively parallel hypercube multiprocessor

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Tong, Charles; Swarztrauber, Paul N.

1989-01-01

Design alternatives for ordered Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) algorithms were examined on massively parallel hypercube multiprocessors such as the Connection Machine. Particular emphasis is placed on reducing communication which is known to dominate the overall computing time. To this end, the order and computational phases of the FFT were combined, and the sequence to processor maps that reduce communication were used. The class of ordered transforms is expanded to include any FFT in which the order of the transform is the same as that of the input sequence. Two such orderings are examined, namely, standard-order and A-order which can be implemented with equal ease on the Connection Machine where orderings are determined by geometries and priorities. If the sequence has N = 2 exp r elements and the hypercube has P = 2 exp d processors, then a standard-order FFT can be implemented with d + r/2 + 1 parallel transmissions. An A-order sequence can be transformed with 2d - r/2 parallel transmissions which is r - d + 1 fewer than the standard order. A parallel method for computing the trigonometric coefficients is presented that does not use trigonometric functions or interprocessor communication. A performance of 0.9 GFLOPS was obtained for an A-order transform on the Connection Machine.

Leveraging human oversight and intervention in large-scale parallel processing of open-source data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Casini, Enrico; Suri, Niranjan; Bradshaw, Jeffrey M.

2015-05-01

The popularity of cloud computing along with the increased availability of cheap storage have led to the necessity of elaboration and transformation of large volumes of open-source data, all in parallel. One way to handle such extensive volumes of information properly is to take advantage of distributed computing frameworks like Map-Reduce. Unfortunately, an entirely automated approach that excludes human intervention is often unpredictable and error prone. Highly accurate data processing and decision-making can be achieved by supporting an automatic process through human collaboration, in a variety of environments such as warfare, cyber security and threat monitoring. Although this mutual participation seems easily exploitable, human-machine collaboration in the field of data analysis presents several challenges. First, due to the asynchronous nature of human intervention, it is necessary to verify that once a correction is made, all the necessary reprocessing is done in chain. Second, it is often needed to minimize the amount of reprocessing in order to optimize the usage of resources due to limited availability. In order to improve on these strict requirements, this paper introduces improvements to an innovative approach for human-machine collaboration in the processing of large amounts of open-source data in parallel.

Conceptual Study of Permanent Magnet Machine Ship Propulsion Systems

DTIC Science & Technology

1977-12-01

cycloconverter subsystem is designed using advanced thyristors and can be either water or air cooled. The machine-cycloconverter, many-phase or parallel...Turnb, Phase, Poles, Air Gap ................................. 3-9 3-5 Machine Characteristics Versus Number of Poles (large machine, 40 000 hp). Poles...cylindrical permanent magnet generator forces the power conditioner to provide for both frequency change and voltage control. The complexity of this dual

Pre-resistance-welding resistance check

DOEpatents

Destefan, Dennis E.; Stompro, David A.

1991-01-01

A preweld resistance check for resistance welding machines uses an open circuited measurement to determine the welding machine resistance, a closed circuit measurement to determine the parallel resistance of a workpiece set and the machine, and a calculation to determine the resistance of the workpiece set. Any variation in workpiece set or machine resistance is an indication that the weld may be different from a control weld.

Advances in Parallelization for Large Scale Oct-Tree Mesh Generation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

O'Connell, Matthew; Karman, Steve L.

2015-01-01

Despite great advancements in the parallelization of numerical simulation codes over the last 20 years, it is still common to perform grid generation in serial. Generating large scale grids in serial often requires using special "grid generation" compute machines that can have more than ten times the memory of average machines. While some parallel mesh generation techniques have been proposed, generating very large meshes for LES or aeroacoustic simulations is still a challenging problem. An automated method for the parallel generation of very large scale off-body hierarchical meshes is presented here. This work enables large scale parallel generation of off-body meshes by using a novel combination of parallel grid generation techniques and a hybrid "top down" and "bottom up" oct-tree method. Meshes are generated using hardware commonly found in parallel compute clusters. The capability to generate very large meshes is demonstrated by the generation of off-body meshes surrounding complex aerospace geometries. Results are shown including a one billion cell mesh generated around a Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle geometry, which was generated on 64 processors in under 45 minutes.

Parallelization of the TRIGRS model for rainfall-induced landslides using the message passing interface

USGS Publications Warehouse

Alvioli, M.; Baum, R.L.

2016-01-01

We describe a parallel implementation of TRIGRS, the Transient Rainfall Infiltration and Grid-Based Regional Slope-Stability Model for the timing and distribution of rainfall-induced shallow landslides. We have parallelized the four time-demanding execution modes of TRIGRS, namely both the saturated and unsaturated model with finite and infinite soil depth options, within the Message Passing Interface framework. In addition to new features of the code, we outline details of the parallel implementation and show the performance gain with respect to the serial code. Results are obtained both on commercial hardware and on a high-performance multi-node machine, showing the different limits of applicability of the new code. We also discuss the implications for the application of the model on large-scale areas and as a tool for real-time landslide hazard monitoring.

Towards a Better Distributed Framework for Learning Big Data

DTIC Science & Technology

2017-06-14

UNLIMITED: PB Public Release 13. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 14. ABSTRACT This work aimed at solving issues in distributed machine learning. The PI’s team proposed...communication load. Finally, the team proposed the parallel least-squares policy iteration (parallel LSPI) to parallelize a reinforcement policy learning. 15

Synergia: an accelerator modeling tool with 3-D space charge

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Amundson, James F.; Spentzouris, P.; /Fermilab

2004-07-01

High precision modeling of space-charge effects, together with accurate treatment of single-particle dynamics, is essential for designing future accelerators as well as optimizing the performance of existing machines. We describe Synergia, a high-fidelity parallel beam dynamics simulation package with fully three dimensional space-charge capabilities and a higher order optics implementation. We describe the computational techniques, the advanced human interface, and the parallel performance obtained using large numbers of macroparticles. We also perform code benchmarks comparing to semi-analytic results and other codes. Finally, we present initial results on particle tune spread, beam halo creation, and emittance growth in the Fermilab boostermore » accelerator.« less

MIC-SVM: Designing A Highly Efficient Support Vector Machine For Advanced Modern Multi-Core and Many-Core Architectures

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

You, Yang; Song, Shuaiwen; Fu, Haohuan

2014-08-16

Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been widely used in data-mining and Big Data applications as modern commercial databases start to attach an increasing importance to the analytic capabilities. In recent years, SVM was adapted to the field of High Performance Computing for power/performance prediction, auto-tuning, and runtime scheduling. However, even at the risk of losing prediction accuracy due to insufficient runtime information, researchers can only afford to apply offline model training to avoid significant runtime training overhead. To address the challenges above, we designed and implemented MICSVM, a highly efficient parallel SVM for x86 based multi-core and many core architectures,more » such as the Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor (MIC).« less

ORCA Project: Research on high-performance parallel computer programming environments. Final report, 1 Apr-31 Mar 90

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Snyder, L.; Notkin, D.; Adams, L.

1990-03-31

This task relates to research on programming massively parallel computers. Previous work on the Ensamble concept of programming was extended and investigation into nonshared memory models of parallel computation was undertaken. Previous work on the Ensamble concept defined a set of programming abstractions and was used to organize the programming task into three distinct levels; Composition of machine instruction, composition of processes, and composition of phases. It was applied to shared memory models of computations. During the present research period, these concepts were extended to nonshared memory models. During the present research period, one Ph D. thesis was completed, onemore » book chapter, and six conference proceedings were published.« less

STABILIZED PINCH MACHINE

DOEpatents

Anderson, O.A.

1962-04-24

A device for heating and confining a high temperature gas or plasma utilizing the linear pinch effect is described. The pinch discharge produced is the form of an elongated cylinder. The electrical discharge current is returned in parallel along an axial and a concentric conductor whereby the magnetic field of the conductors compresses and stabilizes the pinch discharge against lateral instability. (AEC)

Towards the Teraflop CFD

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Schreiber, Robert; Simon, Horst D.

1992-01-01

We are surveying current projects in the area of parallel supercomputers. The machines considered here will become commercially available in the 1990 - 1992 time frame. All are suitable for exploring the critical issues in applying parallel processors to large scale scientific computations, in particular CFD calculations. This chapter presents an overview of the surveyed machines, and a detailed analysis of the various architectural and technology approaches taken. Particular emphasis is placed on the feasibility of a Teraflops capability following the paths proposed by various developers.

Integration experiments and performance studies of a COTS parallel archive system

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Chen, Hsing-bung; Scott, Cody; Grider, Gary

2010-06-16

Current and future Archive Storage Systems have been asked to (a) scale to very high bandwidths, (b) scale in metadata performance, (c) support policy-based hierarchical storage management capability, (d) scale in supporting changing needs of very large data sets, (e) support standard interface, and (f) utilize commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. Parallel file systems have been asked to do the same thing but at one or more orders of magnitude faster in performance. Archive systems continue to move closer to file systems in their design due to the need for speed and bandwidth, especially metadata searching speeds such as more caching andmore » less robust semantics. Currently the number of extreme highly scalable parallel archive solutions is very small especially those that will move a single large striped parallel disk file onto many tapes in parallel. We believe that a hybrid storage approach of using COTS components and innovative software technology can bring new capabilities into a production environment for the HPC community much faster than the approach of creating and maintaining a complete end-to-end unique parallel archive software solution. In this paper, we relay our experience of integrating a global parallel file system and a standard backup/archive product with a very small amount of additional code to provide a scalable, parallel archive. Our solution has a high degree of overlap with current parallel archive products including (a) doing parallel movement to/from tape for a single large parallel file, (b) hierarchical storage management, (c) ILM features, (d) high volume (non-single parallel file) archives for backup/archive/content management, and (e) leveraging all free file movement tools in Linux such as copy, move, Is, tar, etc. We have successfully applied our working COTS Parallel Archive System to the current world's first petafiop/s computing system, LANL's Roadrunner machine, and demonstrated its capability to address requirements of future archival storage systems.« less

Parallel algorithms for boundary value problems

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Lin, Avi

1990-01-01

A general approach to solve boundary value problems numerically in a parallel environment is discussed. The basic algorithm consists of two steps: the local step where all the P available processors work in parallel, and the global step where one processor solves a tridiagonal linear system of the order P. The main advantages of this approach are two fold. First, this suggested approach is very flexible, especially in the local step and thus the algorithm can be used with any number of processors and with any of the SIMD or MIMD machines. Secondly, the communication complexity is very small and thus can be used as easily with shared memory machines. Several examples for using this strategy are discussed.

Vascular system modeling in parallel environment - distributed and shared memory approaches

PubMed Central

Jurczuk, Krzysztof; Kretowski, Marek; Bezy-Wendling, Johanne

2011-01-01

The paper presents two approaches in parallel modeling of vascular system development in internal organs. In the first approach, new parts of tissue are distributed among processors and each processor is responsible for perfusing its assigned parts of tissue to all vascular trees. Communication between processors is accomplished by passing messages and therefore this algorithm is perfectly suited for distributed memory architectures. The second approach is designed for shared memory machines. It parallelizes the perfusion process during which individual processing units perform calculations concerning different vascular trees. The experimental results, performed on a computing cluster and multi-core machines, show that both algorithms provide a significant speedup. PMID:21550891

Parallel matrix multiplication on the Connection Machine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Tichy, Walter F.

1988-01-01

Matrix multiplication is a computation and communication intensive problem. Six parallel algorithms for matrix multiplication on the Connection Machine are presented and compared with respect to their performance and processor usage. For n by n matrices, the algorithms have theoretical running times of O(n to the 2nd power log n), O(n log n), O(n), and O(log n), and require n, n to the 2nd power, n to the 2nd power, and n to the 3rd power processors, respectively. With careful attention to communication patterns, the theoretically predicted runtimes can indeed be achieved in practice. The parallel algorithms illustrate the tradeoffs between performance, communication cost, and processor usage.

PCLIPS: Parallel CLIPS

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Gryphon, Coranth D.; Miller, Mark D.

1991-01-01

PCLIPS (Parallel CLIPS) is a set of extensions to the C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS) expert system language. PCLIPS is intended to provide an environment for the development of more complex, extensive expert systems. Multiple CLIPS expert systems are now capable of running simultaneously on separate processors, or separate machines, thus dramatically increasing the scope of solvable tasks within the expert systems. As a tool for parallel processing, PCLIPS allows for an expert system to add to its fact-base information generated by other expert systems, thus allowing systems to assist each other in solving a complex problem. This allows individual expert systems to be more compact and efficient, and thus run faster or on smaller machines.

Parallel Algorithms for Computer Vision

DTIC Science & Technology

1990-04-01

NA86-1, Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA, December 1986. [43] J. Little, G. Blelloch, and T. Cass. How to program the connection machine for... to program the connection machine for computer vision. In Proc. Workshop on Comp. Architecture for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intell., 1987. [92] J...In Proceedings of SPIE Conf. on Advances in Intelligent Robotics Systems, Bellingham, VA, 1987. SPIE. [91] J. Little, G. Blelloch, and T. Cass. How

Concurrent Probabilistic Simulation of High Temperature Composite Structural Response

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Abdi, Frank

1996-01-01

A computational structural/material analysis and design tool which would meet industry's future demand for expedience and reduced cost is presented. This unique software 'GENOA' is dedicated to parallel and high speed analysis to perform probabilistic evaluation of high temperature composite response of aerospace systems. The development is based on detailed integration and modification of diverse fields of specialized analysis techniques and mathematical models to combine their latest innovative capabilities into a commercially viable software package. The technique is specifically designed to exploit the availability of processors to perform computationally intense probabilistic analysis assessing uncertainties in structural reliability analysis and composite micromechanics. The primary objectives which were achieved in performing the development were: (1) Utilization of the power of parallel processing and static/dynamic load balancing optimization to make the complex simulation of structure, material and processing of high temperature composite affordable; (2) Computational integration and synchronization of probabilistic mathematics, structural/material mechanics and parallel computing; (3) Implementation of an innovative multi-level domain decomposition technique to identify the inherent parallelism, and increasing convergence rates through high- and low-level processor assignment; (4) Creating the framework for Portable Paralleled architecture for the machine independent Multi Instruction Multi Data, (MIMD), Single Instruction Multi Data (SIMD), hybrid and distributed workstation type of computers; and (5) Market evaluation. The results of Phase-2 effort provides a good basis for continuation and warrants Phase-3 government, and industry partnership.

Dynamic Load Balancing for Grid Partitioning on a SP-2 Multiprocessor: A Framework

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sohn, Andrew; Simon, Horst; Lasinski, T. A. (Technical Monitor)

1994-01-01

Computational requirements of full scale computational fluid dynamics change as computation progresses on a parallel machine. The change in computational intensity causes workload imbalance of processors, which in turn requires a large amount of data movement at runtime. If parallel CFD is to be successful on a parallel or massively parallel machine, balancing of the runtime load is indispensable. Here a framework is presented for dynamic load balancing for CFD applications, called Jove. One processor is designated as a decision maker Jove while others are assigned to computational fluid dynamics. Processors running CFD send flags to Jove in a predetermined number of iterations to initiate load balancing. Jove starts working on load balancing while other processors continue working with the current data and load distribution. Jove goes through several steps to decide if the new data should be taken, including preliminary evaluate, partition, processor reassignment, cost evaluation, and decision. Jove running on a single EBM SP2 node has been completely implemented. Preliminary experimental results show that the Jove approach to dynamic load balancing can be effective for full scale grid partitioning on the target machine IBM SP2.

Dynamic Load Balancing For Grid Partitioning on a SP-2 Multiprocessor: A Framework

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sohn, Andrew; Simon, Horst; Lasinski, T. A. (Technical Monitor)

1994-01-01

Computational requirements of full scale computational fluid dynamics change as computation progresses on a parallel machine. The change in computational intensity causes workload imbalance of processors, which in turn requires a large amount of data movement at runtime. If parallel CFD is to be successful on a parallel or massively parallel machine, balancing of the runtime load is indispensable. Here a framework is presented for dynamic load balancing for CFD applications, called Jove. One processor is designated as a decision maker Jove while others are assigned to computational fluid dynamics. Processors running CFD send flags to Jove in a predetermined number of iterations to initiate load balancing. Jove starts working on load balancing while other processors continue working with the current data and load distribution. Jove goes through several steps to decide if the new data should be taken, including preliminary evaluate, partition, processor reassignment, cost evaluation, and decision. Jove running on a single IBM SP2 node has been completely implemented. Preliminary experimental results show that the Jove approach to dynamic load balancing can be effective for full scale grid partitioning on the target machine IBM SP2.

The influence of foot position on scrum kinetics during machine scrummaging.

PubMed

Bayne, Helen; Kat, Cor-Jacques

2018-05-23

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of variations in the alignment of the feet on scrum kinetics during machine scrummaging. Twenty nine rugby forwards from amateur-level teams completed maximal scrum efforts against an instrumented scrum machine, with the feet in parallel and non-parallel positions. Three-dimensional forces, the moment about the vertical axis and sagittal plane joint angles were measured during the sustained pushing phase. There was a decrease in the magnitude of the resultant force and compression force in both of the non-parallel conditions compared to parallel and larger compression forces were associated with more extended hip and knee angles. Scrummaging with the left foot forward resulted in the lateral force being directed more towards the left and the turning moment becoming more clockwise. These directional changes were reversed when scrummaging with the right foot forward. Scrummaging with the right foot positioned ahead of the left may serve to counteract the natural clockwise wheel of the live scrum and could be used to achieve an anti-clockwise rotation of the scrum for tactical reasons. However, this would be associated with lower resultant forces and a greater lateral shear force component directed towards the right.

On-Line Scheduling of Parallel Machines

DTIC Science & Technology

1990-11-01

machine without losing any work; this is referred to as the preemptive model. In contrast to the nonpreemptive model which we have considered in this paper...that there exists no schedule of length d. The 2-relaxed decision procedure is as follows. Put each job into the queue of the slowest machine Mk such...in their queues . If a machine’s queue is empty it takes jobs to process from the queue of the first machine that is slower than it and that has a

Performance Evaluation in Network-Based Parallel Computing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dezhgosha, Kamyar

1996-01-01

Network-based parallel computing is emerging as a cost-effective alternative for solving many problems which require use of supercomputers or massively parallel computers. The primary objective of this project has been to conduct experimental research on performance evaluation for clustered parallel computing. First, a testbed was established by augmenting our existing SUNSPARCs' network with PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) which is a software system for linking clusters of machines. Second, a set of three basic applications were selected. The applications consist of a parallel search, a parallel sort, a parallel matrix multiplication. These application programs were implemented in C programming language under PVM. Third, we conducted performance evaluation under various configurations and problem sizes. Alternative parallel computing models and workload allocations for application programs were explored. The performance metric was limited to elapsed time or response time which in the context of parallel computing can be expressed in terms of speedup. The results reveal that the overhead of communication latency between processes in many cases is the restricting factor to performance. That is, coarse-grain parallelism which requires less frequent communication between processes will result in higher performance in network-based computing. Finally, we are in the final stages of installing an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switch and four ATM interfaces (each 155 Mbps) which will allow us to extend our study to newer applications, performance metrics, and configurations.

A field study of exposure to whole-body vibration due to agricultural machines in a full-time rice farmer over one year.

PubMed

Tsujimura, Hiroji; Taoda, Kazushi; Kitahara, Teruyo

2015-01-01

The aims of this study were to clarify in detail the levels of whole-body vibration (WBV) exposure from a variety of agricultural machines in a rice farmer over one year, and to evaluate the daily level of exposure compared with European and Japanese threshold limits. The subject was a full-time, male rice farmer. We measured vibration accelerations on the seat pan and at the seat base of four tractors with various implements attached, one rice-planting machine, two combine harvesters, produced by the same manufacturer, and one truck used for transportation of agricultural machines. The position and velocity of the machines were recorded in parallel with WBV measurements. In addition, during the year starting in April 2010, the subject completed a questionnaire regarding his work (date, place, content, hours worked, machines used). We calculated the daily exposure to WBV, A(8), on all the days on which the subject used the agricultural machines. The WBV magnitude in farm fields was relatively high during tasks with high velocity and heavy mechanical load on the machine, and had no dominant axis. The subject worked for 159 days using the agricultural machines during the year, and the proportion of days on which A(8) values exceeded the thresholds was 90% for the Japan occupational exposure limit and 24% for the EU exposure action value. Our findings emphasize the need for rice farmers to have health management strategies suited to the farming seasons and measures to reduce WBV exposure during each farm task.

Implementation of an ADI method on parallel computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Fatoohi, Raad A.; Grosch, Chester E.

1987-01-01

The implementation of an ADI method for solving the diffusion equation on three parallel/vector computers is discussed. The computers were chosen so as to encompass a variety of architectures. They are: the MPP, an SIMD machine with 16K bit serial processors; FLEX/32, an MIMD machine with 20 processors; and CRAY/2, an MIMD machine with four vector processors. The Gaussian elimination algorithm is used to solve a set of tridiagonal systems on the FLEX/32 and CRAY/2 while the cyclic elimination algorithm is used to solve these systems on the MPP. The implementation of the method is discussed in relation to these architectures and measures of the performance on each machine are given. Simple performance models are used to describe the performance. These models highlight the bottlenecks and limiting factors for this algorithm on these architectures. Finally, conclusions are presented.

Implementation of an ADI method on parallel computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Fatoohi, Raad A.; Grosch, Chester E.

1987-01-01

In this paper the implementation of an ADI method for solving the diffusion equation on three parallel/vector computers is discussed. The computers were chosen so as to encompass a variety of architectures. They are the MPP, an SIMD machine with 16-Kbit serial processors; Flex/32, an MIMD machine with 20 processors; and Cray/2, an MIMD machine with four vector processors. The Gaussian elimination algorithm is used to solve a set of tridiagonal systems on the Flex/32 and Cray/2 while the cyclic elimination algorithm is used to solve these systems on the MPP. The implementation of the method is discussed in relation to these architectures and measures of the performance on each machine are given. Simple performance models are used to describe the performance. These models highlight the bottlenecks and limiting factors for this algorithm on these architectures. Finally conclusions are presented.

Concurrent extensions to the FORTRAN language for parallel programming of computational fluid dynamics algorithms

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Weeks, Cindy Lou

1986-01-01

Experiments were conducted at NASA Ames Research Center to define multi-tasking software requirements for multiple-instruction, multiple-data stream (MIMD) computer architectures. The focus was on specifying solutions for algorithms in the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The program objectives were to allow researchers to produce usable parallel application software as soon as possible after acquiring MIMD computer equipment, to provide researchers with an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use parallel software language which could be implemented on several different MIMD machines, and to enable researchers to list preferred design specifications for future MIMD computer architectures. Analysis of CFD algorithms indicated that extensions of an existing programming language, adaptable to new computer architectures, provided the best solution to meeting program objectives. The CoFORTRAN Language was written in response to these objectives and to provide researchers a means to experiment with parallel software solutions to CFD algorithms on machines with parallel architectures.

Large-Scale Linear Optimization through Machine Learning: From Theory to Practical System Design and Implementation

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-08-10

AFRL-AFOSR-JP-TR-2016-0073 Large-scale Linear Optimization through Machine Learning: From Theory to Practical System Design and Implementation ...2016 4.  TITLE AND SUBTITLE Large-scale Linear Optimization through Machine Learning: From Theory to Practical System Design and Implementation 5a...performances on various machine learning tasks and it naturally lends itself to fast parallel implementations . Despite this, very little work has been

A path-level exact parallelization strategy for sequential simulation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Peredo, Oscar F.; Baeza, Daniel; Ortiz, Julián M.; Herrero, José R.

2018-01-01

Sequential Simulation is a well known method in geostatistical modelling. Following the Bayesian approach for simulation of conditionally dependent random events, Sequential Indicator Simulation (SIS) method draws simulated values for K categories (categorical case) or classes defined by K different thresholds (continuous case). Similarly, Sequential Gaussian Simulation (SGS) method draws simulated values from a multivariate Gaussian field. In this work, a path-level approach to parallelize SIS and SGS methods is presented. A first stage of re-arrangement of the simulation path is performed, followed by a second stage of parallel simulation for non-conflicting nodes. A key advantage of the proposed parallelization method is to generate identical realizations as with the original non-parallelized methods. Case studies are presented using two sequential simulation codes from GSLIB: SISIM and SGSIM. Execution time and speedup results are shown for large-scale domains, with many categories and maximum kriging neighbours in each case, achieving high speedup results in the best scenarios using 16 threads of execution in a single machine.

Automated Generation of Message-Passing Programs: An Evaluation Using CAPTools

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hribar, Michelle R.; Jin, Haoqiang; Yan, Jerry C.; Saini, Subhash (Technical Monitor)

1998-01-01

Scientists at NASA Ames Research Center have been developing computational aeroscience applications on highly parallel architectures over the past ten years. During that same time period, a steady transition of hardware and system software also occurred, forcing us to expend great efforts into migrating and re-coding our applications. As applications and machine architectures become increasingly complex, the cost and time required for this process will become prohibitive. In this paper, we present the first set of results in our evaluation of interactive parallelization tools. In particular, we evaluate CAPTool's ability to parallelize computational aeroscience applications. CAPTools was tested on serial versions of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks and ARC3D, a computational fluid dynamics application, on two platforms: the SGI Origin 2000 and the Cray T3E. This evaluation includes performance, amount of user interaction required, limitations and portability. Based on these results, a discussion on the feasibility of computer aided parallelization of aerospace applications is presented along with suggestions for future work.

Cardiac imaging: working towards fully-automated machine analysis & interpretation

PubMed Central

Slomka, Piotr J; Dey, Damini; Sitek, Arkadiusz; Motwani, Manish; Berman, Daniel S; Germano, Guido

2017-01-01

Introduction Non-invasive imaging plays a critical role in managing patients with cardiovascular disease. Although subjective visual interpretation remains the clinical mainstay, quantitative analysis facilitates objective, evidence-based management, and advances in clinical research. This has driven developments in computing and software tools aimed at achieving fully automated image processing and quantitative analysis. In parallel, machine learning techniques have been used to rapidly integrate large amounts of clinical and quantitative imaging data to provide highly personalized individual patient-based conclusions. Areas covered This review summarizes recent advances in automated quantitative imaging in cardiology and describes the latest techniques which incorporate machine learning principles. The review focuses on the cardiac imaging techniques which are in wide clinical use. It also discusses key issues and obstacles for these tools to become utilized in mainstream clinical practice. Expert commentary Fully-automated processing and high-level computer interpretation of cardiac imaging are becoming a reality. Application of machine learning to the vast amounts of quantitative data generated per scan and integration with clinical data also facilitates a move to more patient-specific interpretation. These developments are unlikely to replace interpreting physicians but will provide them with highly accurate tools to detect disease, risk-stratify, and optimize patient-specific treatment. However, with each technological advance, we move further from human dependence and closer to fully-automated machine interpretation. PMID:28277804

Decomposition method for fast computation of gigapixel-sized Fresnel holograms on a graphics processing unit cluster.

PubMed

Jackin, Boaz Jessie; Watanabe, Shinpei; Ootsu, Kanemitsu; Ohkawa, Takeshi; Yokota, Takashi; Hayasaki, Yoshio; Yatagai, Toyohiko; Baba, Takanobu

2018-04-20

A parallel computation method for large-size Fresnel computer-generated hologram (CGH) is reported. The method was introduced by us in an earlier report as a technique for calculating Fourier CGH from 2D object data. In this paper we extend the method to compute Fresnel CGH from 3D object data. The scale of the computation problem is also expanded to 2 gigapixels, making it closer to real application requirements. The significant feature of the reported method is its ability to avoid communication overhead and thereby fully utilize the computing power of parallel devices. The method exhibits three layers of parallelism that favor small to large scale parallel computing machines. Simulation and optical experiments were conducted to demonstrate the workability and to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed technique. A two-times improvement in computation speed has been achieved compared to the conventional method, on a 16-node cluster (one GPU per node) utilizing only one layer of parallelism. A 20-times improvement in computation speed has been estimated utilizing two layers of parallelism on a very large-scale parallel machine with 16 nodes, where each node has 16 GPUs.

Load Balancing Strategies for Multi-Block Overset Grid Applications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Djomehri, M. Jahed; Biswas, Rupak; Lopez-Benitez, Noe; Biegel, Bryan (Technical Monitor)

2002-01-01

The multi-block overset grid method is a powerful technique for high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations about complex aerospace configurations. The solution process uses a grid system that discretizes the problem domain by using separately generated but overlapping structured grids that periodically update and exchange boundary information through interpolation. For efficient high performance computations of large-scale realistic applications using this methodology, the individual grids must be properly partitioned among the parallel processors. Overall performance, therefore, largely depends on the quality of load balancing. In this paper, we present three different load balancing strategies far overset grids and analyze their effects on the parallel efficiency of a Navier-Stokes CFD application running on an SGI Origin2000 machine.

VAC: Versatile Advection Code

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tóth, Gábor; Keppens, Rony

2012-07-01

The Versatile Advection Code (VAC) is a freely available general hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic simulation software that works in 1, 2 or 3 dimensions on Cartesian and logically Cartesian grids. VAC runs on any Unix/Linux system with a Fortran 90 (or 77) compiler and Perl interpreter. VAC can run on parallel machines using either the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library or a High Performance Fortran (HPF) compiler.

Implementing Molecular Dynamics on Hybrid High Performance Computers - Particle-Particle Particle-Mesh

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Brown, W Michael; Kohlmeyer, Axel; Plimpton, Steven J

The use of accelerators such as graphics processing units (GPUs) has become popular in scientific computing applications due to their low cost, impressive floating-point capabilities, high memory bandwidth, and low electrical power requirements. Hybrid high-performance computers, machines with nodes containing more than one type of floating-point processor (e.g. CPU and GPU), are now becoming more prevalent due to these advantages. In this paper, we present a continuation of previous work implementing algorithms for using accelerators into the LAMMPS molecular dynamics software for distributed memory parallel hybrid machines. In our previous work, we focused on acceleration for short-range models with anmore » approach intended to harness the processing power of both the accelerator and (multi-core) CPUs. To augment the existing implementations, we present an efficient implementation of long-range electrostatic force calculation for molecular dynamics. Specifically, we present an implementation of the particle-particle particle-mesh method based on the work by Harvey and De Fabritiis. We present benchmark results on the Keeneland InfiniBand GPU cluster. We provide a performance comparison of the same kernels compiled with both CUDA and OpenCL. We discuss limitations to parallel efficiency and future directions for improving performance on hybrid or heterogeneous computers.« less

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Reed, D.A.; Grunwald, D.C.

The spectrum of parallel processor designs can be divided into three sections according to the number and complexity of the processors. At one end there are simple, bit-serial processors. Any one of thee processors is of little value, but when it is coupled with many others, the aggregate computing power can be large. This approach to parallel processing can be likened to a colony of termites devouring a log. The most notable examples of this approach are the NASA/Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor, which has 16K one-bit processors, and the Thinking Machines Connection Machine, which has 64K one-bit processors. At themore » other end of the spectrum, a small number of processors, each built using the fastest available technology and the most sophisticated architecture, are combined. An example of this approach is the Cray X-MP. This type of parallel processing is akin to four woodmen attacking the log with chainsaws.« less

Parallel Simulation of Unsteady Turbulent Flames

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Menon, Suresh

1996-01-01

Time-accurate simulation of turbulent flames in high Reynolds number flows is a challenging task since both fluid dynamics and combustion must be modeled accurately. To numerically simulate this phenomenon, very large computer resources (both time and memory) are required. Although current vector supercomputers are capable of providing adequate resources for simulations of this nature, the high cost and their limited availability, makes practical use of such machines less than satisfactory. At the same time, the explicit time integration algorithms used in unsteady flow simulations often possess a very high degree of parallelism, making them very amenable to efficient implementation on large-scale parallel computers. Under these circumstances, distributed memory parallel computers offer an excellent near-term solution for greatly increased computational speed and memory, at a cost that may render the unsteady simulations of the type discussed above more feasible and affordable.This paper discusses the study of unsteady turbulent flames using a simulation algorithm that is capable of retaining high parallel efficiency on distributed memory parallel architectures. Numerical studies are carried out using large-eddy simulation (LES). In LES, the scales larger than the grid are computed using a time- and space-accurate scheme, while the unresolved small scales are modeled using eddy viscosity based subgrid models. This is acceptable for the moment/energy closure since the small scales primarily provide a dissipative mechanism for the energy transferred from the large scales. However, for combustion to occur, the species must first undergo mixing at the small scales and then come into molecular contact. Therefore, global models cannot be used. Recently, a new model for turbulent combustion was developed, in which the combustion is modeled, within the subgrid (small-scales) using a methodology that simulates the mixing and the molecular transport and the chemical kinetics within each LES grid cell. Finite-rate kinetics can be included without any closure and this approach actually provides a means to predict the turbulent rates and the turbulent flame speed. The subgrid combustion model requires resolution of the local time scales associated with small-scale mixing, molecular diffusion and chemical kinetics and, therefore, within each grid cell, a significant amount of computations must be carried out before the large-scale (LES resolved) effects are incorporated. Therefore, this approach is uniquely suited for parallel processing and has been implemented on various systems such as: Intel Paragon, IBM SP-2, Cray T3D and SGI Power Challenge (PC) using the system independent Message Passing Interface (MPI) compiler. In this paper, timing data on these machines is reported along with some characteristic results.

RISC Processors and High Performance Computing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bailey, David H.; Saini, Subhash; Craw, James M. (Technical Monitor)

1995-01-01

This tutorial will discuss the top five RISC microprocessors and the parallel systems in which they are used. It will provide a unique cross-machine comparison not available elsewhere. The effective performance of these processors will be compared by citing standard benchmarks in the context of real applications. The latest NAS Parallel Benchmarks, both absolute performance and performance per dollar, will be listed. The next generation of the NPB will be described. The tutorial will conclude with a discussion of future directions in the field. Technology Transfer Considerations: All of these computer systems are commercially available internationally. Information about these processors is available in the public domain, mostly from the vendors themselves. The NAS Parallel Benchmarks and their results have been previously approved numerous times for public release, beginning back in 1991.

Telescoping magnetic ball bar test gage

DOEpatents

Bryan, J.B.

1982-03-15

A telescoping magnetic ball bar test gage for determining the accuracy of machine tools, including robots, and those measuring machines having non-disengagable servo drives which cannot be clutched out. Two gage balls are held and separated from one another by a telescoping fixture which allows them relative radial motional freedom but not relative lateral motional freedom. The telescoping fixture comprises a parallel reed flexure unit and a rigid member. One gage ball is secured by a magnetic socket knuckle assembly which fixes its center with respect to the machine being tested. The other gage ball is secured by another magnetic socket knuckle assembly which is engaged or held by the machine in such manner that the center of that ball is directed to execute a prescribed trajectory, all points of which are equidistant from the center of the fixed gage ball. As the moving ball executes its trajectory, changes in the radial distance between the centers of the two balls caused by inaccuracies in the machine are determined or measured by a linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) assembly actuated by the parallel reed flexure unit. Measurements can be quickly and easily taken for multiple trajectories about several different fixed ball locations, thereby determining the accuracy of the machine.

Parallelism measurement for base plate of standard artifact with multiple tactile approaches

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ye, Xiuling; Zhao, Yan; Wang, Yiwen; Wang, Zhong; Fu, Luhua; Liu, Changjie

2018-01-01

Nowadays, as workpieces become more precise and more specialized which results in more sophisticated structures and higher accuracy for the artifacts, higher requirements have been put forward for measuring accuracy and measuring methods. As an important method to obtain the size of workpieces, coordinate measuring machine (CMM) has been widely used in many industries. In order to achieve the calibration of a self-developed CMM, it is found that the parallelism of the base plate used for fixing the standard artifact is an important factor which affects the measurement accuracy in the process of studying self-made high-precision standard artifact. And aimed to measure the parallelism of the base plate, by using the existing high-precision CMM, gauge blocks, dial gauge and marble platform with the tactile approach, three methods for parallelism measurement of workpieces are employed, and comparisons are made within the measurement results. The results of experiments show that the final accuracy of all the three methods is able to reach micron level and meets the measurement requirements. Simultaneously, these three approaches are suitable for different measurement conditions which provide a basis for rapid and high-precision measurement under different equipment conditions.

Flexbar 3.0 - SIMD and multicore parallelization.

PubMed

Roehr, Johannes T; Dieterich, Christoph; Reinert, Knut

2017-09-15

High-throughput sequencing machines can process many samples in a single run. For Illumina systems, sequencing reads are barcoded with an additional DNA tag that is contained in the respective sequencing adapters. The recognition of barcode and adapter sequences is hence commonly needed for the analysis of next-generation sequencing data. Flexbar performs demultiplexing based on barcodes and adapter trimming for such data. The massive amounts of data generated on modern sequencing machines demand that this preprocessing is done as efficiently as possible. We present Flexbar 3.0, the successor of the popular program Flexbar. It employs now twofold parallelism: multi-threading and additionally SIMD vectorization. Both types of parallelism are used to speed-up the computation of pair-wise sequence alignments, which are used for the detection of barcodes and adapters. Furthermore, new features were included to cover a wide range of applications. We evaluated the performance of Flexbar based on a simulated sequencing dataset. Our program outcompetes other tools in terms of speed and is among the best tools in the presented quality benchmark. https://github.com/seqan/flexbar. johannes.roehr@fu-berlin.de or knut.reinert@fu-berlin.de. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

Achieving high performance on the Intel Paragon

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Greenberg, D.S.; Maccabe, B.; Riesen, R.

1993-11-01

When presented with a new supercomputer most users will first ask {open_quotes}How much faster will my applications run?{close_quotes} and then add a fearful {open_quotes}How much effort will it take me to convert to the new machine?{close_quotes} This paper describes some lessons learned at Sandia while asking these questions about the new 1800+ node Intel Paragon. The authors conclude that the operating system is crucial to both achieving high performance and allowing easy conversion from previous parallel implementations to a new machine. Using the Sandia/UNM Operating System (SUNMOS) they were able to port a LU factorization of dense matrices from themore » nCUBE2 to the Paragon and achieve 92% scaled speed-up on 1024 nodes. Thus on a 44,000 by 44,000 matrix which had required over 10 hours on the previous machine, they completed in less than 1/2 hour at a rate of over 40 GFLOPS. Two keys to achieving such high performance were the small size of SUNMOS (less than 256 kbytes) and the ability to send large messages with very low overhead.« less

ProperCAD: A portable object-oriented parallel environment for VLSI CAD

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ramkumar, Balkrishna; Banerjee, Prithviraj

1993-01-01

Most parallel algorithms for VLSI CAD proposed to date have one important drawback: they work efficiently only on machines that they were designed for. As a result, algorithms designed to date are dependent on the architecture for which they are developed and do not port easily to other parallel architectures. A new project under way to address this problem is described. A Portable object-oriented parallel environment for CAD algorithms (ProperCAD) is being developed. The objectives of this research are (1) to develop new parallel algorithms that run in a portable object-oriented environment (CAD algorithms using a general purpose platform for portable parallel programming called CARM is being developed and a C++ environment that is truly object-oriented and specialized for CAD applications is also being developed); and (2) to design the parallel algorithms around a good sequential algorithm with a well-defined parallel-sequential interface (permitting the parallel algorithm to benefit from future developments in sequential algorithms). One CAD application that has been implemented as part of the ProperCAD project, flat VLSI circuit extraction, is described. The algorithm, its implementation, and its performance on a range of parallel machines are discussed in detail. It currently runs on an Encore Multimax, a Sequent Symmetry, Intel iPSC/2 and i860 hypercubes, a NCUBE 2 hypercube, and a network of Sun Sparc workstations. Performance data for other applications that were developed are provided: namely test pattern generation for sequential circuits, parallel logic synthesis, and standard cell placement.

The development of a scalable parallel 3-D CFD algorithm for turbomachinery. M.S. Thesis Final Report

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Luke, Edward Allen

1993-01-01

Two algorithms capable of computing a transonic 3-D inviscid flow field about rotating machines are considered for parallel implementation. During the study of these algorithms, a significant new method of measuring the performance of parallel algorithms is developed. The theory that supports this new method creates an empirical definition of scalable parallel algorithms that is used to produce quantifiable evidence that a scalable parallel application was developed. The implementation of the parallel application and an automated domain decomposition tool are also discussed.

The OpenMP Implementation of NAS Parallel Benchmarks and its Performance

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jin, Hao-Qiang; Frumkin, Michael; Yan, Jerry

1999-01-01

As the new ccNUMA architecture became popular in recent years, parallel programming with compiler directives on these machines has evolved to accommodate new needs. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of OpenMP directives for parallelizing the NAS Parallel Benchmarks. Implementation details will be discussed and performance will be compared with the MPI implementation. We have demonstrated that OpenMP can achieve very good results for parallelization on a shared memory system, but effective use of memory and cache is very important.

Making extreme computations possible with virtual machines

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Reuter, J.; Chokoufe Nejad, B.; Ohl, T.

2016-10-01

State-of-the-art algorithms generate scattering amplitudes for high-energy physics at leading order for high-multiplicity processes as compiled code (in Fortran, C or C++). For complicated processes the size of these libraries can become tremendous (many GiB). We show that amplitudes can be translated to byte-code instructions, which even reduce the size by one order of magnitude. The byte-code is interpreted by a Virtual Machine with runtimes comparable to compiled code and a better scaling with additional legs. We study the properties of this algorithm, as an extension of the Optimizing Matrix Element Generator (O'Mega). The bytecode matrix elements are available as alternative input for the event generator WHIZARD. The bytecode interpreter can be implemented very compactly, which will help with a future implementation on massively parallel GPUs.

Abstract quantum computing machines and quantum computational logics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chiara, Maria Luisa Dalla; Giuntini, Roberto; Sergioli, Giuseppe; Leporini, Roberto

2016-06-01

Classical and quantum parallelism are deeply different, although it is sometimes claimed that quantum Turing machines are nothing but special examples of classical probabilistic machines. We introduce the concepts of deterministic state machine, classical probabilistic state machine and quantum state machine. On this basis, we discuss the question: To what extent can quantum state machines be simulated by classical probabilistic state machines? Each state machine is devoted to a single task determined by its program. Real computers, however, behave differently, being able to solve different kinds of problems. This capacity can be modeled, in the quantum case, by the mathematical notion of abstract quantum computing machine, whose different programs determine different quantum state machines. The computations of abstract quantum computing machines can be linguistically described by the formulas of a particular form of quantum logic, termed quantum computational logic.

Design, development and use of the finite element machine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Adams, L. M.; Voigt, R. C.

1983-01-01

Some of the considerations that went into the design of the Finite Element Machine, a research asynchronous parallel computer are described. The present status of the system is also discussed along with some indication of the type of results that were obtained.

Direct Machining of Low-Loss THz Waveguide Components With an RF Choke.

PubMed

Lewis, Samantha M; Nanni, Emilio A; Temkin, Richard J

2014-12-01

We present results for the successful fabrication of low-loss THz metallic waveguide components using direct machining with a CNC end mill. The approach uses a split-block machining process with the addition of an RF choke running parallel to the waveguide. The choke greatly reduces coupling to the parasitic mode of the parallel-plate waveguide produced by the split-block. This method has demonstrated loss as low as 0.2 dB/cm at 280 GHz for a copper WR-3 waveguide. It has also been used in the fabrication of 3 and 10 dB directional couplers in brass, demonstrating excellent agreement with design simulations from 240-260 GHz. The method may be adapted to structures with features on the order of 200 μm.

Efficient bounding schemes for the two-center hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with removal times.

PubMed

Hidri, Lotfi; Gharbi, Anis; Louly, Mohamed Aly

2014-01-01

We focus on the two-center hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with identical parallel machines and removal times. The job removal time is the required duration to remove it from a machine after its processing. The objective is to minimize the maximum completion time (makespan). A heuristic and a lower bound are proposed for this NP-Hard problem. These procedures are based on the optimal solution of the parallel machine scheduling problem with release dates and delivery times. The heuristic is composed of two phases. The first one is a constructive phase in which an initial feasible solution is provided, while the second phase is an improvement one. Intensive computational experiments have been conducted to confirm the good performance of the proposed procedures.

Efficient Bounding Schemes for the Two-Center Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with Removal Times

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

We focus on the two-center hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with identical parallel machines and removal times. The job removal time is the required duration to remove it from a machine after its processing. The objective is to minimize the maximum completion time (makespan). A heuristic and a lower bound are proposed for this NP-Hard problem. These procedures are based on the optimal solution of the parallel machine scheduling problem with release dates and delivery times. The heuristic is composed of two phases. The first one is a constructive phase in which an initial feasible solution is provided, while the second phase is an improvement one. Intensive computational experiments have been conducted to confirm the good performance of the proposed procedures. PMID:25610911

An Optimizing Compiler for Petascale I/O on Leadership Class Architectures

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Choudhary, Alok; Kandemir, Mahmut

In high-performance computing systems, parallel I/O architectures usually have very complex hierarchies with multiple layers that collectively constitute an I/O stack, including high-level I/O libraries such as PnetCDF and HDF5, I/O middleware such as MPI-IO, and parallel file systems such as PVFS and Lustre. Our project explored automated instrumentation and compiler support for I/O intensive applications. Our project made significant progress towards understanding the complex I/O hierarchies of high-performance storage systems (including storage caches, HDDs, and SSDs), and designing and implementing state-of-the-art compiler/runtime system technology that targets I/O intensive HPC applications that target leadership class machine. This final report summarizesmore » the major achievements of the project and also points out promising future directions.« less

Automatic recognition of vector and parallel operations in a higher level language

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Schneck, P. B.

1971-01-01

A compiler for recognizing statements of a FORTRAN program which are suited for fast execution on a parallel or pipeline machine such as Illiac-4, Star or ASC is described. The technique employs interval analysis to provide flow information to the vector/parallel recognizer. Where profitable the compiler changes scalar variables to subscripted variables. The output of the compiler is an extension to FORTRAN which shows parallel and vector operations explicitly.

Revisiting Parallel Cyclic Reduction and Parallel Prefix-Based Algorithms for Block Tridiagonal System of Equations

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Seal, Sudip K; Perumalla, Kalyan S; Hirshman, Steven Paul

2013-01-01

Simulations that require solutions of block tridiagonal systems of equations rely on fast parallel solvers for runtime efficiency. Leading parallel solvers that are highly effective for general systems of equations, dense or sparse, are limited in scalability when applied to block tridiagonal systems. This paper presents scalability results as well as detailed analyses of two parallel solvers that exploit the special structure of block tridiagonal matrices to deliver superior performance, often by orders of magnitude. A rigorous analysis of their relative parallel runtimes is shown to reveal the existence of a critical block size that separates the parameter space spannedmore » by the number of block rows, the block size and the processor count, into distinct regions that favor one or the other of the two solvers. Dependence of this critical block size on the above parameters as well as on machine-specific constants is established. These formal insights are supported by empirical results on up to 2,048 cores of a Cray XT4 system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest reported scalability for parallel block tridiagonal solvers to date.« less

The QCDSP project —a status report

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Dong; Chen, Ping; Christ, Norman; Edwards, Robert; Fleming, George; Gara, Alan; Hansen, Sten; Jung, Chulwoo; Kaehler, Adrian; Kasow, Steven; Kennedy, Anthony; Kilcup, Gregory; Luo, Yubin; Malureanu, Catalin; Mawhinney, Robert; Parsons, John; Sexton, James; Sui, Chengzhong; Vranas, Pavlos

1998-01-01

We give a brief overview of the massively parallel computer project underway for nearly the past four years, centered at Columbia University. A 6 Gflops and a 50 Gflops machine are presently being debugged for installation at OSU and SCRI respectively, while a 0.4 Tflops machine is under construction for Columbia and a 0.6 Tflops machine is planned for the new RIKEN Brookhaven Research Center.

Enhancing membrane protein subcellular localization prediction by parallel fusion of multi-view features.

PubMed

Yu, Dongjun; Wu, Xiaowei; Shen, Hongbin; Yang, Jian; Tang, Zhenmin; Qi, Yong; Yang, Jingyu

2012-12-01

Membrane proteins are encoded by ~ 30% in the genome and function importantly in the living organisms. Previous studies have revealed that membrane proteins' structures and functions show obvious cell organelle-specific properties. Hence, it is highly desired to predict membrane protein's subcellular location from the primary sequence considering the extreme difficulties of membrane protein wet-lab studies. Although many models have been developed for predicting protein subcellular locations, only a few are specific to membrane proteins. Existing prediction approaches were constructed based on statistical machine learning algorithms with serial combination of multi-view features, i.e., different feature vectors are simply serially combined to form a super feature vector. However, such simple combination of features will simultaneously increase the information redundancy that could, in turn, deteriorate the final prediction accuracy. That's why it was often found that prediction success rates in the serial super space were even lower than those in a single-view space. The purpose of this paper is investigation of a proper method for fusing multiple multi-view protein sequential features for subcellular location predictions. Instead of serial strategy, we propose a novel parallel framework for fusing multiple membrane protein multi-view attributes that will represent protein samples in complex spaces. We also proposed generalized principle component analysis (GPCA) for feature reduction purpose in the complex geometry. All the experimental results through different machine learning algorithms on benchmark membrane protein subcellular localization datasets demonstrate that the newly proposed parallel strategy outperforms the traditional serial approach. We also demonstrate the efficacy of the parallel strategy on a soluble protein subcellular localization dataset indicating the parallel technique is flexible to suite for other computational biology problems. The software and datasets are available at: http://www.csbio.sjtu.edu.cn/bioinf/mpsp.

Accuracy analysis and design of A3 parallel spindle head

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ni, Yanbing; Zhang, Biao; Sun, Yupeng; Zhang, Yuan

2016-03-01

As functional components of machine tools, parallel mechanisms are widely used in high efficiency machining of aviation components, and accuracy is one of the critical technical indexes. Lots of researchers have focused on the accuracy problem of parallel mechanisms, but in terms of controlling the errors and improving the accuracy in the stage of design and manufacturing, further efforts are required. Aiming at the accuracy design of a 3-DOF parallel spindle head(A3 head), its error model, sensitivity analysis and tolerance allocation are investigated. Based on the inverse kinematic analysis, the error model of A3 head is established by using the first-order perturbation theory and vector chain method. According to the mapping property of motion and constraint Jacobian matrix, the compensatable and uncompensatable error sources which affect the accuracy in the end-effector are separated. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis is performed on the uncompensatable error sources. The sensitivity probabilistic model is established and the global sensitivity index is proposed to analyze the influence of the uncompensatable error sources on the accuracy in the end-effector of the mechanism. The results show that orientation error sources have bigger effect on the accuracy in the end-effector. Based upon the sensitivity analysis results, the tolerance design is converted into the issue of nonlinearly constrained optimization with the manufacturing cost minimum being the optimization objective. By utilizing the genetic algorithm, the allocation of the tolerances on each component is finally determined. According to the tolerance allocation results, the tolerance ranges of ten kinds of geometric error sources are obtained. These research achievements can provide fundamental guidelines for component manufacturing and assembly of this kind of parallel mechanisms.

The engine design engine. A clustered computer platform for the aerodynamic inverse design and analysis of a full engine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sanz, J.; Pischel, K.; Hubler, D.

1992-01-01

An application for parallel computation on a combined cluster of powerful workstations and supercomputers was developed. A Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is used as message passage language on a macro-tasking parallelization of the Aerodynamic Inverse Design and Analysis for a Full Engine computer code. The heterogeneous nature of the cluster is perfectly handled by the controlling host machine. Communication is established via Ethernet with the TCP/IP protocol over an open network. A reasonable overhead is imposed for internode communication, rendering an efficient utilization of the engaged processors. Perhaps one of the most interesting features of the system is its versatile nature, that permits the usage of the computational resources available that are experiencing less use at a given point in time.

Buffered coscheduling for parallel programming and enhanced fault tolerance

DOEpatents

Petrini, Fabrizio [Los Alamos, NM; Feng, Wu-chun [Los Alamos, NM

2006-01-31

A computer implemented method schedules processor jobs on a network of parallel machine processors or distributed system processors. Control information communications generated by each process performed by each processor during a defined time interval is accumulated in buffers, where adjacent time intervals are separated by strobe intervals for a global exchange of control information. A global exchange of the control information communications at the end of each defined time interval is performed during an intervening strobe interval so that each processor is informed by all of the other processors of the number of incoming jobs to be received by each processor in a subsequent time interval. The buffered coscheduling method of this invention also enhances the fault tolerance of a network of parallel machine processors or distributed system processors

Optical Symbolic Computing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Neff, John A.

1989-12-01

Experiments originating from Gestalt psychology have shown that representing information in a symbolic form provides a more effective means to understanding. Computer scientists have been struggling for the last two decades to determine how best to create, manipulate, and store collections of symbolic structures. In the past, much of this struggling led to software innovations because that was the path of least resistance. For example, the development of heuristics for organizing the searching through knowledge bases was much less expensive than building massively parallel machines that could search in parallel. That is now beginning to change with the emergence of parallel architectures which are showing the potential for handling symbolic structures. This paper will review the relationships between symbolic computing and parallel computing architectures, and will identify opportunities for optics to significantly impact the performance of such computing machines. Although neural networks are an exciting subset of massively parallel computing structures, this paper will not touch on this area since it is receiving a great deal of attention in the literature. That is, the concepts presented herein do not consider the distributed representation of knowledge.

SequenceL: Automated Parallel Algorithms Derived from CSP-NT Computational Laws

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Cooke, Daniel; Rushton, Nelson

2013-01-01

With the introduction of new parallel architectures like the cell and multicore chips from IBM, Intel, AMD, and ARM, as well as the petascale processing available for highend computing, a larger number of programmers will need to write parallel codes. Adding the parallel control structure to the sequence, selection, and iterative control constructs increases the complexity of code development, which often results in increased development costs and decreased reliability. SequenceL is a high-level programming language that is, a programming language that is closer to a human s way of thinking than to a machine s. Historically, high-level languages have resulted in decreased development costs and increased reliability, at the expense of performance. In recent applications at JSC and in industry, SequenceL has demonstrated the usual advantages of high-level programming in terms of low cost and high reliability. SequenceL programs, however, have run at speeds typically comparable with, and in many cases faster than, their counterparts written in C and C++ when run on single-core processors. Moreover, SequenceL is able to generate parallel executables automatically for multicore hardware, gaining parallel speedups without any extra effort from the programmer beyond what is required to write the sequen tial/singlecore code. A SequenceL-to-C++ translator has been developed that automatically renders readable multithreaded C++ from a combination of a SequenceL program and sample data input. The SequenceL language is based on two fundamental computational laws, Consume-Simplify- Produce (CSP) and Normalize-Trans - pose (NT), which enable it to automate the creation of parallel algorithms from high-level code that has no annotations of parallelism whatsoever. In our anecdotal experience, SequenceL development has been in every case less costly than development of the same algorithm in sequential (that is, single-core, single process) C or C++, and an order of magnitude less costly than development of comparable parallel code. Moreover, SequenceL not only automatically parallelizes the code, but since it is based on CSP-NT, it is provably race free, thus eliminating the largest quality challenge the parallelized software developer faces.

Thermal Investigation of Interaction between High-power CW-laser Radiation and a Water-jet

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Brecher, Christian; Janssen, Henning; Eckert, Markus; Schmidt, Florian

The technology of a water guided laser beam has been industrially established for micro machining. Pulsed laser radiation is guided via a water jet (diameter: 25-250 μm) using total internal reflection. Due to the cylindrical jet shape the depth of field increases to above 50 mm, enabling parallel kerfs compared to conventional laser systems. However higher material thicknesses and macro geometries cannot be machined economically viable due to low average laser powers. Fraunhofer IPT has successfully combined a high-power continuous-wave (CW) fiber laser (6 kW) and water jet technology. The main challenge of guiding high-power laser radiation in water is the energy transferred to the jet by absorption, decreasing its stability. A model of laser water interaction in the water jet has been developed and validated experimentally. Based on the results an upscaling of system technology to 30 kW is discussed, enabling a high potential in cutting challenging materials at high qualities and high speeds.

GROMACS 4:  Algorithms for Highly Efficient, Load-Balanced, and Scalable Molecular Simulation.

PubMed

Hess, Berk; Kutzner, Carsten; van der Spoel, David; Lindahl, Erik

2008-03-01

Molecular simulation is an extremely useful, but computationally very expensive tool for studies of chemical and biomolecular systems. Here, we present a new implementation of our molecular simulation toolkit GROMACS which now both achieves extremely high performance on single processors from algorithmic optimizations and hand-coded routines and simultaneously scales very well on parallel machines. The code encompasses a minimal-communication domain decomposition algorithm, full dynamic load balancing, a state-of-the-art parallel constraint solver, and efficient virtual site algorithms that allow removal of hydrogen atom degrees of freedom to enable integration time steps up to 5 fs for atomistic simulations also in parallel. To improve the scaling properties of the common particle mesh Ewald electrostatics algorithms, we have in addition used a Multiple-Program, Multiple-Data approach, with separate node domains responsible for direct and reciprocal space interactions. Not only does this combination of algorithms enable extremely long simulations of large systems but also it provides that simulation performance on quite modest numbers of standard cluster nodes.

Environmental concept for engineering software on MIMD computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Lopez, L. A.; Valimohamed, K.

1989-01-01

The issues related to developing an environment in which engineering systems can be implemented on MIMD machines are discussed. The problem is presented in terms of implementing the finite element method under such an environment. However, neither the concepts nor the prototype implementation environment are limited to this application. The topics discussed include: the ability to schedule and synchronize tasks efficiently; granularity of tasks; load balancing; and the use of a high level language to specify parallel constructs, manage data, and achieve portability. The objective of developing a virtual machine concept which incorporates solutions to the above issues leads to a design that can be mapped onto loosely coupled, tightly coupled, and hybrid systems.

Research on rapid agile metrology for manufacturing based on real-time multitask operating system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Jihong; Song, Zhen; Yang, Daoshan; Zhou, Ji; Buckley, Shawn

1996-10-01

Rapid agile metrology for manufacturing (RAMM) using multiple non-contact sensors is likely to remain a growing trend in manufacturing. High speed inspecting systems for manufacturing is characterized by multitasks implemented in parallel and real-time events which occur simultaneously. In this paper, we introduce a real-time operating system into RAMM research. A general task model of a class-based object- oriented technology is proposed. A general multitask frame of a typical RAMM system using OPNet is discussed. Finally, an application example of a machine which inspects parts held on a carrier strip is described. With RTOS and OPNet, this machine can measure two dimensions of the contacts at 300 parts/second.

FLAME: A platform for high performance computing of complex systems, applied for three case studies

DOE PAGES

Kiran, Mariam; Bicak, Mesude; Maleki-Dizaji, Saeedeh; ...

2011-01-01

FLAME allows complex models to be automatically parallelised on High Performance Computing (HPC) grids enabling large number of agents to be simulated over short periods of time. Modellers are hindered by complexities of porting models on parallel platforms and time taken to run large simulations on a single machine, which FLAME overcomes. Three case studies from different disciplines were modelled using FLAME, and are presented along with their performance results on a grid.

Telescoping magnetic ball bar test gage

DOEpatents

Bryan, J.B.

1984-03-13

A telescoping magnetic ball bar test gage for determining the accuracy of machine tools, including robots, and those measuring machines having non-disengageable servo drives which cannot be clutched out is disclosed. Two gage balls are held and separated from one another by a telescoping fixture which allows them relative radial motional freedom but not relative lateral motional freedom. The telescoping fixture comprises a parallel reed flexure unit and a rigid member. One gage ball is secured by a magnetic socket knuckle assembly which fixes its center with respect to the machine being tested. The other gage ball is secured by another magnetic socket knuckle assembly which is engaged or held by the machine in such manner that the center of that ball is directed to execute a prescribed trajectory, all points of which are equidistant from the center of the fixed gage ball. As the moving ball executes its trajectory, changes in the radial distance between the centers of the two balls caused by inaccuracies in the machine are determined or measured by a linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) assembly actuated by the parallel reed flexure unit. Measurements can be quickly and easily taken for multiple trajectories about several different fixed ball locations, thereby determining the accuracy of the machine. 3 figs.

Spatial and temporal accuracy of asynchrony-tolerant finite difference schemes for partial differential equations at extreme scales

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kumari, Komal; Donzis, Diego

2017-11-01

Highly resolved computational simulations on massively parallel machines are critical in understanding the physics of a vast number of complex phenomena in nature governed by partial differential equations. Simulations at extreme levels of parallelism present many challenges with communication between processing elements (PEs) being a major bottleneck. In order to fully exploit the computational power of exascale machines one needs to devise numerical schemes that relax global synchronizations across PEs. This asynchronous computations, however, have a degrading effect on the accuracy of standard numerical schemes.We have developed asynchrony-tolerant (AT) schemes that maintain order of accuracy despite relaxed communications. We show, analytically and numerically, that these schemes retain their numerical properties with multi-step higher order temporal Runge-Kutta schemes. We also show that for a range of optimized parameters,the computation time and error for AT schemes is less than their synchronous counterpart. Stability of the AT schemes which depends upon history and random nature of delays, are also discussed. Support from NSF is gratefully acknowledged.

Bit-parallel arithmetic in a massively-parallel associative processor

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Scherson, Isaac D.; Kramer, David A.; Alleyne, Brian D.

1992-01-01

A simple but powerful new architecture based on a classical associative processor model is presented. Algorithms for performing the four basic arithmetic operations both for integer and floating point operands are described. For m-bit operands, the proposed architecture makes it possible to execute complex operations in O(m) cycles as opposed to O(m exp 2) for bit-serial machines. A word-parallel, bit-parallel, massively-parallel computing system can be constructed using this architecture with VLSI technology. The operation of this system is demonstrated for the fast Fourier transform and matrix multiplication.

Next Generation Parallelization Systems for Processing and Control of PDS Image Node Assets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Verma, R.

2017-06-01

We present next-generation parallelization tools to help Planetary Data System (PDS) Imaging Node (IMG) better monitor, process, and control changes to nearly 650 million file assets and over a dozen machines on which they are referenced or stored.

Block-Parallel Data Analysis with DIY2

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Morozov, Dmitriy; Peterka, Tom

DIY2 is a programming model and runtime for block-parallel analytics on distributed-memory machines. Its main abstraction is block-structured data parallelism: data are decomposed into blocks; blocks are assigned to processing elements (processes or threads); computation is described as iterations over these blocks, and communication between blocks is defined by reusable patterns. By expressing computation in this general form, the DIY2 runtime is free to optimize the movement of blocks between slow and fast memories (disk and flash vs. DRAM) and to concurrently execute blocks residing in memory with multiple threads. This enables the same program to execute in-core, out-of-core, serial,more » parallel, single-threaded, multithreaded, or combinations thereof. This paper describes the implementation of the main features of the DIY2 programming model and optimizations to improve performance. DIY2 is evaluated on benchmark test cases to establish baseline performance for several common patterns and on larger complete analysis codes running on large-scale HPC machines.« less

Statistical Analysis of NAS Parallel Benchmarks and LINPACK Results

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Meuer, Hans-Werner; Simon, Horst D.; Strohmeier, Erich; Lasinski, T. A. (Technical Monitor)

1994-01-01

In the last three years extensive performance data have been reported for parallel machines both based on the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, and on LINPACK. In this study we have used the reported benchmark results and performed a number of statistical experiments using factor, cluster, and regression analyses. In addition to the performance results of LINPACK and the eight NAS parallel benchmarks, we have also included peak performance of the machine, and the LINPACK n and n(sub 1/2) values. Some of the results and observations can be summarized as follows: 1) All benchmarks are strongly correlated with peak performance. 2) LINPACK and EP have each a unique signature. 3) The remaining NPB can grouped into three groups as follows: (CG and IS), (LU and SP), and (MG, FT, and BT). Hence three (or four with EP) benchmarks are sufficient to characterize the overall NPB performance. Our poster presentation will follow a standard poster format, and will present the data of our statistical analysis in detail.

Address tracing for parallel machines

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Stunkel, Craig B.; Janssens, Bob; Fuchs, W. Kent

1991-01-01

Recently implemented parallel system address-tracing methods based on several metrics are surveyed. The issues specific to collection of traces for both shared and distributed memory parallel computers are highlighted. Five general categories of address-trace collection methods are examined: hardware-captured, interrupt-based, simulation-based, altered microcode-based, and instrumented program-based traces. The problems unique to shared memory and distributed memory multiprocessors are examined separately.

The science of computing - Parallel computation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Denning, P. J.

1985-01-01

Although parallel computation architectures have been known for computers since the 1920s, it was only in the 1970s that microelectronic components technologies advanced to the point where it became feasible to incorporate multiple processors in one machine. Concommitantly, the development of algorithms for parallel processing also lagged due to hardware limitations. The speed of computing with solid-state chips is limited by gate switching delays. The physical limit implies that a 1 Gflop operational speed is the maximum for sequential processors. A computer recently introduced features a 'hypercube' architecture with 128 processors connected in networks at 5, 6 or 7 points per grid, depending on the design choice. Its computing speed rivals that of supercomputers, but at a fraction of the cost. The added speed with less hardware is due to parallel processing, which utilizes algorithms representing different parts of an equation that can be broken into simpler statements and processed simultaneously. Present, highly developed computer languages like FORTRAN, PASCAL, COBOL, etc., rely on sequential instructions. Thus, increased emphasis will now be directed at parallel processing algorithms to exploit the new architectures.

MPI implementation of PHOENICS: A general purpose computational fluid dynamics code

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Simunovic, S.; Zacharia, T.; Baltas, N.; Spalding, D. B.

1995-03-01

PHOENICS is a suite of computational analysis programs that are used for simulation of fluid flow, heat transfer, and dynamical reaction processes. The parallel version of the solver EARTH for the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program PHOENICS has been implemented using Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. Implementation of MPI version of PHOENICS makes this computational tool portable to a wide range of parallel machines and enables the use of high performance computing for large scale computational simulations. MPI libraries are available on several parallel architectures making the program usable across different architectures as well as on heterogeneous computer networks. The Intel Paragon NX and MPI versions of the program have been developed and tested on massively parallel supercomputers Intel Paragon XP/S 5, XP/S 35, and Kendall Square Research, and on the multiprocessor SGI Onyx computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The preliminary testing results of the developed program have shown scalable performance for reasonably sized computational domains.

MPI implementation of PHOENICS: A general purpose computational fluid dynamics code

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Simunovic, S.; Zacharia, T.; Baltas, N.

1995-04-01

PHOENICS is a suite of computational analysis programs that are used for simulation of fluid flow, heat transfer, and dynamical reaction processes. The parallel version of the solver EARTH for the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program PHOENICS has been implemented using Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. Implementation of MPI version of PHOENICS makes this computational tool portable to a wide range of parallel machines and enables the use of high performance computing for large scale computational simulations. MPI libraries are available on several parallel architectures making the program usable across different architectures as well as on heterogeneous computer networks. Themore » Intel Paragon NX and MPI versions of the program have been developed and tested on massively parallel supercomputers Intel Paragon XP/S 5, XP/S 35, and Kendall Square Research, and on the multiprocessor SGI Onyx computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The preliminary testing results of the developed program have shown scalable performance for reasonably sized computational domains.« less

The design and implementation of a parallel unstructured Euler solver using software primitives

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Das, R.; Mavriplis, D. J.; Saltz, J.; Gupta, S.; Ponnusamy, R.

1992-01-01

This paper is concerned with the implementation of a three-dimensional unstructured grid Euler-solver on massively parallel distributed-memory computer architectures. The goal is to minimize solution time by achieving high computational rates with a numerically efficient algorithm. An unstructured multigrid algorithm with an edge-based data structure has been adopted, and a number of optimizations have been devised and implemented in order to accelerate the parallel communication rates. The implementation is carried out by creating a set of software tools, which provide an interface between the parallelization issues and the sequential code, while providing a basis for future automatic run-time compilation support. Large practical unstructured grid problems are solved on the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube and Intel Touchstone Delta machine. The quantitative effect of the various optimizations are demonstrated, and we show that the combined effect of these optimizations leads to roughly a factor of three performance improvement. The overall solution efficiency is compared with that obtained on the CRAY-YMP vector supercomputer.

Parallelization of an Object-Oriented Unstructured Aeroacoustics Solver

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Baggag, Abdelkader; Atkins, Harold; Oezturan, Can; Keyes, David

1999-01-01

A computational aeroacoustics code based on the discontinuous Galerkin method is ported to several parallel platforms using MPI. The discontinuous Galerkin method is a compact high-order method that retains its accuracy and robustness on non-smooth unstructured meshes. In its semi-discrete form, the discontinuous Galerkin method can be combined with explicit time marching methods making it well suited to time accurate computations. The compact nature of the discontinuous Galerkin method also makes it well suited for distributed memory parallel platforms. The original serial code was written using an object-oriented approach and was previously optimized for cache-based machines. The port to parallel platforms was achieved simply by treating partition boundaries as a type of boundary condition. Code modifications were minimal because boundary conditions were abstractions in the original program. Scalability results are presented for the SCI Origin, IBM SP2, and clusters of SGI and Sun workstations. Slightly superlinear speedup is achieved on a fixed-size problem on the Origin, due to cache effects.

Particle-mesh techniques

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Macneice, Peter

1995-01-01

This is an introduction to numerical Particle-Mesh techniques, which are commonly used to model plasmas, gravitational N-body systems, and both compressible and incompressible fluids. The theory behind this approach is presented, and its practical implementation, both for serial and parallel machines, is discussed. This document is based on a four-hour lecture course presented by the author at the NASA Summer School for High Performance Computational Physics, held at Goddard Space Flight Center.

IceT users' guide and reference.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Moreland, Kenneth D.

2011-01-01

The Image Composition Engine for Tiles (IceT) is a high-performance sort-last parallel rendering library. In addition to providing accelerated rendering for a standard display, IceT provides the unique ability to generate images for tiled displays. The overall resolution of the display may be several times larger than any viewport that may be rendered by a single machine. This document is an overview of the user interface to IceT.

Overview and recent results of the Magnetized Shock Experiment (MSX)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Weber, T. E.; Smith, R. J.; Hsu, S. C.; Omelchenko, Y.

2015-11-01

Recent machine and diagnostics upgrades to the Magnetized Shock Experiment (MSX) at LANL have enabled unprecedented access to the physical processes arising from stagnating magnetized (β ~ 1), collisionless, highly supersonic (M ,MA ~ 10) flows, similar in dimensionless parameters to those found in both space and astrophysical shocks. Hot (100s of eV during translation), dense (1022 - 1023 m-3) Field Reversed Configuration (FRC) plasmoids are accelerated to high velocities (100s of km/s) and subsequently impact against a static target such as a strong parallel or anti-parallel (reconnection-wise) magnetic mirror, a solid obstacle, or neutral gas cloud to recreate the physics of interest with characteristic length and time scales that are both large enough to observe yet small enough to fit within the experiment. Long-lived (>50 μs) stagnated plasmas with density enhancement much greater than predicted by fluid theory (>4x) are observed, accompanied by discontinuous plasma structures indicating shocks and jetting (visible emission and interferometry) and copious >1 keV x-ray emission. An overview of the experimental program will be presented, including machine design and capabilities, diagnostics, and an examination of the physical processes that occur during stagnation against a variety of targets. Supported by the DOE Office of Fusion Energy Sciences under contract DE-AC52-06NA25369.

Efficient diagonalization of the sparse matrices produced within the framework of the UK R-matrix molecular codes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Galiatsatos, P. G.; Tennyson, J.

2012-11-01

The most time consuming step within the framework of the UK R-matrix molecular codes is that of the diagonalization of the inner region Hamiltonian matrix (IRHM). Here we present the method that we follow to speed up this step. We use shared memory machines (SMM), distributed memory machines (DMM), the OpenMP directive based parallel language, the MPI function based parallel language, the sparse matrix diagonalizers ARPACK and PARPACK, a variation for real symmetric matrices of the official coordinate sparse matrix format and finally a parallel sparse matrix-vector product (PSMV). The efficient application of the previous techniques rely on two important facts: the sparsity of the matrix is large enough (more than 98%) and in order to get back converged results we need a small only part of the matrix spectrum.

A scheme for solving the plane-plane challenge in force measurements at the nanoscale.

PubMed

Siria, Alessandro; Huant, Serge; Auvert, Geoffroy; Comin, Fabio; Chevrier, Joel

2010-05-19

Non-contact interaction between two parallel flat surfaces is a central paradigm in sciences. This situation is the starting point for a wealth of different models: the capacitor description in electrostatics, hydrodynamic flow, thermal exchange, the Casimir force, direct contact study, third body confinement such as liquids or films of soft condensed matter. The control of parallelism is so demanding that no versatile single force machine in this geometry has been proposed so far. Using a combination of nanopositioning based on inertial motors, of microcrystal shaping with a focused-ion beam (FIB) and of accurate in situ and real-time control of surface parallelism with X-ray diffraction, we propose here a "gedanken" surface-force machine that should enable one to measure interactions between movable surfaces separated by gaps in the micrometer and nanometer ranges.

An Optimizing Compiler for Petascale I/O on Leadership-Class Architectures

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Kandemir, Mahmut Taylan; Choudary, Alok; Thakur, Rajeev

In high-performance computing (HPC), parallel I/O architectures usually have very complex hierarchies with multiple layers that collectively constitute an I/O stack, including high-level I/O libraries such as PnetCDF and HDF5, I/O middleware such as MPI-IO, and parallel file systems such as PVFS and Lustre. Our DOE project explored automated instrumentation and compiler support for I/O intensive applications. Our project made significant progress towards understanding the complex I/O hierarchies of high-performance storage systems (including storage caches, HDDs, and SSDs), and designing and implementing state-of-the-art compiler/runtime system technology that targets I/O intensive HPC applications that target leadership class machine. This final reportmore » summarizes the major achievements of the project and also points out promising future directions Two new sections in this report compared to the previous report are IOGenie and SSD/NVM-specific optimizations.« less

Sublattice parallel replica dynamics.

PubMed

Martínez, Enrique; Uberuaga, Blas P; Voter, Arthur F

2014-06-01

Exascale computing presents a challenge for the scientific community as new algorithms must be developed to take full advantage of the new computing paradigm. Atomistic simulation methods that offer full fidelity to the underlying potential, i.e., molecular dynamics (MD) and parallel replica dynamics, fail to use the whole machine speedup, leaving a region in time and sample size space that is unattainable with current algorithms. In this paper, we present an extension of the parallel replica dynamics algorithm [A. F. Voter, Phys. Rev. B 57, R13985 (1998)] by combining it with the synchronous sublattice approach of Shim and Amar [ and , Phys. Rev. B 71, 125432 (2005)], thereby exploiting event locality to improve the algorithm scalability. This algorithm is based on a domain decomposition in which events happen independently in different regions in the sample. We develop an analytical expression for the speedup given by this sublattice parallel replica dynamics algorithm and compare it with parallel MD and traditional parallel replica dynamics. We demonstrate how this algorithm, which introduces a slight additional approximation of event locality, enables the study of physical systems unreachable with traditional methodologies and promises to better utilize the resources of current high performance and future exascale computers.

Scheduling of hybrid types of machines with two-machine flowshop as the first type and a single machine as the second type

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hsiao, Ming-Chih; Su, Ling-Huey

2018-02-01

This research addresses the problem of scheduling hybrid machine types, in which one type is a two-machine flowshop and another type is a single machine. A job is either processed on the two-machine flowshop or on the single machine. The objective is to determine a production schedule for all jobs so as to minimize the makespan. The problem is NP-hard since the two parallel machines problem was proved to be NP-hard. Simulated annealing algorithms are developed to solve the problem optimally. A mixed integer programming (MIP) is developed and used to evaluate the performance for two SAs. Computational experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the simulated annealing algorithms, the quality of the simulated annealing algorithms will also be reported.

Institute for Defense Analysis. Annual Report 1995.

DTIC Science & Technology

1995-01-01

staff have been involved in the community-wide development of MPI as well as in its application to specific NSA problems. 35 Parallel Groebner ...Basis Code — Symbolic Computing on Parallel Machines The Groebner basis method is a set of algorithms for reformulating very complex algebraic expres

ATST telescope mount: telescope of machine tool

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jeffers, Paul; Stolz, Günter; Bonomi, Giovanni; Dreyer, Oliver; Kärcher, Hans

2012-09-01

The Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) will be the largest solar telescope in the world, and will be able to provide the sharpest views ever taken of the solar surface. The telescope has a 4m aperture primary mirror, however due to the off axis nature of the optical layout, the telescope mount has proportions similar to an 8 meter class telescope. The technology normally used in this class of telescope is well understood in the telescope community and has been successfully implemented in numerous projects. The world of large machine tools has developed in a separate realm with similar levels of performance requirement but different boundary conditions. In addition the competitive nature of private industry has encouraged development and usage of more cost effective solutions both in initial capital cost and thru-life operating cost. Telescope mounts move relatively slowly with requirements for high stability under external environmental influences such as wind buffeting. Large machine tools operate under high speed requirements coupled with high application of force through the machine but with little or no external environmental influences. The benefits of these parallel development paths and the ATST system requirements are being combined in the ATST Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA). The process of balancing the system requirements with new technologies is based on the experience of the ATST project team, Ingersoll Machine Tools who are the main contractor for the TMA and MT Mechatronics who are their design subcontractors. This paper highlights a number of these proven technologies from the commercially driven machine tool world that are being introduced to the TMA design. Also the challenges of integrating and ensuring that the differences in application requirements are accounted for in the design are discussed.

Multiprocessing the Sieve of Eratosthenes

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bokhari, S.

1986-01-01

The Sieve of Eratosthenes for finding prime numbers in recent years has seen much use as a benchmark algorithm for serial computers while its intrinsically parallel nature has gone largely unnoticed. The implementation of a parallel version of this algorithm for a real parallel computer, the Flex/32, is described and its performance discussed. It is shown that the algorithm is sensitive to several fundamental performance parameters of parallel machines, such as spawning time, signaling time, memory access, and overhead of process switching. Because of the nature of the algorithm, it is impossible to get any speedup beyond 4 or 5 processors unless some form of dynamic load balancing is employed. We describe the performance of our algorithm with and without load balancing and compare it with theoretical lower bounds and simulated results. It is straightforward to understand this algorithm and to check the final results. However, its efficient implementation on a real parallel machine requires thoughtful design, especially if dynamic load balancing is desired. The fundamental operations required by the algorithm are very simple: this means that the slightest overhead appears prominently in performance data. The Sieve thus serves not only as a very severe test of the capabilities of a parallel processor but is also an interesting challenge for the programmer.

A Survey of Parallel Computing

DTIC Science & Technology

1988-07-01

Evaluating Two Massively Parallel Machines. Communications of the ACM .9, , , 176 BIBLIOGRAPHY 29, 8 (August), pp. 752-758. Gajski , D.D., Padua, D.A., Kuck...Computer Architecture, edited by Gajski , D. D., Milutinovic, V. M. Siegel, H. J. and Furht, B. P. IEEE Computer Society Press, Washington, D.C., pp. 387-407

A data distributed parallel algorithm for ray-traced volume rendering

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ma, Kwan-Liu; Painter, James S.; Hansen, Charles D.; Krogh, Michael F.

1993-01-01

This paper presents a divide-and-conquer ray-traced volume rendering algorithm and a parallel image compositing method, along with their implementation and performance on the Connection Machine CM-5, and networked workstations. This algorithm distributes both the data and the computations to individual processing units to achieve fast, high-quality rendering of high-resolution data. The volume data, once distributed, is left intact. The processing nodes perform local ray tracing of their subvolume concurrently. No communication between processing units is needed during this locally ray-tracing process. A subimage is generated by each processing unit and the final image is obtained by compositing subimages in the proper order, which can be determined a priori. Test results on both the CM-5 and a group of networked workstations demonstrate the practicality of our rendering algorithm and compositing method.

An Analysis of Performance Enhancement Techniques for Overset Grid Applications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Djomehri, J. J.; Biswas, R.; Potsdam, M.; Strawn, R. C.; Biegel, Bryan (Technical Monitor)

2002-01-01

The overset grid methodology has significantly reduced time-to-solution of high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations about complex aerospace configurations. The solution process resolves the geometrical complexity of the problem domain by using separately generated but overlapping structured discretization grids that periodically exchange information through interpolation. However, high performance computations of such large-scale realistic applications must be handled efficiently on state-of-the-art parallel supercomputers. This paper analyzes the effects of various performance enhancement techniques on the parallel efficiency of an overset grid Navier-Stokes CFD application running on an SGI Origin2000 machine. Specifically, the role of asynchronous communication, grid splitting, and grid grouping strategies are presented and discussed. Results indicate that performance depends critically on the level of latency hiding and the quality of load balancing across the processors.

Design and Analysis of a Sensor System for Cutting Force Measurement in Machining Processes

PubMed Central

Liang, Qiaokang; Zhang, Dan; Coppola, Gianmarc; Mao, Jianxu; Sun, Wei; Wang, Yaonan; Ge, Yunjian

2016-01-01

Multi-component force sensors have infiltrated a wide variety of automation products since the 1970s. However, one seldom finds full-component sensor systems available in the market for cutting force measurement in machine processes. In this paper, a new six-component sensor system with a compact monolithic elastic element (EE) is designed and developed to detect the tangential cutting forces Fx, Fy and Fz (i.e., forces along x-, y-, and z-axis) as well as the cutting moments Mx, My and Mz (i.e., moments about x-, y-, and z-axis) simultaneously. Optimal structural parameters of the EE are carefully designed via simulation-driven optimization. Moreover, a prototype sensor system is fabricated, which is applied to a 5-axis parallel kinematic machining center. Calibration experimental results demonstrate that the system is capable of measuring cutting forces and moments with good linearity while minimizing coupling error. Both the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and calibration experimental studies validate the high performance of the proposed sensor system that is expected to be adopted into machining processes. PMID:26751451

Design and Analysis of a Sensor System for Cutting Force Measurement in Machining Processes.

PubMed

Liang, Qiaokang; Zhang, Dan; Coppola, Gianmarc; Mao, Jianxu; Sun, Wei; Wang, Yaonan; Ge, Yunjian

2016-01-07

Multi-component force sensors have infiltrated a wide variety of automation products since the 1970s. However, one seldom finds full-component sensor systems available in the market for cutting force measurement in machine processes. In this paper, a new six-component sensor system with a compact monolithic elastic element (EE) is designed and developed to detect the tangential cutting forces Fx, Fy and Fz (i.e., forces along x-, y-, and z-axis) as well as the cutting moments Mx, My and Mz (i.e., moments about x-, y-, and z-axis) simultaneously. Optimal structural parameters of the EE are carefully designed via simulation-driven optimization. Moreover, a prototype sensor system is fabricated, which is applied to a 5-axis parallel kinematic machining center. Calibration experimental results demonstrate that the system is capable of measuring cutting forces and moments with good linearity while minimizing coupling error. Both the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and calibration experimental studies validate the high performance of the proposed sensor system that is expected to be adopted into machining processes.

Scalable parallel distance field construction for large-scale applications

DOE PAGES

Yu, Hongfeng; Xie, Jinrong; Ma, Kwan -Liu; ...

2015-10-01

Computing distance fields is fundamental to many scientific and engineering applications. Distance fields can be used to direct analysis and reduce data. In this paper, we present a highly scalable method for computing 3D distance fields on massively parallel distributed-memory machines. Anew distributed spatial data structure, named parallel distance tree, is introduced to manage the level sets of data and facilitate surface tracking overtime, resulting in significantly reduced computation and communication costs for calculating the distance to the surface of interest from any spatial locations. Our method supports several data types and distance metrics from real-world applications. We demonstrate itsmore » efficiency and scalability on state-of-the-art supercomputers using both large-scale volume datasets and surface models. We also demonstrate in-situ distance field computation on dynamic turbulent flame surfaces for a petascale combustion simulation. In conclusion, our work greatly extends the usability of distance fields for demanding applications.« less

A robot arm simulation with a shared memory multiprocessor machine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Kim, Sung-Soo; Chuang, Li-Ping

1989-01-01

A parallel processing scheme for a single chain robot arm is presented for high speed computation on a shared memory multiprocessor. A recursive formulation that is derived from a virtual work form of the d'Alembert equations of motion is utilized for robot arm dynamics. A joint drive system that consists of a motor rotor and gears is included in the arm dynamics model, in order to take into account gyroscopic effects due to the spinning of the rotor. The fine grain parallelism of mechanical and control subsystem models is exploited, based on independent computation associated with bodies, joint drive systems, and controllers. Efficiency and effectiveness of the parallel scheme are demonstrated through simulations of a telerobotic manipulator arm. Two different mechanical subsystem models, i.e., with and without gyroscopic effects, are compared, to show the trade-off between efficiency and accuracy.

Scalable Parallel Distance Field Construction for Large-Scale Applications.

PubMed

Yu, Hongfeng; Xie, Jinrong; Ma, Kwan-Liu; Kolla, Hemanth; Chen, Jacqueline H

2015-10-01

Computing distance fields is fundamental to many scientific and engineering applications. Distance fields can be used to direct analysis and reduce data. In this paper, we present a highly scalable method for computing 3D distance fields on massively parallel distributed-memory machines. A new distributed spatial data structure, named parallel distance tree, is introduced to manage the level sets of data and facilitate surface tracking over time, resulting in significantly reduced computation and communication costs for calculating the distance to the surface of interest from any spatial locations. Our method supports several data types and distance metrics from real-world applications. We demonstrate its efficiency and scalability on state-of-the-art supercomputers using both large-scale volume datasets and surface models. We also demonstrate in-situ distance field computation on dynamic turbulent flame surfaces for a petascale combustion simulation. Our work greatly extends the usability of distance fields for demanding applications.

Molecular Symmetry in Ab Initio Calculations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Madhavan, P. V.; Written, J. L.

1987-05-01

A scheme is presented for the construction of the Fock matrix in LCAO-SCF calculations and for the transformation of basis integrals to LCAO-MO integrals that can utilize several symmetry unique lists of integrals corresponding to different symmetry groups. The algorithm is fully compatible with vector processing machines and is especially suited for parallel processing machines.

Telescoping magnetic ball bar test gage

DOEpatents

Bryan, James B.

1984-01-01

A telescoping magnetic ball bar test gage for determining the accuracy of machine tools, including robots, and those measuring machines having non-disengageable servo drives which cannot be clutched out. Two gage balls (10, 12) are held and separated from one another by a telescoping fixture which allows them relative radial motional freedom but not relative lateral motional freedom. The telescoping fixture comprises a parallel reed flexure unit (14) and a rigid member (16, 18, 20, 22, 24). One gage ball (10) is secured by a magnetic socket knuckle assembly (34) which fixes its center with respect to the machine being tested. The other gage ball (12) is secured by another magnetic socket knuckle assembly (38) which is engaged or held by the machine in such manner that the center of that ball (12) is directed to execute a prescribed trajectory, all points of which are equidistant from the center of the fixed gage ball (10). As the moving ball (12) executes its trajectory, changes in the radial distance between the centers of the two balls (10, 12) caused by inaccuracies in the machine are determined or measured by a linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) assembly (50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60) actuated by the parallel reed flexure unit (14). Measurements can be quickly and easily taken for multiple trajectories about several different fixed ball (10) locations, thereby determining the accuracy of the machine.

Communication overhead on the Intel Paragon, IBM SP2 and Meiko CS-2

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bokhari, Shahid H.

1995-01-01

Interprocessor communication overhead is a crucial measure of the power of parallel computing systems-its impact can severely limit the performance of parallel programs. This report presents measurements of communication overhead on three contemporary commercial multicomputer systems: the Intel Paragon, the IBM SP2 and the Meiko CS-2. In each case the time to communicate between processors is presented as a function of message length. The time for global synchronization and memory access is discussed. The performance of these machines in emulating hypercubes and executing random pairwise exchanges is also investigated. It is shown that the interprocessor communication time depends heavily on the specific communication pattern required. These observations contradict the commonly held belief that communication overhead on contemporary machines is independent of the placement of tasks on processors. The information presented in this report permits the evaluation of the efficiency of parallel algorithm implementations against standard baselines.

A system for routing arbitrary directed graphs on SIMD architectures

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Tomboulian, Sherryl

1987-01-01

There are many problems which can be described in terms of directed graphs that contain a large number of vertices where simple computations occur using data from connecting vertices. A method is given for parallelizing such problems on an SIMD machine model that is bit-serial and uses only nearest neighbor connections for communication. Each vertex of the graph will be assigned to a processor in the machine. Algorithms are given that will be used to implement movement of data along the arcs of the graph. This architecture and algorithms define a system that is relatively simple to build and can do graph processing. All arcs can be transversed in parallel in time O(T), where T is empirically proportional to the diameter of the interconnection network times the average degree of the graph. Modifying or adding a new arc takes the same time as parallel traversal.

Toward Millions of File System IOPS on Low-Cost, Commodity Hardware

PubMed Central

Zheng, Da; Burns, Randal; Szalay, Alexander S.

2013-01-01

We describe a storage system that removes I/O bottlenecks to achieve more than one million IOPS based on a user-space file abstraction for arrays of commodity SSDs. The file abstraction refactors I/O scheduling and placement for extreme parallelism and non-uniform memory and I/O. The system includes a set-associative, parallel page cache in the user space. We redesign page caching to eliminate CPU overhead and lock-contention in non-uniform memory architecture machines. We evaluate our design on a 32 core NUMA machine with four, eight-core processors. Experiments show that our design delivers 1.23 million 512-byte read IOPS. The page cache realizes the scalable IOPS of Linux asynchronous I/O (AIO) and increases user-perceived I/O performance linearly with cache hit rates. The parallel, set-associative cache matches the cache hit rates of the global Linux page cache under real workloads. PMID:24402052

Toward Millions of File System IOPS on Low-Cost, Commodity Hardware.

PubMed

Zheng, Da; Burns, Randal; Szalay, Alexander S

2013-01-01

We describe a storage system that removes I/O bottlenecks to achieve more than one million IOPS based on a user-space file abstraction for arrays of commodity SSDs. The file abstraction refactors I/O scheduling and placement for extreme parallelism and non-uniform memory and I/O. The system includes a set-associative, parallel page cache in the user space. We redesign page caching to eliminate CPU overhead and lock-contention in non-uniform memory architecture machines. We evaluate our design on a 32 core NUMA machine with four, eight-core processors. Experiments show that our design delivers 1.23 million 512-byte read IOPS. The page cache realizes the scalable IOPS of Linux asynchronous I/O (AIO) and increases user-perceived I/O performance linearly with cache hit rates. The parallel, set-associative cache matches the cache hit rates of the global Linux page cache under real workloads.

Experimental Realization of a Quantum Support Vector Machine

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Zhaokai; Liu, Xiaomei; Xu, Nanyang; Du, Jiangfeng

2015-04-01

The fundamental principle of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to learn from previous experience and do future work accordingly. In the age of big data, classical learning machines often require huge computational resources in many practical cases. Quantum machine learning algorithms, on the other hand, could be exponentially faster than their classical counterparts by utilizing quantum parallelism. Here, we demonstrate a quantum machine learning algorithm to implement handwriting recognition on a four-qubit NMR test bench. The quantum machine learns standard character fonts and then recognizes handwritten characters from a set with two candidates. Because of the wide spread importance of artificial intelligence and its tremendous consumption of computational resources, quantum speedup would be extremely attractive against the challenges of big data.

Scalable parallel communications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Maly, K.; Khanna, S.; Overstreet, C. M.; Mukkamala, R.; Zubair, M.; Sekhar, Y. S.; Foudriat, E. C.

1992-01-01

Coarse-grain parallelism in networking (that is, the use of multiple protocol processors running replicated software sending over several physical channels) can be used to provide gigabit communications for a single application. Since parallel network performance is highly dependent on real issues such as hardware properties (e.g., memory speeds and cache hit rates), operating system overhead (e.g., interrupt handling), and protocol performance (e.g., effect of timeouts), we have performed detailed simulations studies of both a bus-based multiprocessor workstation node (based on the Sun Galaxy MP multiprocessor) and a distributed-memory parallel computer node (based on the Touchstone DELTA) to evaluate the behavior of coarse-grain parallelism. Our results indicate: (1) coarse-grain parallelism can deliver multiple 100 Mbps with currently available hardware platforms and existing networking protocols (such as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and parallel Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) rings); (2) scale-up is near linear in n, the number of protocol processors, and channels (for small n and up to a few hundred Mbps); and (3) since these results are based on existing hardware without specialized devices (except perhaps for some simple modifications of the FDDI boards), this is a low cost solution to providing multiple 100 Mbps on current machines. In addition, from both the performance analysis and the properties of these architectures, we conclude: (1) multiple processors providing identical services and the use of space division multiplexing for the physical channels can provide better reliability than monolithic approaches (it also provides graceful degradation and low-cost load balancing); (2) coarse-grain parallelism supports running several transport protocols in parallel to provide different types of service (for example, one TCP handles small messages for many users, other TCP's running in parallel provide high bandwidth service to a single application); and (3) coarse grain parallelism will be able to incorporate many future improvements from related work (e.g., reduced data movement, fast TCP, fine-grain parallelism) also with near linear speed-ups.

Parallel image compression

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Reif, John H.

1987-01-01

A parallel compression algorithm for the 16,384 processor MPP machine was developed. The serial version of the algorithm can be viewed as a combination of on-line dynamic lossless test compression techniques (which employ simple learning strategies) and vector quantization. These concepts are described. How these concepts are combined to form a new strategy for performing dynamic on-line lossy compression is discussed. Finally, the implementation of this algorithm in a massively parallel fashion on the MPP is discussed.

PUP: An Architecture to Exploit Parallel Unification in Prolog

DTIC Science & Technology

1988-03-01

environment stacking mo del similar to the Warren Abstract Machine [23] since it has been shown to be super ior to other known models (see [21]). The storage...execute in groups of independent operations. Unifications belonging to different group s may not overlap. Also unification operations belonging to the...since all parallel operations on the unification units must complete before any of the units can star t executing the next group of parallel

Fast adaptive composite grid methods on distributed parallel architectures

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Lemke, Max; Quinlan, Daniel

1992-01-01

The fast adaptive composite (FAC) grid method is compared with the adaptive composite method (AFAC) under variety of conditions including vectorization and parallelization. Results are given for distributed memory multiprocessor architectures (SUPRENUM, Intel iPSC/2 and iPSC/860). It is shown that the good performance of AFAC and its superiority over FAC in a parallel environment is a property of the algorithm and not dependent on peculiarities of any machine.

Ultra-short pulse laser micro patterning with highest throughput by utilization of a novel multi-beam processing head

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Homburg, Oliver; Jarczynski, Manfred; Mitra, Thomas; Brüning, Stephan

2017-02-01

In the last decade much improvement has been achieved for ultra-short pulse lasers with high repetition rates. This laser technology has vastly matured so that it entered a manifold of industrial applications recently compared to mainly scientific use in the past. Compared to ns-pulse ablation ultra-short pulses in the ps- or even fs regime lead to still colder ablation and further reduced heat-affected zones. This is crucial for micro patterning when structure sizes are getting smaller and requirements are getting stronger at the same time. An additional advantage of ultra-fast processing is its applicability to a large variety of materials, e.g. metals and several high bandgap materials like glass and ceramics. One challenge for ultra-fast micro machining is throughput. The operational capacity of these processes can be maximized by increasing the scan rate or the number of beams - parallel processing. This contribution focuses on process parallelism of ultra-short pulsed lasers with high repetition rate and individually addressable acousto-optical beam modulation. The core of the multi-beam generation is a smooth diffractive beam splitter component with high uniform spots and negligible loss, and a prismatic array compressor to match beam size and pitch. The optical design and the practical realization of an 8 beam processing head in combination with a high average power single mode ultra-short pulsed laser source are presented as well as the currently on-going and promising laboratory research and micro machining results. Finally, an outlook of scaling the processing head to several tens of beams is given.

An obstacle to building a time machine

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Carroll, Sean M.; Farhi, Edward; Guth, Alan H.

1992-01-01

Gott (1991) has shown that a spacetime with two infinite parallel cosmic strings passing each other with sufficient velocity contains closed timelike curves. An attempt to build such a time machine is discussed. Using the energy-momentum conservation laws in the equivalent (2 + 1)-dimensional theory, the spacetime representing the decay of one gravitating particle into two is explicitly constructed; there is never enough mass in an open universe to build the time machine from the products of decays of stationary particles. More generally, the Gott time machine cannot exist in any open (2 + 1)-dimensional universe for which the total momentum is timelike.

Development of Fast Algorithms Using Recursion, Nesting and Iterations for Computational Electromagnetics

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Chew, W. C.; Song, J. M.; Lu, C. C.; Weedon, W. H.

1995-01-01

In the first phase of our work, we have concentrated on laying the foundation to develop fast algorithms, including the use of recursive structure like the recursive aggregate interaction matrix algorithm (RAIMA), the nested equivalence principle algorithm (NEPAL), the ray-propagation fast multipole algorithm (RPFMA), and the multi-level fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA). We have also investigated the use of curvilinear patches to build a basic method of moments code where these acceleration techniques can be used later. In the second phase, which is mainly reported on here, we have concentrated on implementing three-dimensional NEPAL on a massively parallel machine, the Connection Machine CM-5, and have been able to obtain some 3D scattering results. In order to understand the parallelization of codes on the Connection Machine, we have also studied the parallelization of 3D finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) code with PML material absorbing boundary condition (ABC). We found that simple algorithms like the FDTD with material ABC can be parallelized very well allowing us to solve within a minute a problem of over a million nodes. In addition, we have studied the use of the fast multipole method and the ray-propagation fast multipole algorithm to expedite matrix-vector multiplication in a conjugate-gradient solution to integral equations of scattering. We find that these methods are faster than LU decomposition for one incident angle, but are slower than LU decomposition when many incident angles are needed as in the monostatic RCS calculations.

Parallel spatial direct numerical simulations on the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Joslin, Ronald D.; Zubair, Mohammad

1993-01-01

The implementation and performance of a parallel spatial direct numerical simulation (PSDNS) approach on the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube is documented. The direct numerical simulation approach is used to compute spatially evolving disturbances associated with the laminar-to-turbulent transition in boundary-layer flows. The feasibility of using the PSDNS on the hypercube to perform transition studies is examined. The results indicate that the direct numerical simulation approach can effectively be parallelized on a distributed-memory parallel machine. By increasing the number of processors nearly ideal linear speedups are achieved with nonoptimized routines; slower than linear speedups are achieved with optimized (machine dependent library) routines. This slower than linear speedup results because the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) routine dominates the computational cost and because the routine indicates less than ideal speedups. However with the machine-dependent routines the total computational cost decreases by a factor of 4 to 5 compared with standard FORTRAN routines. The computational cost increases linearly with spanwise wall-normal and streamwise grid refinements. The hypercube with 32 processors was estimated to require approximately twice the amount of Cray supercomputer single processor time to complete a comparable simulation; however it is estimated that a subgrid-scale model which reduces the required number of grid points and becomes a large-eddy simulation (PSLES) would reduce the computational cost and memory requirements by a factor of 10 over the PSDNS. This PSLES implementation would enable transition simulations on the hypercube at a reasonable computational cost.

A Navier-Strokes Chimera Code on the Connection Machine CM-5: Design and Performance

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jespersen, Dennis C.; Levit, Creon; Kwak, Dochan (Technical Monitor)

1994-01-01

We have implemented a three-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes code on the Connection Machine CM-5. The code is set up for implicit time-stepping on single or multiple structured grids. For multiple grids and geometrically complex problems, we follow the 'chimera' approach, where flow data on one zone is interpolated onto another in the region of overlap. We will describe our design philosophy and give some timing results for the current code. A parallel machine like the CM-5 is well-suited for finite-difference methods on structured grids. The regular pattern of connections of a structured mesh maps well onto the architecture of the machine. So the first design choice, finite differences on a structured mesh, is natural. We use centered differences in space, with added artificial dissipation terms. When numerically solving the Navier-Stokes equations, there are liable to be some mesh cells near a solid body that are small in at least one direction. This mesh cell geometry can impose a very severe CFL (Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy) condition on the time step for explicit time-stepping methods. Thus, though explicit time-stepping is well-suited to the architecture of the machine, we have adopted implicit time-stepping. We have further taken the approximate factorization approach. This creates the need to solve large banded linear systems and creates the first possible barrier to an efficient algorithm. To overcome this first possible barrier we have considered two options. The first is just to solve the banded linear systems with data spread over the whole machine, using whatever fast method is available. This option is adequate for solving scalar tridiagonal systems, but for scalar pentadiagonal or block tridiagonal systems it is somewhat slower than desired. The second option is to 'transpose' the flow and geometry variables as part of the time-stepping process: Start with x-lines of data in-processor. Form explicit terms in x, then transpose so y-lines of data are in-processor. Form explicit terms in y, then transpose so z-lines are in processor. Form explicit terms in z, then solve linear systems in the z-direction. Transpose to the y-direction, then solve linear systems in the y-direction. Finally transpose to the x direction and solve linear systems in the x-direction. This strategy avoids inter-processor communication when differencing and solving linear systems, but requires a large amount of communication when doing the transposes. The transpose method is more efficient than the non-transpose strategy when dealing with scalar pentadiagonal or block tridiagonal systems. For handling geometrically complex problems the chimera strategy was adopted. For multiple zone cases we compute on each zone sequentially (using the whole parallel machine), then send the chimera interpolation data to a distributed data structure (array) laid out over the whole machine. This information transfer implies an irregular communication pattern, and is the second possible barrier to an efficient algorithm. We have implemented these ideas on the CM-5 using CMF (Connection Machine Fortran), a data parallel language which combines elements of Fortran 90 and certain extensions, and which bears a strong similarity to High Performance Fortran. We make use of the Connection Machine Scientific Software Library (CMSSL) for the linear solver and array transpose operations.

Message passing interface and multithreading hybrid for parallel molecular docking of large databases on petascale high performance computing machines.

PubMed

Zhang, Xiaohua; Wong, Sergio E; Lightstone, Felice C

2013-04-30

A mixed parallel scheme that combines message passing interface (MPI) and multithreading was implemented in the AutoDock Vina molecular docking program. The resulting program, named VinaLC, was tested on the petascale high performance computing (HPC) machines at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. To exploit the typical cluster-type supercomputers, thousands of docking calculations were dispatched by the master process to run simultaneously on thousands of slave processes, where each docking calculation takes one slave process on one node, and within the node each docking calculation runs via multithreading on multiple CPU cores and shared memory. Input and output of the program and the data handling within the program were carefully designed to deal with large databases and ultimately achieve HPC on a large number of CPU cores. Parallel performance analysis of the VinaLC program shows that the code scales up to more than 15K CPUs with a very low overhead cost of 3.94%. One million flexible compound docking calculations took only 1.4 h to finish on about 15K CPUs. The docking accuracy of VinaLC has been validated against the DUD data set by the re-docking of X-ray ligands and an enrichment study, 64.4% of the top scoring poses have RMSD values under 2.0 Å. The program has been demonstrated to have good enrichment performance on 70% of the targets in the DUD data set. An analysis of the enrichment factors calculated at various percentages of the screening database indicates VinaLC has very good early recovery of actives. Copyright © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Fast and Accurate Support Vector Machines on Large Scale Systems

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Vishnu, Abhinav; Narasimhan, Jayenthi; Holder, Larry

Support Vector Machines (SVM) is a supervised Machine Learning and Data Mining (MLDM) algorithm, which has become ubiquitous largely due to its high accuracy and obliviousness to dimensionality. The objective of SVM is to find an optimal boundary --- also known as hyperplane --- which separates the samples (examples in a dataset) of different classes by a maximum margin. Usually, very few samples contribute to the definition of the boundary. However, existing parallel algorithms use the entire dataset for finding the boundary, which is sub-optimal for performance reasons. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed memory algorithm to eliminatemore » the samples which do not contribute to the boundary definition in SVM. We propose several heuristics, which range from early (aggressive) to late (conservative) elimination of the samples, such that the overall time for generating the boundary is reduced considerably. In a few cases, a sample may be eliminated (shrunk) pre-emptively --- potentially resulting in an incorrect boundary. We propose a scalable approach to synchronize the necessary data structures such that the proposed algorithm maintains its accuracy. We consider the necessary trade-offs of single/multiple synchronization using in-depth time-space complexity analysis. We implement the proposed algorithm using MPI and compare it with libsvm--- de facto sequential SVM software --- which we enhance with OpenMP for multi-core/many-core parallelism. Our proposed approach shows excellent efficiency using up to 4096 processes on several large datasets such as UCI HIGGS Boson dataset and Offending URL dataset.« less

Automatic data partitioning on distributed memory multicomputers. Ph.D. Thesis

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Gupta, Manish

1992-01-01

Distributed-memory parallel computers are increasingly being used to provide high levels of performance for scientific applications. Unfortunately, such machines are not very easy to program. A number of research efforts seek to alleviate this problem by developing compilers that take over the task of generating communication. The communication overheads and the extent of parallelism exploited in the resulting target program are determined largely by the manner in which data is partitioned across different processors of the machine. Most of the compilers provide no assistance to the programmer in the crucial task of determining a good data partitioning scheme. A novel approach is presented, the constraints-based approach, to the problem of automatic data partitioning for numeric programs. In this approach, the compiler identifies some desirable requirements on the distribution of various arrays being referenced in each statement, based on performance considerations. These desirable requirements are referred to as constraints. For each constraint, the compiler determines a quality measure that captures its importance with respect to the performance of the program. The quality measure is obtained through static performance estimation, without actually generating the target data-parallel program with explicit communication. Each data distribution decision is taken by combining all the relevant constraints. The compiler attempts to resolve any conflicts between constraints such that the overall execution time of the parallel program is minimized. This approach has been implemented as part of a compiler called Paradigm, that accepts Fortran 77 programs, and specifies the partitioning scheme to be used for each array in the program. We have obtained results on some programs taken from the Linpack and Eispack libraries, and the Perfect Benchmarks. These results are quite promising, and demonstrate the feasibility of automatic data partitioning for a significant class of scientific application programs with regular computations.

A Parallel Vector Machine for the PM Programming Language

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bellerby, Tim

2016-04-01

PM is a new programming language which aims to make the writing of computational geoscience models on parallel hardware accessible to scientists who are not themselves expert parallel programmers. It is based around the concept of communicating operators: language constructs that enable variables local to a single invocation of a parallelised loop to be viewed as if they were arrays spanning the entire loop domain. This mechanism enables different loop invocations (which may or may not be executing on different processors) to exchange information in a manner that extends the successful Communicating Sequential Processes idiom from single messages to collective communication. Communicating operators avoid the additional synchronisation mechanisms, such as atomic variables, required when programming using the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) paradigm. Using a single loop invocation as the fundamental unit of concurrency enables PM to uniformly represent different levels of parallelism from vector operations through shared memory systems to distributed grids. This paper describes an implementation of PM based on a vectorised virtual machine. On a single processor node, concurrent operations are implemented using masked vector operations. Virtual machine instructions operate on vectors of values and may be unmasked, masked using a Boolean field, or masked using an array of active vector cell locations. Conditional structures (such as if-then-else or while statement implementations) calculate and apply masks to the operations they control. A shift in mask representation from Boolean to location-list occurs when active locations become sufficiently sparse. Parallel loops unfold data structures (or vectors of data structures for nested loops) into vectors of values that may additionally be distributed over multiple computational nodes and then split into micro-threads compatible with the size of the local cache. Inter-node communication is accomplished using standard OpenMP and MPI. Performance analyses of the PM vector machine, demonstrating its scaling properties with respect to domain size and the number of processor nodes will be presented for a range of hardware configurations. The PM software and language definition are being made available under unrestrictive MIT and Creative Commons Attribution licenses respectively: www.pm-lang.org.

A distributed version of the NASA Engine Performance Program

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Cours, Jeffrey T.; Curlett, Brian P.

1993-01-01

Distributed NEPP, a version of the NASA Engine Performance Program, uses the original NEPP code but executes it in a distributed computer environment. Multiple workstations connected by a network increase the program's speed and, more importantly, the complexity of the cases it can handle in a reasonable time. Distributed NEPP uses the public domain software package, called Parallel Virtual Machine, allowing it to execute on clusters of machines containing many different architectures. It includes the capability to link with other computers, allowing them to process NEPP jobs in parallel. This paper discusses the design issues and granularity considerations that entered into programming Distributed NEPP and presents the results of timing runs.

Integrated configurable equipment selection and line balancing for mass production with serial-parallel machining systems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Battaïa, Olga; Dolgui, Alexandre; Guschinsky, Nikolai; Levin, Genrikh

2014-10-01

Solving equipment selection and line balancing problems together allows better line configurations to be reached and avoids local optimal solutions. This article considers jointly these two decision problems for mass production lines with serial-parallel workplaces. This study was motivated by the design of production lines based on machines with rotary or mobile tables. Nevertheless, the results are more general and can be applied to assembly and production lines with similar structures. The designers' objectives and the constraints are studied in order to suggest a relevant mathematical model and an efficient optimization approach to solve it. A real case study is used to validate the model and the developed approach.

Toward an automated parallel computing environment for geosciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Huai; Liu, Mian; Shi, Yaolin; Yuen, David A.; Yan, Zhenzhen; Liang, Guoping

2007-08-01

Software for geodynamic modeling has not kept up with the fast growing computing hardware and network resources. In the past decade supercomputing power has become available to most researchers in the form of affordable Beowulf clusters and other parallel computer platforms. However, to take full advantage of such computing power requires developing parallel algorithms and associated software, a task that is often too daunting for geoscience modelers whose main expertise is in geosciences. We introduce here an automated parallel computing environment built on open-source algorithms and libraries. Users interact with this computing environment by specifying the partial differential equations, solvers, and model-specific properties using an English-like modeling language in the input files. The system then automatically generates the finite element codes that can be run on distributed or shared memory parallel machines. This system is dynamic and flexible, allowing users to address different problems in geosciences. It is capable of providing web-based services, enabling users to generate source codes online. This unique feature will facilitate high-performance computing to be integrated with distributed data grids in the emerging cyber-infrastructures for geosciences. In this paper we discuss the principles of this automated modeling environment and provide examples to demonstrate its versatility.

1993 Gordon Bell Prize Winners

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Karp, Alan H.; Simon, Horst; Heller, Don; Cooper, D. M. (Technical Monitor)

1994-01-01

The Gordon Bell Prize recognizes significant achievements in the application of supercomputers to scientific and engineering problems. In 1993, finalists were named for work in three categories: (1) Performance, which recognizes those who solved a real problem in the quickest elapsed time. (2) Price/performance, which encourages the development of cost-effective supercomputing. (3) Compiler-generated speedup, which measures how well compiler writers are facilitating the programming of parallel processors. The winners were announced November 17 at the Supercomputing 93 conference in Portland, Oregon. Gordon Bell, an independent consultant in Los Altos, California, is sponsoring $2,000 in prizes each year for 10 years to promote practical parallel processing research. This is the sixth year of the prize, which Computer administers. Something unprecedented in Gordon Bell Prize competition occurred this year: A computer manufacturer was singled out for recognition. Nine entries reporting results obtained on the Cray C90 were received, seven of the submissions orchestrated by Cray Research. Although none of these entries showed sufficiently high performance to win outright, the judges were impressed by the breadth of applications that ran well on this machine, all nine running at more than a third of the peak performance of the machine.

Streaming data analytics via message passing with application to graph algorithms

DOE PAGES

Plimpton, Steven J.; Shead, Tim

2014-05-06

The need to process streaming data, which arrives continuously at high-volume in real-time, arises in a variety of contexts including data produced by experiments, collections of environmental or network sensors, and running simulations. Streaming data can also be formulated as queries or transactions which operate on a large dynamic data store, e.g. a distributed database. We describe a lightweight, portable framework named PHISH which enables a set of independent processes to compute on a stream of data in a distributed-memory parallel manner. Datums are routed between processes in patterns defined by the application. PHISH can run on top of eithermore » message-passing via MPI or sockets via ZMQ. The former means streaming computations can be run on any parallel machine which supports MPI; the latter allows them to run on a heterogeneous, geographically dispersed network of machines. We illustrate how PHISH can support streaming MapReduce operations, and describe streaming versions of three algorithms for large, sparse graph analytics: triangle enumeration, subgraph isomorphism matching, and connected component finding. Lastly, we also provide benchmark timings for MPI versus socket performance of several kernel operations useful in streaming algorithms.« less

Feasibility and its characteristics of CO2 laser micromachining-based PMMA anti-scattering grid estimated by MCNP code simulation.

PubMed

Bae, Jun Woo; Kim, Hee Reyoung

2018-01-01

Anti-scattering grid has been used to improve the image quality. However, applying a commonly used linear or parallel grid would cause image distortion, and focusing grid also requires a precise fabrication technology, which is expensive. To investigate and analyze whether using CO2 laser micromachining-based PMMA anti-scattering grid can improve the performance of the grid at a lower cost. Thus, improvement of grid performance would result in improvement of image quality. The cross-sectional shape of CO2 laser machined PMMA is similar to alphabet 'V'. The performance was characterized by contrast improvement factor (CIF) and Bucky. Four types of grid were tested, which include thin parallel, thick parallel, 'V'-type and 'inverse V'-type of grid. For a Bucky factor of 2.1, the CIF of the grid with both the "V" and inverse "V" had a value of 1.53, while the thick and thick parallel types had values of 1.43 and 1.65, respectively. The 'V' shape grid manufacture by CO2 laser micromachining showed higher CIF than parallel one, which had same shielding material channel width. It was thought that the 'V' shape grid would be replacement to the conventional parallel grid if it is hard to fabricate the high-aspect-ratio grid.

Parallel family trees for transfer matrices in the Potts model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Navarro, Cristobal A.; Canfora, Fabrizio; Hitschfeld, Nancy; Navarro, Gonzalo

2015-02-01

The computational cost of transfer matrix methods for the Potts model is related to the question in how many ways can two layers of a lattice be connected? Answering the question leads to the generation of a combinatorial set of lattice configurations. This set defines the configuration space of the problem, and the smaller it is, the faster the transfer matrix can be computed. The configuration space of generic (q , v) transfer matrix methods for strips is in the order of the Catalan numbers, which grows asymptotically as O(4m) where m is the width of the strip. Other transfer matrix methods with a smaller configuration space indeed exist but they make assumptions on the temperature, number of spin states, or restrict the structure of the lattice. In this paper we propose a parallel algorithm that uses a sub-Catalan configuration space of O(3m) to build the generic (q , v) transfer matrix in a compressed form. The improvement is achieved by grouping the original set of Catalan configurations into a forest of family trees, in such a way that the solution to the problem is now computed by solving the root node of each family. As a result, the algorithm becomes exponentially faster than the Catalan approach while still highly parallel. The resulting matrix is stored in a compressed form using O(3m ×4m) of space, making numerical evaluation and decompression to be faster than evaluating the matrix in its O(4m ×4m) uncompressed form. Experimental results for different sizes of strip lattices show that the parallel family trees (PFT) strategy indeed runs exponentially faster than the Catalan Parallel Method (CPM), especially when dealing with dense transfer matrices. In terms of parallel performance, we report strong-scaling speedups of up to 5.7 × when running on an 8-core shared memory machine and 28 × for a 32-core cluster. The best balance of speedup and efficiency for the multi-core machine was achieved when using p = 4 processors, while for the cluster scenario it was in the range p ∈ [ 8 , 10 ] . Because of the parallel capabilities of the algorithm, a large-scale execution of the parallel family trees strategy in a supercomputer could contribute to the study of wider strip lattices.

Characterizing output bottlenecks in a supercomputer

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Xie, Bing; Chase, Jeffrey; Dillow, David A

2012-01-01

Supercomputer I/O loads are often dominated by writes. HPC (High Performance Computing) file systems are designed to absorb these bursty outputs at high bandwidth through massive parallelism. However, the delivered write bandwidth often falls well below the peak. This paper characterizes the data absorption behavior of a center-wide shared Lustre parallel file system on the Jaguar supercomputer. We use a statistical methodology to address the challenges of accurately measuring a shared machine under production load and to obtain the distribution of bandwidth across samples of compute nodes, storage targets, and time intervals. We observe and quantify limitations from competing traffic,more » contention on storage servers and I/O routers, concurrency limitations in the client compute node operating systems, and the impact of variance (stragglers) on coupled output such as striping. We then examine the implications of our results for application performance and the design of I/O middleware systems on shared supercomputers.« less

Supersonic civil airplane study and design: Performance and sonic boom

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Cheung, Samson

1995-01-01

Since aircraft configuration plays an important role in aerodynamic performance and sonic boom shape, the configuration of the next generation supersonic civil transport has to be tailored to meet high aerodynamic performance and low sonic boom requirements. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be used to design airplanes to meet these dual objectives. The work and results in this report are used to support NASA's High Speed Research Program (HSRP). CFD tools and techniques have been developed for general usages of sonic boom propagation study and aerodynamic design. Parallel to the research effort on sonic boom extrapolation, CFD flow solvers have been coupled with a numeric optimization tool to form a design package for aircraft configuration. This CFD optimization package has been applied to configuration design on a low-boom concept and an oblique all-wing concept. A nonlinear unconstrained optimizer for Parallel Virtual Machine has been developed for aerodynamic design and study.

Study of Thread Level Parallelism in a Video Encoding Application for Chip Multiprocessor Design

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Debes, Eric; Kaine, Greg

2002-11-01

In media applications there is a high level of available thread level parallelism (TLP). In this paper we study the intra TLP in a video encoder. We show that a well-distributed highly optimized encoder running on a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) system can run 3.2 faster on a 4-way SMP machine than on a single processor. The multithreaded encoder running on an SMP system is then used to understand the requirements of a chip multiprocessor (CMP) architecture, which is one possible architectural direction to better exploit TLP. In the framework of this study, we use a software approach to evaluate the dataflow between processors for the video encoder running on an SMP system. An estimation of the dataflow is done with L2 cache miss event counters using Intel® VTuneTM performance analyzer. The experimental measurements are compared to theoretical results.

UFMulti: A new parallel processing software system for HEP

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Avery, Paul; White, Andrew

1989-12-01

UFMulti is a multiprocessing software package designed for general purpose high energy physics applications, including physics and detector simulation, data reduction and DST physics analysis. The system is particularly well suited for installations where several workstation or computers are connected through a local area network (LAN). The initial configuration of the software is currently running on VAX/VMS machines with a planned extension to ULTRIX, using the new RISC CPUs from Digital, in the near future.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Bonachea, D.; Dickens, P.; Thakur, R.

There is a growing interest in using Java as the language for developing high-performance computing applications. To be successful in the high-performance computing domain, however, Java must not only be able to provide high computational performance, but also high-performance I/O. In this paper, we first examine several approaches that attempt to provide high-performance I/O in Java - many of which are not obvious at first glance - and evaluate their performance on two parallel machines, the IBM SP and the SGI Origin2000. We then propose extensions to the Java I/O library that address the deficiencies in the Java I/O APImore » and improve performance dramatically. The extensions add bulk (array) I/O operations to Java, thereby removing much of the overhead currently associated with array I/O in Java. We have implemented the extensions in two ways: in a standard JVM using the Java Native Interface (JNI) and in a high-performance parallel dialect of Java called Titanium. We describe the two implementations and present performance results that demonstrate the benefits of the proposed extensions.« less

High-performance dynamic quantum clustering on graphics processors

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Wittek, Peter, E-mail: peterwittek@acm.org

2013-01-15

Clustering methods in machine learning may benefit from borrowing metaphors from physics. Dynamic quantum clustering associates a Gaussian wave packet with the multidimensional data points and regards them as eigenfunctions of the Schroedinger equation. The clustering structure emerges by letting the system evolve and the visual nature of the algorithm has been shown to be useful in a range of applications. Furthermore, the method only uses matrix operations, which readily lend themselves to parallelization. In this paper, we develop an implementation on graphics hardware and investigate how this approach can accelerate the computations. We achieve a speedup of up tomore » two magnitudes over a multicore CPU implementation, which proves that quantum-like methods and acceleration by graphics processing units have a great relevance to machine learning.« less

Orchid: a novel management, annotation and machine learning framework for analyzing cancer mutations.

PubMed

Cario, Clinton L; Witte, John S

2018-03-15

As whole-genome tumor sequence and biological annotation datasets grow in size, number and content, there is an increasing basic science and clinical need for efficient and accurate data management and analysis software. With the emergence of increasingly sophisticated data stores, execution environments and machine learning algorithms, there is also a need for the integration of functionality across frameworks. We present orchid, a python based software package for the management, annotation and machine learning of cancer mutations. Building on technologies of parallel workflow execution, in-memory database storage and machine learning analytics, orchid efficiently handles millions of mutations and hundreds of features in an easy-to-use manner. We describe the implementation of orchid and demonstrate its ability to distinguish tissue of origin in 12 tumor types based on 339 features using a random forest classifier. Orchid and our annotated tumor mutation database are freely available at https://github.com/wittelab/orchid. Software is implemented in python 2.7, and makes use of MySQL or MemSQL databases. Groovy 2.4.5 is optionally required for parallel workflow execution. JWitte@ucsf.edu. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Implementations of BLAST for parallel computers.

PubMed

Jülich, A

1995-02-01

The BLAST sequence comparison programs have been ported to a variety of parallel computers-the shared memory machine Cray Y-MP 8/864 and the distributed memory architectures Intel iPSC/860 and nCUBE. Additionally, the programs were ported to run on workstation clusters. We explain the parallelization techniques and consider the pros and cons of these methods. The BLAST programs are very well suited for parallelization for a moderate number of processors. We illustrate our results using the program blastp as an example. As input data for blastp, a 799 residue protein query sequence and the protein database PIR were used.

Study of PVD AlCrN Coating for Reducing Carbide Cutting Tool Deterioration in the Machining of Titanium Alloys.

PubMed

Cadena, Natalia L; Cue-Sampedro, Rodrigo; Siller, Héctor R; Arizmendi-Morquecho, Ana M; Rivera-Solorio, Carlos I; Di-Nardo, Santiago

2013-05-24

The manufacture of medical and aerospace components made of titanium alloys and other difficult-to-cut materials requires the parallel development of high performance cutting tools coated with materials capable of enhanced tribological and resistance properties. In this matter, a thin nanocomposite film made out of AlCrN (aluminum-chromium-nitride) was studied in this research, showing experimental work in the deposition process and its characterization. A heat-treated monolayer coating, competitive with other coatings in the machining of titanium alloys, was analyzed. Different analysis and characterizations were performed on the manufactured coating by scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDXS), and X-ray diffraction (XRD). Furthermore, the mechanical behavior of the coating was evaluated through hardness test and tribology with pin-on-disk to quantify friction coefficient and wear rate. Finally, machinability tests using coated tungsten carbide cutting tools were executed in order to determine its performance through wear resistance, which is a key issue of cutting tools in high-end cutting at elevated temperatures. It was demonstrated that the specimen (with lower friction coefficient than previous research) is more efficient in machinability tests in Ti6Al4V alloys. Furthermore, the heat-treated monolayer coating presented better performance in comparison with a conventional monolayer of AlCrN coating.

Study of PVD AlCrN Coating for Reducing Carbide Cutting Tool Deterioration in the Machining of Titanium Alloys

PubMed Central

Cadena, Natalia L.; Cue-Sampedro, Rodrigo; Siller, Héctor R.; Arizmendi-Morquecho, Ana M.; Rivera-Solorio, Carlos I.; Di-Nardo, Santiago

2013-01-01

The manufacture of medical and aerospace components made of titanium alloys and other difficult-to-cut materials requires the parallel development of high performance cutting tools coated with materials capable of enhanced tribological and resistance properties. In this matter, a thin nanocomposite film made out of AlCrN (aluminum–chromium–nitride) was studied in this research, showing experimental work in the deposition process and its characterization. A heat-treated monolayer coating, competitive with other coatings in the machining of titanium alloys, was analyzed. Different analysis and characterizations were performed on the manufactured coating by scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDXS), and X-ray diffraction (XRD). Furthermore, the mechanical behavior of the coating was evaluated through hardness test and tribology with pin-on-disk to quantify friction coefficient and wear rate. Finally, machinability tests using coated tungsten carbide cutting tools were executed in order to determine its performance through wear resistance, which is a key issue of cutting tools in high-end cutting at elevated temperatures. It was demonstrated that the specimen (with lower friction coefficient than previous research) is more efficient in machinability tests in Ti6Al4V alloys. Furthermore, the heat-treated monolayer coating presented better performance in comparison with a conventional monolayer of AlCrN coating. PMID:28809266

Parallel-vector out-of-core equation solver for computational mechanics

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Qin, J.; Agarwal, T. K.; Storaasli, O. O.; Nguyen, D. T.; Baddourah, M. A.

1993-01-01

A parallel/vector out-of-core equation solver is developed for shared-memory computers, such as the Cray Y-MP machine. The input/ output (I/O) time is reduced by using the a synchronous BUFFER IN and BUFFER OUT, which can be executed simultaneously with the CPU instructions. The parallel and vector capability provided by the supercomputers is also exploited to enhance the performance. Numerical applications in large-scale structural analysis are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the present out-of-core solver.

The Complexity of Parallel Algorithms,

DTIC Science & Technology

1985-11-01

programns have been written for se(luiential coiipn ters. Many p~eop~le want coimp ~ilers dihal. will c(nimpile t he, code for parallel machines, to avoid...between two vertices. We also rely on parallel algorithms for maintaining data structures and manipulating graphs. We do not go into the details of these...Jpatlis and maintain connected coimp ~onents. The routine is: - 35 .- ExtendPath(r, Q, V) begin P +-0; s 4- while there is a path in V - P from s to a vertex

Means and method of balancing multi-cylinder reciprocating machines

DOEpatents

Corey, John A.; Walsh, Michael M.

1985-01-01

A virtual balancing axis arrangement is described for multi-cylinder reciprocating piston machines for effectively balancing out imbalanced forces and minimizing residual imbalance moments acting on the crankshaft of such machines without requiring the use of additional parallel-arrayed balancing shafts or complex and expensive gear arrangements. The novel virtual balancing axis arrangement is capable of being designed into multi-cylinder reciprocating piston and crankshaft machines for substantially reducing vibrations induced during operation of such machines with only minimal number of additional component parts. Some of the required component parts may be available from parts already required for operation of auxiliary equipment, such as oil and water pumps used in certain types of reciprocating piston and crankshaft machine so that by appropriate location and dimensioning in accordance with the teachings of the invention, the virtual balancing axis arrangement can be built into the machine at little or no additional cost.

Characterizing parallel file-access patterns on a large-scale multiprocessor

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Purakayastha, Apratim; Ellis, Carla Schlatter; Kotz, David; Nieuwejaar, Nils; Best, Michael

1994-01-01

Rapid increases in the computational speeds of multiprocessors have not been matched by corresponding performance enhancements in the I/O subsystem. To satisfy the large and growing I/O requirements of some parallel scientific applications, we need parallel file systems that can provide high-bandwidth and high-volume data transfer between the I/O subsystem and thousands of processors. Design of such high-performance parallel file systems depends on a thorough grasp of the expected workload. So far there have been no comprehensive usage studies of multiprocessor file systems. Our CHARISMA project intends to fill this void. The first results from our study involve an iPSC/860 at NASA Ames. This paper presents results from a different platform, the CM-5 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The CHARISMA studies are unique because we collect information about every individual read and write request and about the entire mix of applications running on the machines. The results of our trace analysis lead to recommendations for parallel file system design. First the file system should support efficient concurrent access to many files, and I/O requests from many jobs under varying load conditions. Second, it must efficiently manage large files kept open for long periods. Third, it should expect to see small requests predominantly sequential access patterns, application-wide synchronous access, no concurrent file-sharing between jobs appreciable byte and block sharing between processes within jobs, and strong interprocess locality. Finally, the trace data suggest that node-level write caches and collective I/O request interfaces may be useful in certain environments.

Dynamically programmable cache

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nakkar, Mouna; Harding, John A.; Schwartz, David A.; Franzon, Paul D.; Conte, Thomas

1998-10-01

Reconfigurable machines have recently been used as co- processors to accelerate the execution of certain algorithms or program subroutines. The problems with the above approach include high reconfiguration time and limited partial reconfiguration. By far the most critical problems are: (1) the small on-chip memory which results in slower execution time, and (2) small FPGA areas that cannot implement large subroutines. Dynamically Programmable Cache (DPC) is a novel architecture for embedded processors which offers solutions to the above problems. To solve memory access problems, DPC processors merge reconfigurable arrays with the data cache at various cache levels to create a multi-level reconfigurable machines. As a result DPC machines have both higher data accessibility and FPGA memory bandwidth. To solve the limited FPGA resource problem, DPC processors implemented multi-context switching (Virtualization) concept. Virtualization allows implementation of large subroutines with fewer FPGA cells. Additionally, DPC processors can parallelize the execution of several operations resulting in faster execution time. In this paper, the speedup improvement for DPC machines are shown to be 5X faster than an Altera FLEX10K FPGA chip and 2X faster than a Sun Ultral SPARC station for two different algorithms (convolution and motion estimation).

A spherical parallel three degrees-of-freedom robot for ankle-foot neuro-rehabilitation.

PubMed

Malosio, Matteo; Negri, Simone Pio; Pedrocchi, Nicola; Vicentini, Federico; Caimmi, Marco; Molinari Tosatti, Lorenzo

2012-01-01

The ankle represents a fairly complex bone structure, resulting in kinematics that hinders a flawless robot-assisted recovery of foot motility in impaired subjects. The paper proposes a novel device for ankle-foot neuro-rehabilitation based on a mechatronic redesign of the remarkable Agile Eye spherical robot on the basis of clinical requisites. The kinematic design allows the positioning of the ankle articular center close to the machine rotation center with valuable benefits in term of therapy functions. The prototype, named PKAnkle, Parallel Kinematic machine for Ankle rehabilitation, provides a 6-axes load cell for the measure of subject interaction forces/torques, and it integrates a commercial EMG-acquisition system. Robot control provides active and passive therapeutic exercises.

50 GFlops molecular dynamics on the Connection Machine 5

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Lomdahl, P.S.; Tamayo, P.; Groenbech-Jensen, N.

1993-12-31

The authors present timings and performance numbers for a new short range three dimensional (3D) molecular dynamics (MD) code, SPaSM, on the Connection Machine-5 (CM-5). They demonstrate that runs with more than 10{sup 8} particles are now possible on massively parallel MIMD computers. To the best of their knowledge this is at least an order of magnitude more particles than what has previously been reported. Typical production runs show sustained performance (including communication) in the range of 47--50 GFlops on a 1024 node CM-5 with vector units (VUs). The speed of the code scales linearly with the number of processorsmore » and with the number of particles and shows 95% parallel efficiency in the speedup.« less

Implementation of the force decomposition machine for molecular dynamics simulations.

PubMed

Borštnik, Urban; Miller, Benjamin T; Brooks, Bernard R; Janežič, Dušanka

2012-09-01

We present the design and implementation of the force decomposition machine (FDM), a cluster of personal computers (PCs) that is tailored to running molecular dynamics (MD) simulations using the distributed diagonal force decomposition (DDFD) parallelization method. The cluster interconnect architecture is optimized for the communication pattern of the DDFD method. Our implementation of the FDM relies on standard commodity components even for networking. Although the cluster is meant for DDFD MD simulations, it remains general enough for other parallel computations. An analysis of several MD simulation runs on both the FDM and a standard PC cluster demonstrates that the FDM's interconnect architecture provides a greater performance compared to a more general cluster interconnect. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Parallel processing in finite element structural analysis

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Noor, Ahmed K.

1987-01-01

A brief review is made of the fundamental concepts and basic issues of parallel processing. Discussion focuses on parallel numerical algorithms, performance evaluation of machines and algorithms, and parallelism in finite element computations. A computational strategy is proposed for maximizing the degree of parallelism at different levels of the finite element analysis process including: 1) formulation level (through the use of mixed finite element models); 2) analysis level (through additive decomposition of the different arrays in the governing equations into the contributions to a symmetrized response plus correction terms); 3) numerical algorithm level (through the use of operator splitting techniques and application of iterative processes); and 4) implementation level (through the effective combination of vectorization, multitasking and microtasking, whenever available).

Pyramidal neurovision architecture for vision machines

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gupta, Madan M.; Knopf, George K.

1993-08-01

The vision system employed by an intelligent robot must be active; active in the sense that it must be capable of selectively acquiring the minimal amount of relevant information for a given task. An efficient active vision system architecture that is based loosely upon the parallel-hierarchical (pyramidal) structure of the biological visual pathway is presented in this paper. Although the computational architecture of the proposed pyramidal neuro-vision system is far less sophisticated than the architecture of the biological visual pathway, it does retain some essential features such as the converging multilayered structure of its biological counterpart. In terms of visual information processing, the neuro-vision system is constructed from a hierarchy of several interactive computational levels, whereupon each level contains one or more nonlinear parallel processors. Computationally efficient vision machines can be developed by utilizing both the parallel and serial information processing techniques within the pyramidal computing architecture. A computer simulation of a pyramidal vision system for active scene surveillance is presented.

The core legion object model

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Lewis, M.; Grimshaw, A.

1996-12-31

The Legion project at the University of Virginia is an architecture for designing and building system services that provide the illusion of a single virtual machine to users, a virtual machine that provides secure shared object and shared name spaces, application adjustable fault-tolerance, improved response time, and greater throughput. Legion targets wide area assemblies of workstations, supercomputers, and parallel supercomputers, Legion tackles problems not solved by existing workstation based parallel processing tools; the system will enable fault-tolerance, wide area parallel processing, inter-operability, heterogeneity, a single global name space, protection, security, efficient scheduling, and comprehensive resource management. This paper describes themore » core Legion object model, which specifies the composition and functionality of Legion`s core objects-those objects that cooperate to create, locate, manage, and remove objects in the Legion system. The object model facilitates a flexible extensible implementation, provides a single global name space, grants site autonomy to participating organizations, and scales to millions of sites and trillions of objects.« less

Parallel and Scalable Clustering and Classification for Big Data in Geosciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Riedel, M.

2015-12-01

Machine learning, data mining, and statistical computing are common techniques to perform analysis in earth sciences. This contribution will focus on two concrete and widely used data analytics methods suitable to analyse 'big data' in the context of geoscience use cases: clustering and classification. From the broad class of available clustering methods we focus on the density-based spatial clustering of appliactions with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm that enables the identification of outliers or interesting anomalies. A new open source parallel and scalable DBSCAN implementation will be discussed in the light of a scientific use case that detects water mixing events in the Koljoefjords. The second technique we cover is classification, with a focus set on the support vector machines algorithm (SVMs), as one of the best out-of-the-box classification algorithm. A parallel and scalable SVM implementation will be discussed in the light of a scientific use case in the field of remote sensing with 52 different classes of land cover types.

Optical RISC computer

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Guilfoyle, Peter S.; Stone, Richard V.; Hessenbruch, John M.; Zeise, Frederick F.

1993-07-01

A second generation digital optical computer (DOC II) has been developed which utilizes a RISC based operating system as its host. This 32 bit, high performance (12.8 GByte/sec), computing platform demonstrates a number of basic principals that are inherent to parallel free space optical interconnects such as speed (up to 1012 bit operations per second) and low power 1.2 fJ per bit). Although DOC II is a general purpose machine, special purpose applications have been developed and are currently being evaluated on the optical platform.

Vector processing efficiency of plasma MHD codes by use of the FACOM 230-75 APU

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Matsuura, T.; Tanaka, Y.; Naraoka, K.; Takizuka, T.; Tsunematsu, T.; Tokuda, S.; Azumi, M.; Kurita, G.; Takeda, T.

1982-06-01

In the framework of pipelined vector architecture, the efficiency of vector processing is assessed with respect to plasma MHD codes in nuclear fusion research. By using a vector processor, the FACOM 230-75 APU, the limit of the enhancement factor due to parallelism of current vector machines is examined for three numerical codes based on a fluid model. Reasonable speed-up factors of approximately 6,6 and 4 times faster than the highly optimized scalar version are obtained for ERATO (linear stability code), AEOLUS-R1 (nonlinear stability code) and APOLLO (1-1/2D transport code), respectively. Problems of the pipelined vector processors are discussed from the viewpoint of restructuring, optimization and choice of algorithms. In conclusion, the important concept of "concurrency within pipelined parallelism" is emphasized.

A Knowledge-Based Approach for Item Exposure Control in Computerized Adaptive Testing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Doong, Shing H.

2009-01-01

The purpose of this study is to investigate a functional relation between item exposure parameters (IEPs) and item parameters (IPs) over parallel pools. This functional relation is approximated by a well-known tool in machine learning. Let P and Q be parallel item pools and suppose IEPs for P have been obtained via a Sympson and Hetter-type…

Constitutive Model Calibration via Autonomous Multiaxial Experimentation (Postprint)

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-09-17

test machine. Experimental data is reduced and finite element simulations are conducted in parallel with the test based on experimental strain...data is reduced and finite element simulations are conducted in parallel with the test based on experimental strain conditions. Optimization methods...be used directly in finite element simulations of more complex geometries. Keywords Axial/torsional experimentation • Plasticity • Constitutive model

Automated Handling of Garments for Pressing

DTIC Science & Technology

1991-09-30

Parallel Algorithms for 2D Kalman Filtering ................................. 47 DJ. Potter and M.P. Cline Hash Table and Sorted Array: A Case Study of... Kalman Filtering on the Connection Machine ............................ 55 MA. Palis and D.K. Krecker Parallel Sorting of Large Arrays on the MasPar...ALGORITHM’VS FOR SEAM SENSING. .. .. .. ... ... .... ..... 24 6.1 KarelTW Algorithms .. .. ... ... ... ... .... ... ...... 24 6.1.1 Image Filtering

Parallel computing of a digital hologram and particle searching for microdigital-holographic particle-tracking velocimetry

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Satake, Shin-ichi; Kanamori, Hiroyuki; Kunugi, Tomoaki

2007-02-01

We have developed a parallel algorithm for microdigital-holographic particle-tracking velocimetry. The algorithm is used in (1) numerical reconstruction of a particle image computer using a digital hologram, and (2) searching for particles. The numerical reconstruction from the digital hologram makes use of the Fresnel diffraction equation and the FFT (fast Fourier transform),whereas the particle search algorithm looks for local maximum graduation in a reconstruction field represented by a 3D matrix. To achieve high performance computing for both calculations (reconstruction and particle search), two memory partitions are allocated to the 3D matrix. In this matrix, the reconstruction part consists of horizontallymore » placed 2D memory partitions on the x-y plane for the FFT, whereas, the particle search part consists of vertically placed 2D memory partitions set along the z axes.Consequently, the scalability can be obtained for the proportion of processor elements,where the benchmarks are carried out for parallel computation by a SGI Altix machine.« less

Analysis of parameters for technological equipment of parallel kinematics based on rods of variable length for processing accuracy assurance

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Koltsov, A. G.; Shamutdinov, A. H.; Blokhin, D. A.; Krivonos, E. V.

2018-01-01

A new classification of parallel kinematics mechanisms on symmetry coefficient, being proportional to mechanism stiffness and accuracy of the processing product using the technological equipment under study, is proposed. A new version of the Stewart platform with a high symmetry coefficient is presented for analysis. The workspace of the mechanism under study is described, this space being a complex solid figure. The workspace end points are reached by the center of the mobile platform which moves in parallel related to the base plate. Parameters affecting the processing accuracy, namely the static and dynamic stiffness, natural vibration frequencies are determined. The capability assessment of the mechanism operation under various loads, taking into account resonance phenomena at different points of the workspace, was conducted. The study proved that stiffness and therefore, processing accuracy with the use of the above mentioned mechanisms are comparable with the stiffness and accuracy of medium-sized series-produced machines.

Implementation of ADI: Schemes on MIMD parallel computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Vanderwijngaart, Rob F.

1993-01-01

In order to simulate the effects of the impingement of hot exhaust jets of High Performance Aircraft on landing surfaces a multi-disciplinary computation coupling flow dynamics to heat conduction in the runway needs to be carried out. Such simulations, which are essentially unsteady, require very large computational power in order to be completed within a reasonable time frame of the order of an hour. Such power can be furnished by the latest generation of massively parallel computers. These remove the bottleneck of ever more congested data paths to one or a few highly specialized central processing units (CPU's) by having many off-the-shelf CPU's work independently on their own data, and exchange information only when needed. During the past year the first phase of this project was completed, in which the optimal strategy for mapping an ADI-algorithm for the three dimensional unsteady heat equation to a MIMD parallel computer was identified. This was done by implementing and comparing three different domain decomposition techniques that define the tasks for the CPU's in the parallel machine. These implementations were done for a Cartesian grid and Dirichlet boundary conditions. The most promising technique was then used to implement the heat equation solver on a general curvilinear grid with a suite of nontrivial boundary conditions. Finally, this technique was also used to implement the Scalar Penta-diagonal (SP) benchmark, which was taken from the NAS Parallel Benchmarks report. All implementations were done in the programming language C on the Intel iPSC/860 computer.

Information Processing Research.

DTIC Science & Technology

1988-05-01

concentrated mainly on the Hitech chess machine, which achieves its success from parallelism in the right places. Hitech has now reached a National rating...includes local user workstations, a set of central server workstations each acting as a host for a Warp machine, and a few Warp multiprocessors. The... successful completion. A quorum for an operation is any such set of sites. Neces- sary and sufficient constraints on quorum intersections are derived

Lattice-Gas Automata Fluids on Parallel Supercomputers

DTIC Science & Technology

1993-11-23

Kelvin-Helmholtz shear instabil- ity, and the Von Karman vortex shedding instability. Performance of the two machines in terms of both site update... PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) Phillips Laboratory,Hanscom Field,MA,01731 8. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER 9. SPONSORING...Helmholtz shear instability, and the Von Karman vortex shedding instability. Performance of the two machines in terms of both site update rate and

Concurrent Collections (CnC): A new approach to parallel programming

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Knobe, Kathleen

2010-05-07

A common approach in designing parallel languages is to provide some high level handles to manipulate the use of the parallel platform. This exposes some aspects of the target platform, for example, shared vs. distributed memory. It may expose some but not all types of parallelism, for example, data parallelism but not task parallelism. This approach must find a balance between the desire to provide a simple view for the domain expert and provide sufficient power for tuning. This is hard for any given architecture and harder if the language is to apply to a range of architectures. Either simplicitymore » or power is lost. Instead of viewing the language design problem as one of providing the programmer with high level handles, we view the problem as one of designing an interface. On one side of this interface is the programmer (domain expert) who knows the application but needs no knowledge of any aspects of the platform. On the other side of the interface is the performance expert (programmer or program) who demands maximal flexibility for optimizing the mapping to a wide range of target platforms (parallel / serial, shared / distributed, homogeneous / heterogeneous, etc.) but needs no knowledge of the domain. Concurrent Collections (CnC) is based on this separation of concerns. The talk will present CnC and its benefits. About the speaker. Kathleen Knobe has focused throughout her career on parallelism especially compiler technology, runtime system design and language design. She worked at Compass (aka Massachusetts Computer Associates) from 1980 to 1991 designing compilers for a wide range of parallel platforms for Thinking Machines, MasPar, Alliant, Numerix, and several government projects. In 1991 she decided to finish her education. After graduating from MIT in 1997, she joined Digital Equipment’s Cambridge Research Lab (CRL). She stayed through the DEC/Compaq/HP mergers and when CRL was acquired and absorbed by Intel. She currently works in the Software and Services Group / Technology Pathfinding and Innovation.« less

Concurrent Collections (CnC): A new approach to parallel programming

ScienceCinema

Knobe, Kathleen

2018-04-16

A common approach in designing parallel languages is to provide some high level handles to manipulate the use of the parallel platform. This exposes some aspects of the target platform, for example, shared vs. distributed memory. It may expose some but not all types of parallelism, for example, data parallelism but not task parallelism. This approach must find a balance between the desire to provide a simple view for the domain expert and provide sufficient power for tuning. This is hard for any given architecture and harder if the language is to apply to a range of architectures. Either simplicity or power is lost. Instead of viewing the language design problem as one of providing the programmer with high level handles, we view the problem as one of designing an interface. On one side of this interface is the programmer (domain expert) who knows the application but needs no knowledge of any aspects of the platform. On the other side of the interface is the performance expert (programmer or program) who demands maximal flexibility for optimizing the mapping to a wide range of target platforms (parallel / serial, shared / distributed, homogeneous / heterogeneous, etc.) but needs no knowledge of the domain. Concurrent Collections (CnC) is based on this separation of concerns. The talk will present CnC and its benefits. About the speaker. Kathleen Knobe has focused throughout her career on parallelism especially compiler technology, runtime system design and language design. She worked at Compass (aka Massachusetts Computer Associates) from 1980 to 1991 designing compilers for a wide range of parallel platforms for Thinking Machines, MasPar, Alliant, Numerix, and several government projects. In 1991 she decided to finish her education. After graduating from MIT in 1997, she joined Digital Equipment’s Cambridge Research Lab (CRL). She stayed through the DEC/Compaq/HP mergers and when CRL was acquired and absorbed by Intel. She currently works in the Software and Services Group / Technology Pathfinding and Innovation.

Portable parallel stochastic optimization for the design of aeropropulsion components

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sues, Robert H.; Rhodes, G. S.

1994-01-01

This report presents the results of Phase 1 research to develop a methodology for performing large-scale Multi-disciplinary Stochastic Optimization (MSO) for the design of aerospace systems ranging from aeropropulsion components to complete aircraft configurations. The current research recognizes that such design optimization problems are computationally expensive, and require the use of either massively parallel or multiple-processor computers. The methodology also recognizes that many operational and performance parameters are uncertain, and that uncertainty must be considered explicitly to achieve optimum performance and cost. The objective of this Phase 1 research was to initialize the development of an MSO methodology that is portable to a wide variety of hardware platforms, while achieving efficient, large-scale parallelism when multiple processors are available. The first effort in the project was a literature review of available computer hardware, as well as review of portable, parallel programming environments. The first effort was to implement the MSO methodology for a problem using the portable parallel programming language, Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM). The third and final effort was to demonstrate the example on a variety of computers, including a distributed-memory multiprocessor, a distributed-memory network of workstations, and a single-processor workstation. Results indicate the MSO methodology can be well-applied towards large-scale aerospace design problems. Nearly perfect linear speedup was demonstrated for computation of optimization sensitivity coefficients on both a 128-node distributed-memory multiprocessor (the Intel iPSC/860) and a network of workstations (speedups of almost 19 times achieved for 20 workstations). Very high parallel efficiencies (75 percent for 31 processors and 60 percent for 50 processors) were also achieved for computation of aerodynamic influence coefficients on the Intel. Finally, the multi-level parallelization strategy that will be needed for large-scale MSO problems was demonstrated to be highly efficient. The same parallel code instructions were used on both platforms, demonstrating portability. There are many applications for which MSO can be applied, including NASA's High-Speed-Civil Transport, and advanced propulsion systems. The use of MSO will reduce design and development time and testing costs dramatically.

A practical approach to portability and performance problems on massively parallel supercomputers

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Beazley, D.M.; Lomdahl, P.S.

1994-12-08

We present an overview of the tactics we have used to achieve a high-level of performance while improving portability for a large-scale molecular dynamics code SPaSM. SPaSM was originally implemented in ANSI C with message passing for the Connection Machine 5 (CM-5). In 1993, SPaSM was selected as one of the winners in the IEEE Gordon Bell Prize competition for sustaining 50 Gflops on the 1024 node CM-5 at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Achieving this performance on the CM-5 required rewriting critical sections of code in CDPEAC assembler language. In addition, the code made extensive use of CM-5 parallel I/Omore » and the CMMD message passing library. Given this highly specialized implementation, we describe how we have ported the code to the Cray T3D and high performance workstations. In addition we will describe how it has been possible to do this using a single version of source code that runs on all three platforms without sacrificing any performance. Sound too good to be true? We hope to demonstrate that one can realize both code performance and portability without relying on the latest and greatest prepackaged tool or parallelizing compiler.« less

Proceedings: Sisal `93

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Feo, J.T.

1993-10-01

This report contain papers on: Programmability and performance issues; The case of an iterative partial differential equation solver; Implementing the kernal of the Australian Region Weather Prediction Model in Sisal; Even and quarter-even prime length symmetric FFTs and their Sisal Implementations; Top-down thread generation for Sisal; Overlapping communications and computations on NUMA architechtures; Compiling technique based on dataflow analysis for funtional programming language Valid; Copy elimination for true multidimensional arrays in Sisal 2.0; Increasing parallelism for an optimization that reduces copying in IF2 graphs; Caching in on Sisal; Cache performance of Sisal Vs. FORTRAN; FFT algorithms on a shared-memory multiprocessor;more » A parallel implementation of nonnumeric search problems in Sisal; Computer vision algorithms in Sisal; Compilation of Sisal for a high-performance data driven vector processor; Sisal on distributed memory machines; A virtual shared addressing system for distributed memory Sisal; Developing a high-performance FFT algorithm in Sisal for a vector supercomputer; Implementation issues for IF2 on a static data-flow architechture; and Systematic control of parallelism in array-based data-flow computation. Selected papers have been indexed separately for inclusion in the Energy Science and Technology Database.« less

Dual Super-Systolic Core for Real-Time Reconstructive Algorithms of High-Resolution Radar/SAR Imaging Systems

PubMed Central

Atoche, Alejandro Castillo; Castillo, Javier Vázquez

2012-01-01

A high-speed dual super-systolic core for reconstructive signal processing (SP) operations consists of a double parallel systolic array (SA) machine in which each processing element of the array is also conceptualized as another SA in a bit-level fashion. In this study, we addressed the design of a high-speed dual super-systolic array (SSA) core for the enhancement/reconstruction of remote sensing (RS) imaging of radar/synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor systems. The selected reconstructive SP algorithms are efficiently transformed in their parallel representation and then, they are mapped into an efficient high performance embedded computing (HPEC) architecture in reconfigurable Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA) platforms. As an implementation test case, the proposed approach was aggregated in a HW/SW co-design scheme in order to solve the nonlinear ill-posed inverse problem of nonparametric estimation of the power spatial spectrum pattern (SSP) from a remotely sensed scene. We show how such dual SSA core, drastically reduces the computational load of complex RS regularization techniques achieving the required real-time operational mode. PMID:22736964

A parallel Jacobson-Oksman optimization algorithm. [parallel processing (computers)

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Straeter, T. A.; Markos, A. T.

1975-01-01

A gradient-dependent optimization technique which exploits the vector-streaming or parallel-computing capabilities of some modern computers is presented. The algorithm, derived by assuming that the function to be minimized is homogeneous, is a modification of the Jacobson-Oksman serial minimization method. In addition to describing the algorithm, conditions insuring the convergence of the iterates of the algorithm and the results of numerical experiments on a group of sample test functions are presented. The results of these experiments indicate that this algorithm will solve optimization problems in less computing time than conventional serial methods on machines having vector-streaming or parallel-computing capabilities.

Radio Synthesis Imaging - A High Performance Computing and Communications Project

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Crutcher, Richard M.

The National Science Foundation has funded a five-year High Performance Computing and Communications project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for the direct implementation of several of the computing recommendations of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee (the "Bahcall report"). This paper is a summary of the project goals and a progress report. The project will implement a prototype of the next generation of astronomical telescope systems - remotely located telescopes connected by high-speed networks to very high performance, scalable architecture computers and on-line data archives, which are accessed by astronomers over Gbit/sec networks. Specifically, a data link has been installed between the BIMA millimeter-wave synthesis array at Hat Creek, California and NCSA at Urbana, Illinois for real-time transmission of data to NCSA. Data are automatically archived, and may be browsed and retrieved by astronomers using the NCSA Mosaic software. In addition, an on-line digital library of processed images will be established. BIMA data will be processed on a very high performance distributed computing system, with I/O, user interface, and most of the software system running on the NCSA Convex C3880 supercomputer or Silicon Graphics Onyx workstations connected by HiPPI to the high performance, massively parallel Thinking Machines Corporation CM-5. The very computationally intensive algorithms for calibration and imaging of radio synthesis array observations will be optimized for the CM-5 and new algorithms which utilize the massively parallel architecture will be developed. Code running simultaneously on the distributed computers will communicate using the Data Transport Mechanism developed by NCSA. The project will also use the BLANCA Gbit/s testbed network between Urbana and Madison, Wisconsin to connect an Onyx workstation in the University of Wisconsin Astronomy Department to the NCSA CM-5, for development of long-distance distributed computing. Finally, the project is developing 2D and 3D visualization software as part of the international AIPS++ project. This research and development project is being carried out by a team of experts in radio astronomy, algorithm development for massively parallel architectures, high-speed networking, database management, and Thinking Machines Corporation personnel. The development of this complete software, distributed computing, and data archive and library solution to the radio astronomy computing problem will advance our expertise in high performance computing and communications technology and the application of these techniques to astronomical data processing.

Praxis language reference manual

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Walker, J.H.

1981-01-01

This document is a language reference manual for the programming language Praxis. The document contains the specifications that must be met by any compiler for the language. The Praxis language was designed for systems programming in real-time process applications. Goals for the language and its implementations are: (1) highly efficient code generated by the compiler; (2) program portability; (3) completeness, that is, all programming requirements can be met by the language without needing an assembler; and (4) separate compilation to aid in design and management of large systems. The language does not provide any facilities for input/output, stack and queuemore » handling, string operations, parallel processing, or coroutine processing. These features can be implemented as routines in the language, using machine-dependent code to take advantage of facilities in the control environment on different machines.« less

Ion beam figuring of high-slope surfaces based on figure error compensation algorithm.

PubMed

Dai, Yifan; Liao, Wenlin; Zhou, Lin; Chen, Shanyong; Xie, Xuhui

2010-12-01

In a deterministic figuring process, it is critical to guarantee high stability of the removal function as well as the accuracy of the dwell time solution, which directly influence the convergence of the figuring process. Hence, when figuring steep optics, the ion beam is required to keep a perpendicular incidence, and a five-axis figuring machine is typically utilized. In this paper, however, a method for high-precision figuring of high-slope optics is proposed with a linear three-axis machine, allowing for inclined beam incidence. First, the changing rule of the removal function and the normal removal rate with the incidence angle is analyzed according to the removal characteristics of ion beam figuring (IBF). Then, we propose to reduce the influence of varying removal function and projection distortion on the dwell time solution by means of figure error compensation. Consequently, the incident ion beam is allowed to keep parallel to the optical axis. Simulations and experiments are given to verify the removal analysis. Finally, a figuring experiment is conducted on a linear three-axis IBF machine, which proves the validity of the method for high-slope surfaces. It takes two iterations and about 9 min to successfully figure a fused silica sample, whose aperture is 21.3 mm and radius of curvature is 16 mm. The root-mean-square figure error of the convex surface is reduced from 13.13 to 5.86 nm.

Contention Modeling for Multithreaded Distributed Shared Memory Machines: The Cray XMT

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Secchi, Simone; Tumeo, Antonino; Villa, Oreste

Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) machines are a wide class of multi-processor computing systems where a large virtually-shared address space is mapped on a network of physically distributed memories. High memory latency and network contention are two of the main factors that limit performance scaling of such architectures. Modern high-performance computing DSM systems have evolved toward exploitation of massive hardware multi-threading and fine-grained memory hashing to tolerate irregular latencies, avoid network hot-spots and enable high scaling. In order to model the performance of such large-scale machines, parallel simulation has been proved to be a promising approach to achieve good accuracy inmore » reasonable times. One of the most critical factors in solving the simulation speed-accuracy trade-off is network modeling. The Cray XMT is a massively multi-threaded supercomputing architecture that belongs to the DSM class, since it implements a globally-shared address space abstraction on top of a physically distributed memory substrate. In this paper, we discuss the development of a contention-aware network model intended to be integrated in a full-system XMT simulator. We start by measuring the effects of network contention in a 128-processor XMT machine and then investigate the trade-off that exists between simulation accuracy and speed, by comparing three network models which operate at different levels of accuracy. The comparison and model validation is performed by executing a string-matching algorithm on the full-system simulator and on the XMT, using three datasets that generate noticeably different contention patterns.« less

A Parameter Communication Optimization Strategy for Distributed Machine Learning in Sensors.

PubMed

Zhang, Jilin; Tu, Hangdi; Ren, Yongjian; Wan, Jian; Zhou, Li; Li, Mingwei; Wang, Jue; Yu, Lifeng; Zhao, Chang; Zhang, Lei

2017-09-21

In order to utilize the distributed characteristic of sensors, distributed machine learning has become the mainstream approach, but the different computing capability of sensors and network delays greatly influence the accuracy and the convergence rate of the machine learning model. Our paper describes a reasonable parameter communication optimization strategy to balance the training overhead and the communication overhead. We extend the fault tolerance of iterative-convergent machine learning algorithms and propose the Dynamic Finite Fault Tolerance (DFFT). Based on the DFFT, we implement a parameter communication optimization strategy for distributed machine learning, named Dynamic Synchronous Parallel Strategy (DSP), which uses the performance monitoring model to dynamically adjust the parameter synchronization strategy between worker nodes and the Parameter Server (PS). This strategy makes full use of the computing power of each sensor, ensures the accuracy of the machine learning model, and avoids the situation that the model training is disturbed by any tasks unrelated to the sensors.

Assessing the potential of surface-immobilized molecular logic machines for integration with solid state technology.

PubMed

Dunn, Katherine E; Trefzer, Martin A; Johnson, Steven; Tyrrell, Andy M

2016-08-01

Molecular computation with DNA has great potential for low power, highly parallel information processing in a biological or biochemical context. However, significant challenges remain for the field of DNA computation. New technology is needed to allow multiplexed label-free readout and to enable regulation of molecular state without addition of new DNA strands. These capabilities could be provided by hybrid bioelectronic systems in which biomolecular computing is integrated with conventional electronics through immobilization of DNA machines on the surface of electronic circuitry. Here we present a quantitative experimental analysis of a surface-immobilized OR gate made from DNA and driven by strand displacement. The purpose of our work is to examine the performance of a simple representative surface-immobilized DNA logic machine, to provide valuable information for future work on hybrid bioelectronic systems involving DNA devices. We used a quartz crystal microbalance to examine a DNA monolayer containing approximately 5×10(11)gatescm(-2), with an inter-gate separation of approximately 14nm, and we found that the ensemble of gates took approximately 6min to switch. The gates could be switched repeatedly, but the switching efficiency was significantly degraded on the second and subsequent cycles when the binding site for the input was near to the surface. Otherwise, the switching efficiency could be 80% or better, and the power dissipated by the ensemble of gates during switching was approximately 0.1nWcm(-2), which is orders of magnitude less than the power dissipated during switching of an equivalent array of transistors. We propose an architecture for hybrid DNA-electronic systems in which information can be stored and processed, either in series or in parallel, by a combination of molecular machines and conventional electronics. In this architecture, information can flow freely and in both directions between the solution-phase and the underlying electronics via surface-immobilized DNA machines that provide the interface between the molecular and electronic domains. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Thread-Level Parallelization and Optimization of NWChem for the Intel MIC Architecture

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Shan, Hongzhang; Williams, Samuel; Jong, Wibe de

In the multicore era it was possible to exploit the increase in on-chip parallelism by simply running multiple MPI processes per chip. Unfortunately, manycore processors' greatly increased thread- and data-level parallelism coupled with a reduced memory capacity demand an altogether different approach. In this paper we explore augmenting two NWChem modules, triples correction of the CCSD(T) and Fock matrix construction, with OpenMP in order that they might run efficiently on future manycore architectures. As the next NERSC machine will be a self-hosted Intel MIC (Xeon Phi) based supercomputer, we leverage an existing MIC testbed at NERSC to evaluate our experiments.more » In order to proxy the fact that future MIC machines will not have a host processor, we run all of our experiments in tt native mode. We found that while straightforward application of OpenMP to the deep loop nests associated with the tensor contractions of CCSD(T) was sufficient in attaining high performance, significant effort was required to safely and efficiently thread the TEXAS integral package when constructing the Fock matrix. Ultimately, our new MPI OpenMP hybrid implementations attain up to 65x better performance for the triples part of the CCSD(T) due in large part to the fact that the limited on-card memory limits the existing MPI implementation to a single process per card. Additionally, we obtain up to 1.6x better performance on Fock matrix constructions when compared with the best MPI implementations running multiple processes per card.« less

Thread-level parallelization and optimization of NWChem for the Intel MIC architecture

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Shan, Hongzhang; Williams, Samuel; de Jong, Wibe

In the multicore era it was possible to exploit the increase in on-chip parallelism by simply running multiple MPI processes per chip. Unfortunately, manycore processors' greatly increased thread- and data-level parallelism coupled with a reduced memory capacity demand an altogether different approach. In this paper we explore augmenting two NWChem modules, triples correction of the CCSD(T) and Fock matrix construction, with OpenMP in order that they might run efficiently on future manycore architectures. As the next NERSC machine will be a self-hosted Intel MIC (Xeon Phi) based supercomputer, we leverage an existing MIC testbed at NERSC to evaluate our experiments.more » In order to proxy the fact that future MIC machines will not have a host processor, we run all of our experiments in native mode. We found that while straightforward application of OpenMP to the deep loop nests associated with the tensor contractions of CCSD(T) was sufficient in attaining high performance, significant e ort was required to safely and efeciently thread the TEXAS integral package when constructing the Fock matrix. Ultimately, our new MPI+OpenMP hybrid implementations attain up to 65× better performance for the triples part of the CCSD(T) due in large part to the fact that the limited on-card memory limits the existing MPI implementation to a single process per card. Additionally, we obtain up to 1.6× better performance on Fock matrix constructions when compared with the best MPI implementations running multiple processes per card.« less

Distributed multitasking ITS with PVM

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Fan, W.C.; Halbleib, J.A. Sr.

1995-12-31

Advances in computer hardware and communication software have made it possible to perform parallel-processing computing on a collection of desktop workstations. For many applications, multitasking on a cluster of high-performance workstations has achieved performance comparable to or better than that on a traditional supercomputer. From the point of view of cost-effectiveness, it also allows users to exploit available but unused computational resources and thus achieve a higher performance-to-cost ratio. Monte Carlo calculations are inherently parallelizable because the individual particle trajectories can be generated independently with minimum need for interprocessor communication. Furthermore, the number of particle histories that can be generatedmore » in a given amount of wall-clock time is nearly proportional to the number of processors in the cluster. This is an important fact because the inherent statistical uncertainty in any Monte Carlo result decreases as the number of histories increases. For these reasons, researchers have expended considerable effort to take advantage of different parallel architectures for a variety of Monte Carlo radiation transport codes, often with excellent results. The initial interest in this work was sparked by the multitasking capability of the MCNP code on a cluster of workstations using the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) software. On a 16-machine IBM RS/6000 cluster, it has been demonstrated that MCNP runs ten times as fast as on a single-processor CRAY YMP. In this paper, we summarize the implementation of a similar multitasking capability for the coupled electronphoton transport code system, the Integrated TIGER Series (ITS), and the evaluation of two load-balancing schemes for homogeneous and heterogeneous networks.« less

Distributed multitasking ITS with PVM

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Fan, W.C.; Halbleib, J.A. Sr.

1995-02-01

Advances of computer hardware and communication software have made it possible to perform parallel-processing computing on a collection of desktop workstations. For many applications, multitasking on a cluster of high-performance workstations has achieved performance comparable or better than that on a traditional supercomputer. From the point of view of cost-effectiveness, it also allows users to exploit available but unused computational resources, and thus achieve a higher performance-to-cost ratio. Monte Carlo calculations are inherently parallelizable because the individual particle trajectories can be generated independently with minimum need for interprocessor communication. Furthermore, the number of particle histories that can be generated inmore » a given amount of wall-clock time is nearly proportional to the number of processors in the cluster. This is an important fact because the inherent statistical uncertainty in any Monte Carlo result decreases as the number of histories increases. For these reasons, researchers have expended considerable effort to take advantage of different parallel architectures for a variety of Monte Carlo radiation transport codes, often with excellent results. The initial interest in this work was sparked by the multitasking capability of MCNP on a cluster of workstations using the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) software. On a 16-machine IBM RS/6000 cluster, it has been demonstrated that MCNP runs ten times as fast as on a single-processor CRAY YMP. In this paper, we summarize the implementation of a similar multitasking capability for the coupled electron/photon transport code system, the Integrated TIGER Series (ITS), and the evaluation of two load balancing schemes for homogeneous and heterogeneous networks.« less

Evaluating SPLASH-2 Applications Using MapReduce

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhu, Shengkai; Xiao, Zhiwei; Chen, Haibo; Chen, Rong; Zhang, Weihua; Zang, Binyu

MapReduce has been prevalent for running data-parallel applications. By hiding other non-functionality parts such as parallelism, fault tolerance and load balance from programmers, MapReduce significantly simplifies the programming of large clusters. Due to the mentioned features of MapReduce above, researchers have also explored the use of MapReduce on other application domains, such as machine learning, textual retrieval and statistical translation, among others.

Automatic Adaptation of Tunable Distributed Applications

DTIC Science & Technology

2001-01-01

size, weight, and battery life, with a single CPU, less memory, smaller hard disk, and lower bandwidth network connectivity. The power of PDAs is...wireless, and bluetooth [32] facilities; thus achieving different rates of data transmission. 1 With the trend of “write once, run everywhere...applications, a single component can execute on multiple processors (or machines) in parallel. These parallel applications, written in a specialized language

Effective switching frequency multiplier inverter

DOEpatents

Su, Gui-Jia [Oak Ridge, TN; Peng, Fang Z [Okemos, MI

2007-08-07

A switching frequency multiplier inverter for low inductance machines that uses parallel connection of switches and each switch is independently controlled according to a pulse width modulation scheme. The effective switching frequency is multiplied by the number of switches connected in parallel while each individual switch operates within its limit of switching frequency. This technique can also be used for other power converters such as DC/DC, AC/DC converters.

A new scheduling algorithm for parallel sparse LU factorization with static pivoting

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Grigori, Laura; Li, Xiaoye S.

2002-08-20

In this paper we present a static scheduling algorithm for parallel sparse LU factorization with static pivoting. The algorithm is divided into mapping and scheduling phases, using the symmetric pruned graphs of L' and U to represent dependencies. The scheduling algorithm is designed for driving the parallel execution of the factorization on a distributed-memory architecture. Experimental results and comparisons with SuperLU{_}DIST are reported after applying this algorithm on real world application matrices on an IBM SP RS/6000 distributed memory machine.

Efficient Machine Learning Approach for Optimizing Scientific Computing Applications on Emerging HPC Architectures

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Arumugam, Kamesh

Efficient parallel implementations of scientific applications on multi-core CPUs with accelerators such as GPUs and Xeon Phis is challenging. This requires - exploiting the data parallel architecture of the accelerator along with the vector pipelines of modern x86 CPU architectures, load balancing, and efficient memory transfer between different devices. It is relatively easy to meet these requirements for highly structured scientific applications. In contrast, a number of scientific and engineering applications are unstructured. Getting performance on accelerators for these applications is extremely challenging because many of these applications employ irregular algorithms which exhibit data-dependent control-ow and irregular memory accesses. Furthermore,more » these applications are often iterative with dependency between steps, and thus making it hard to parallelize across steps. As a result, parallelism in these applications is often limited to a single step. Numerical simulation of charged particles beam dynamics is one such application where the distribution of work and memory access pattern at each time step is irregular. Applications with these properties tend to present significant branch and memory divergence, load imbalance between different processor cores, and poor compute and memory utilization. Prior research on parallelizing such irregular applications have been focused around optimizing the irregular, data-dependent memory accesses and control-ow during a single step of the application independent of the other steps, with the assumption that these patterns are completely unpredictable. We observed that the structure of computation leading to control-ow divergence and irregular memory accesses in one step is similar to that in the next step. It is possible to predict this structure in the current step by observing the computation structure of previous steps. In this dissertation, we present novel machine learning based optimization techniques to address the parallel implementation challenges of such irregular applications on different HPC architectures. In particular, we use supervised learning to predict the computation structure and use it to address the control-ow and memory access irregularities in the parallel implementation of such applications on GPUs, Xeon Phis, and heterogeneous architectures composed of multi-core CPUs with GPUs or Xeon Phis. We use numerical simulation of charged particles beam dynamics simulation as a motivating example throughout the dissertation to present our new approach, though they should be equally applicable to a wide range of irregular applications. The machine learning approach presented here use predictive analytics and forecasting techniques to adaptively model and track the irregular memory access pattern at each time step of the simulation to anticipate the future memory access pattern. Access pattern forecasts can then be used to formulate optimization decisions during application execution which improves the performance of the application at a future time step based on the observations from earlier time steps. In heterogeneous architectures, forecasts can also be used to improve the memory performance and resource utilization of all the processing units to deliver a good aggregate performance. We used these optimization techniques and anticipation strategy to design a cache-aware, memory efficient parallel algorithm to address the irregularities in the parallel implementation of charged particles beam dynamics simulation on different HPC architectures. Experimental result using a diverse mix of HPC architectures shows that our approach in using anticipation strategy is effective in maximizing data reuse, ensuring workload balance, minimizing branch and memory divergence, and in improving resource utilization.« less

Distributed communications and control network for robotic mining

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Schiffbauer, William H.

1989-01-01

The application of robotics to coal mining machines is one approach pursued to increase productivity while providing enhanced safety for the coal miner. Toward that end, a network composed of microcontrollers, computers, expert systems, real time operating systems, and a variety of program languages are being integrated that will act as the backbone for intelligent machine operation. Actual mining machines, including a few customized ones, have been given telerobotic semiautonomous capabilities by applying the described network. Control devices, intelligent sensors and computers onboard these machines are showing promise of achieving improved mining productivity and safety benefits. Current research using these machines involves navigation, multiple machine interaction, machine diagnostics, mineral detection, and graphical machine representation. Guidance sensors and systems employed include: sonar, laser rangers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, clinometers, and accelerometers. Information on the network of hardware/software and its implementation on mining machines are presented. Anticipated coal production operations using the network are discussed. A parallelism is also drawn between the direction of present day underground coal mining research to how the lunar soil (regolith) may be mined. A conceptual lunar mining operation that employs a distributed communication and control network is detailed.

Implementing Shared Memory Parallelism in MCBEND

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bird, Adam; Long, David; Dobson, Geoff

2017-09-01

MCBEND is a general purpose radiation transport Monte Carlo code from AMEC Foster Wheelers's ANSWERS® Software Service. MCBEND is well established in the UK shielding community for radiation shielding and dosimetry assessments. The existing MCBEND parallel capability effectively involves running the same calculation on many processors. This works very well except when the memory requirements of a model restrict the number of instances of a calculation that will fit on a machine. To more effectively utilise parallel hardware OpenMP has been used to implement shared memory parallelism in MCBEND. This paper describes the reasoning behind the choice of OpenMP, notes some of the challenges of multi-threading an established code such as MCBEND and assesses the performance of the parallel method implemented in MCBEND.

A framework for grand scale parallelization of the combined finite discrete element method in 2d

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lei, Z.; Rougier, E.; Knight, E. E.; Munjiza, A.

2014-09-01

Within the context of rock mechanics, the Combined Finite-Discrete Element Method (FDEM) has been applied to many complex industrial problems such as block caving, deep mining techniques (tunneling, pillar strength, etc.), rock blasting, seismic wave propagation, packing problems, dam stability, rock slope stability, rock mass strength characterization problems, etc. The reality is that most of these were accomplished in a 2D and/or single processor realm. In this work a hardware independent FDEM parallelization framework has been developed using the Virtual Parallel Machine for FDEM, (V-FDEM). With V-FDEM, a parallel FDEM software can be adapted to different parallel architecture systems ranging from just a few to thousands of cores.

Information Processing Research

DTIC Science & Technology

1988-01-01

the Hitech chess machine, which achieves its success from parallelism in the right places. Hitech has now reached a National rating of 2359, making it...outset that success depended on building real systems and subjecting them to use by a large number of faculty and students within the Department. We...central server workstations each acting as a host for a Warp machine, and a few Warp multiprocessors. The command interpreter is executed in Lisp on

RISC Processors and High Performance Computing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Saini, Subhash; Bailey, David H.; Lasinski, T. A. (Technical Monitor)

1995-01-01

In this tutorial, we will discuss top five current RISC microprocessors: The IBM Power2, which is used in the IBM RS6000/590 workstation and in the IBM SP2 parallel supercomputer, the DEC Alpha, which is in the DEC Alpha workstation and in the Cray T3D; the MIPS R8000, which is used in the SGI Power Challenge; the HP PA-RISC 7100, which is used in the HP 700 series workstations and in the Convex Exemplar; and the Cray proprietary processor, which is used in the new Cray J916. The architecture of these microprocessors will first be presented. The effective performance of these processors will then be compared, both by citing standard benchmarks and also in the context of implementing a real applications. In the process, different programming models such as data parallel (CM Fortran and HPF) and message passing (PVM and MPI) will be introduced and compared. The latest NAS Parallel Benchmark (NPB) absolute performance and performance per dollar figures will be presented. The next generation of the NP13 will also be described. The tutorial will conclude with a discussion of general trends in the field of high performance computing, including likely future developments in hardware and software technology, and the relative roles of vector supercomputers tightly coupled parallel computers, and clusters of workstations. This tutorial will provide a unique cross-machine comparison not available elsewhere.

Minimizing makespan in a two-stage flow shop with parallel batch-processing machines and re-entrant jobs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Huang, J. D.; Liu, J. J.; Chen, Q. X.; Mao, N.

2017-06-01

Against a background of heat-treatment operations in mould manufacturing, a two-stage flow-shop scheduling problem is described for minimizing makespan with parallel batch-processing machines and re-entrant jobs. The weights and release dates of jobs are non-identical, but job processing times are equal. A mixed-integer linear programming model is developed and tested with small-scale scenarios. Given that the problem is NP hard, three heuristic construction methods with polynomial complexity are proposed. The worst case of the new constructive heuristic is analysed in detail. A method for computing lower bounds is proposed to test heuristic performance. Heuristic efficiency is tested with sets of scenarios. Compared with the two improved heuristics, the performance of the new constructive heuristic is superior.

Parallel 3D Multi-Stage Simulation of a Turbofan Engine

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Turner, Mark G.; Topp, David A.

1998-01-01

A 3D multistage simulation of each component of a modern GE Turbofan engine has been made. An axisymmetric view of this engine is presented in the document. This includes a fan, booster rig, high pressure compressor rig, high pressure turbine rig and a low pressure turbine rig. In the near future, all components will be run in a single calculation for a solution of 49 blade rows. The simulation exploits the use of parallel computations by using two levels of parallelism. Each blade row is run in parallel and each blade row grid is decomposed into several domains and run in parallel. 20 processors are used for the 4 blade row analysis. The average passage approach developed by John Adamczyk at NASA Lewis Research Center has been further developed and parallelized. This is APNASA Version A. It is a Navier-Stokes solver using a 4-stage explicit Runge-Kutta time marching scheme with variable time steps and residual smoothing for convergence acceleration. It has an implicit K-E turbulence model which uses an ADI solver to factor the matrix. Between 50 and 100 explicit time steps are solved before a blade row body force is calculated and exchanged with the other blade rows. This outer iteration has been coined a "flip." Efforts have been made to make the solver linearly scaleable with the number of blade rows. Enough flips are run (between 50 and 200) so the solution in the entire machine is not changing. The K-E equations are generally solved every other explicit time step. One of the key requirements in the development of the parallel code was to make the parallel solution exactly (bit for bit) match the serial solution. This has helped isolate many small parallel bugs and guarantee the parallelization was done correctly. The domain decomposition is done only in the axial direction since the number of points axially is much larger than the other two directions. This code uses MPI for message passing. The parallel speed up of the solver portion (no 1/0 or body force calculation) for a grid which has 227 points axially.

Performance Evaluation and Modeling Techniques for Parallel Processors. Ph.D. Thesis

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dimpsey, Robert Tod

1992-01-01

In practice, the performance evaluation of supercomputers is still substantially driven by singlepoint estimates of metrics (e.g., MFLOPS) obtained by running characteristic benchmarks or workloads. With the rapid increase in the use of time-shared multiprogramming in these systems, such measurements are clearly inadequate. This is because multiprogramming and system overhead, as well as other degradations in performance due to time varying characteristics of workloads, are not taken into account. In multiprogrammed environments, multiple jobs and users can dramatically increase the amount of system overhead and degrade the performance of the machine. Performance techniques, such as benchmarking, which characterize performance on a dedicated machine ignore this major component of true computer performance. Due to the complexity of analysis, there has been little work done in analyzing, modeling, and predicting the performance of applications in multiprogrammed environments. This is especially true for parallel processors, where the costs and benefits of multi-user workloads are exacerbated. While some may claim that the issue of multiprogramming is not a viable one in the supercomputer market, experience shows otherwise. Even in recent massively parallel machines, multiprogramming is a key component. It has even been claimed that a partial cause of the demise of the CM2 was the fact that it did not efficiently support time-sharing. In the same paper, Gordon Bell postulates that, multicomputers will evolve to multiprocessors in order to support efficient multiprogramming. Therefore, it is clear that parallel processors of the future will be required to offer the user a time-shared environment with reasonable response times for the applications. In this type of environment, the most important performance metric is the completion of response time of a given application. However, there are a few evaluation efforts addressing this issue.

PFLOTRAN: Reactive Flow & Transport Code for Use on Laptops to Leadership-Class Supercomputers

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Hammond, Glenn E.; Lichtner, Peter C.; Lu, Chuan

PFLOTRAN, a next-generation reactive flow and transport code for modeling subsurface processes, has been designed from the ground up to run efficiently on machines ranging from leadership-class supercomputers to laptops. Based on an object-oriented design, the code is easily extensible to incorporate additional processes. It can interface seamlessly with Fortran 9X, C and C++ codes. Domain decomposition parallelism is employed, with the PETSc parallel framework used to manage parallel solvers, data structures and communication. Features of the code include a modular input file, implementation of high-performance I/O using parallel HDF5, ability to perform multiple realization simulations with multiple processors permore » realization in a seamless manner, and multiple modes for multiphase flow and multicomponent geochemical transport. Chemical reactions currently implemented in the code include homogeneous aqueous complexing reactions and heterogeneous mineral precipitation/dissolution, ion exchange, surface complexation and a multirate kinetic sorption model. PFLOTRAN has demonstrated petascale performance using 2{sup 17} processor cores with over 2 billion degrees of freedom. Accomplishments achieved to date include applications to the Hanford 300 Area and modeling CO{sub 2} sequestration in deep geologic formations.« less

Design of robotic cells based on relative handling modules with use of SolidWorks system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gaponenko, E. V.; Anciferov, S. I.

2018-05-01

The article presents a diagramed engineering solution for a robotic cell with six degrees of freedom for machining of complex details, consisting of the base with a tool installation module and a detail machining module made as parallel structure mechanisms. The output links of the detail machining module and the tool installation module can move along X-Y-Z coordinate axes each. A 3D-model of the complex is designed in the SolidWorks system. It will be used further for carrying out engineering calculations and mathematical analysis and obtaining all required documentation.

The HEP.TrkX Project: deep neural networks for HL-LHC online and offline tracking

DOE PAGES

Farrell, Steven; Anderson, Dustin; Calafiura, Paolo; ...

2017-08-08

Particle track reconstruction in dense environments such as the detectors of the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) is a challenging pattern recognition problem. Traditional tracking algorithms such as the combinatorial Kalman Filter have been used with great success in LHC experiments for years. However, these state-of-the-art techniques are inherently sequential and scale poorly with the expected increases in detector occupancy in the HL-LHC conditions. The HEP.TrkX project is a pilot project with the aim to identify and develop cross-experiment solutions based on machine learning algorithms for track reconstruction. Machine learning algorithms bring a lot of potential to this problemmore » thanks to their capability to model complex non-linear data dependencies, to learn effective representations of high-dimensional data through training, and to parallelize easily on high-throughput architectures such as GPUs. This contribution will describe our initial explorations into this relatively unexplored idea space. Furthermore, we will discuss the use of recurrent (LSTM) and convolutional neural networks to find and fit tracks in toy detector data.« less

The HEP.TrkX Project: deep neural networks for HL-LHC online and offline tracking

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Farrell, Steven; Anderson, Dustin; Calafiura, Paolo

Particle track reconstruction in dense environments such as the detectors of the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) is a challenging pattern recognition problem. Traditional tracking algorithms such as the combinatorial Kalman Filter have been used with great success in LHC experiments for years. However, these state-of-the-art techniques are inherently sequential and scale poorly with the expected increases in detector occupancy in the HL-LHC conditions. The HEP.TrkX project is a pilot project with the aim to identify and develop cross-experiment solutions based on machine learning algorithms for track reconstruction. Machine learning algorithms bring a lot of potential to this problemmore » thanks to their capability to model complex non-linear data dependencies, to learn effective representations of high-dimensional data through training, and to parallelize easily on high-throughput architectures such as GPUs. This contribution will describe our initial explorations into this relatively unexplored idea space. Furthermore, we will discuss the use of recurrent (LSTM) and convolutional neural networks to find and fit tracks in toy detector data.« less

The HEP.TrkX Project: deep neural networks for HL-LHC online and offline tracking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Farrell, Steven; Anderson, Dustin; Calafiura, Paolo; Cerati, Giuseppe; Gray, Lindsey; Kowalkowski, Jim; Mudigonda, Mayur; Prabhat; Spentzouris, Panagiotis; Spiropoulou, Maria; Tsaris, Aristeidis; Vlimant, Jean-Roch; Zheng, Stephan

2017-08-01

Particle track reconstruction in dense environments such as the detectors of the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) is a challenging pattern recognition problem. Traditional tracking algorithms such as the combinatorial Kalman Filter have been used with great success in LHC experiments for years. However, these state-of-the-art techniques are inherently sequential and scale poorly with the expected increases in detector occupancy in the HL-LHC conditions. The HEP.TrkX project is a pilot project with the aim to identify and develop cross-experiment solutions based on machine learning algorithms for track reconstruction. Machine learning algorithms bring a lot of potential to this problem thanks to their capability to model complex non-linear data dependencies, to learn effective representations of high-dimensional data through training, and to parallelize easily on high-throughput architectures such as GPUs. This contribution will describe our initial explorations into this relatively unexplored idea space. We will discuss the use of recurrent (LSTM) and convolutional neural networks to find and fit tracks in toy detector data.

Research on parallel load sharing principle of piezoelectric six-dimensional heavy force/torque sensor

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Wei; Li, Ying-jun; Jia, Zhen-yuan; Zhang, Jun; Qian, Min

2011-01-01

In working process of huge heavy-load manipulators, such as the free forging machine, hydraulic die-forging press, forging manipulator, heavy grasping manipulator, large displacement manipulator, measurement of six-dimensional heavy force/torque and real-time force feedback of the operation interface are basis to realize coordinate operation control and force compliance control. It is also an effective way to raise the control accuracy and achieve highly efficient manufacturing. Facing to solve dynamic measurement problem on six-dimensional time-varying heavy load in extremely manufacturing process, the novel principle of parallel load sharing on six-dimensional heavy force/torque is put forward. The measuring principle of six-dimensional force sensor is analyzed, and the spatial model is built and decoupled. The load sharing ratios are analyzed and calculated in vertical and horizontal directions. The mapping relationship between six-dimensional heavy force/torque value to be measured and output force value is built. The finite element model of parallel piezoelectric six-dimensional heavy force/torque sensor is set up, and its static characteristics are analyzed by ANSYS software. The main parameters, which affect load sharing ratio, are analyzed. The experiments for load sharing with different diameters of parallel axis are designed. The results show that the six-dimensional heavy force/torque sensor has good linearity. Non-linearity errors are less than 1%. The parallel axis makes good effect of load sharing. The larger the diameter is, the better the load sharing effect is. The results of experiments are in accordance with the FEM analysis. The sensor has advantages of large measuring range, good linearity, high inherent frequency, and high rigidity. It can be widely used in extreme environments for real-time accurate measurement of six-dimensional time-varying huge loads on manipulators.

Analytical Modeling of a Double-Sided Flux Concentrating E-Core Transverse Flux Machine with Pole Windings

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Muljadi, Eduard; Hasan, Iftekhar; Husain, Tausif

In this paper, a nonlinear analytical model based on the Magnetic Equivalent Circuit (MEC) method is developed for a double-sided E-Core Transverse Flux Machine (TFM). The proposed TFM has a cylindrical rotor, sandwiched between E-core stators on both sides. Ferrite magnets are used in the rotor with flux concentrating design to attain high airgap flux density, better magnet utilization, and higher torque density. The MEC model was developed using a series-parallel combination of flux tubes to estimate the reluctance network for different parts of the machine including air gaps, permanent magnets, and the stator and rotor ferromagnetic materials, in amore » two-dimensional (2-D) frame. An iterative Gauss-Siedel method is integrated with the MEC model to capture the effects of magnetic saturation. A single phase, 1 kW, 400 rpm E-Core TFM is analytically modeled and its results for flux linkage, no-load EMF, and generated torque, are verified with Finite Element Analysis (FEA). The analytical model significantly reduces the computation time while estimating results with less than 10 percent error.« less

Self-balanced modulation and magnetic rebalancing method for parallel multilevel inverters

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Li, Hui; Shi, Yanjun

A self-balanced modulation method and a closed-loop magnetic flux rebalancing control method for parallel multilevel inverters. The combination of the two methods provides for balancing of the magnetic flux of the inter-cell transformers (ICTs) of the parallel multilevel inverters without deteriorating the quality of the output voltage. In various embodiments a parallel multi-level inverter modulator is provide including a multi-channel comparator to generate a multiplexed digitized ideal waveform for a parallel multi-level inverter and a finite state machine (FSM) module coupled to the parallel multi-channel comparator, the FSM module to receive the multiplexed digitized ideal waveform and to generate amore » pulse width modulated gate-drive signal for each switching device of the parallel multi-level inverter. The system and method provides for optimization of the output voltage spectrum without influence the magnetic balancing.« less

Coding for parallel execution of hardware-in-the-loop millimeter-wave scene generation models on multicore SIMD processor architectures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Olson, Richard F.

2013-05-01

Rendering of point scatterer based radar scenes for millimeter wave (mmW) seeker tests in real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HWIL) scene generation requires efficient algorithms and vector-friendly computer architectures for complex signal synthesis. New processor technology from Intel implements an extended 256-bit vector SIMD instruction set (AVX, AVX2) in a multi-core CPU design providing peak execution rates of hundreds of GigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) on one chip. Real world mmW scene generation code can approach peak SIMD execution rates only after careful algorithm and source code design. An effective software design will maintain high computing intensity emphasizing register-to-register SIMD arithmetic operations over data movement between CPU caches or off-chip memories. Engineers at the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center (AMRDEC) applied two basic parallel coding methods to assess new 256-bit SIMD multi-core architectures for mmW scene generation in HWIL. These include use of POSIX threads built on vector library functions and more portable, highlevel parallel code based on compiler technology (e.g. OpenMP pragmas and SIMD autovectorization). Since CPU technology is rapidly advancing toward high processor core counts and TeraFLOPS peak SIMD execution rates, it is imperative that coding methods be identified which produce efficient and maintainable parallel code. This paper describes the algorithms used in point scatterer target model rendering, the parallelization of those algorithms, and the execution performance achieved on an AVX multi-core machine using the two basic parallel coding methods. The paper concludes with estimates for scale-up performance on upcoming multi-core technology.

BONSAI Garden: Parallel knowledge discovery system for amino acid sequences

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Shoudai, T.; Miyano, S.; Shinohara, A.

1995-12-31

We have developed a machine discovery system BON-SAI which receives positive and negative examples as inputs and produces as a hypothesis a pair of a decision tree over regular patterns and an alphabet indexing. This system has succeeded in discovering reasonable knowledge on transmembrane domain sequences and signal peptide sequences by computer experiments. However, when several kinds of sequences axe mixed in the data, it does not seem reasonable for a single BONSAI system to find a hypothesis of a reasonably small size with high accuracy. For this purpose, we have designed a system BONSAI Garden, in which several BONSAI`smore » and a program called Gardener run over a network in parallel, to partition the data into some number of classes together with hypotheses explaining these classes accurately.« less

Visualization of unsteady computational fluid dynamics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Haimes, Robert

1994-11-01

A brief summary of the computer environment used for calculating three dimensional unsteady Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) results is presented. This environment requires a super computer as well as massively parallel processors (MPP's) and clusters of workstations acting as a single MPP (by concurrently working on the same task) provide the required computational bandwidth for CFD calculations of transient problems. The cluster of reduced instruction set computers (RISC) is a recent advent based on the low cost and high performance that workstation vendors provide. The cluster, with the proper software can act as a multiple instruction/multiple data (MIMD) machine. A new set of software tools is being designed specifically to address visualizing 3D unsteady CFD results in these environments. Three user's manuals for the parallel version of Visual3, pV3, revision 1.00 make up the bulk of this report.

Visualization of unsteady computational fluid dynamics

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Haimes, Robert

1994-01-01

A brief summary of the computer environment used for calculating three dimensional unsteady Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) results is presented. This environment requires a super computer as well as massively parallel processors (MPP's) and clusters of workstations acting as a single MPP (by concurrently working on the same task) provide the required computational bandwidth for CFD calculations of transient problems. The cluster of reduced instruction set computers (RISC) is a recent advent based on the low cost and high performance that workstation vendors provide. The cluster, with the proper software can act as a multiple instruction/multiple data (MIMD) machine. A new set of software tools is being designed specifically to address visualizing 3D unsteady CFD results in these environments. Three user's manuals for the parallel version of Visual3, pV3, revision 1.00 make up the bulk of this report.

Weldability of Weldalite (tm) 049 with and without TiB2 reinforcement

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1991-01-01

The effects are assessed of TiB2 reinforcement and parent alloy Li content on the weldability of Weldalite (tm) 049 type alloys. Welding trials were performed using either AC or DC polarity gas tungsten arc (GTA) welding according to described procedures. The welding was performed under conditions of high restraint on 5 cm (2 in) wide x 25.4 cm (10 in) long plates machined from the 0.952 cm (0.375 in) extruded bar parallel to the extrusion direction. A 37.5 deg bevel was machined on the center edge of the extruded bar. Cut rod filler wire was machined from three alloys, and one commercially available 2319 filler wire was also used. The preliminary assessment of the weldability revealed no propensity for hot cracking under conditions of high restraint. This result is significant, because hot cracking has been reported for all other leading aluminum lithium alloys welded with certain conventional filler alloys. The strengths for Weldalite parent welded with parent filler obtained were higher than those for alloys used in launch systems, such as 2219 and 2014 welded with 2319 and 4043 fillers, respectively. Even higher values were obtained by variable polarity plasma arc welding (e.g., 54 ksi (372 MPa) mean tensile strength).

Energy-momentum restrictions on the creation of Gott time machines

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Carroll, Sean M.; Farhi, Edward; Guth, Alan H.; Olum, Ken D.

1994-11-01

The discovery by Gott of a remarkably simple spacetime with closed timelike curves (CTC's) provides a tool for investigating how the creation of time machines is prevented in classical general relativity. The Gott spacetime contains two infinitely long, parallel cosmic strings, which can equivalently be viewed as point masses in (2+1)-dimensional gravity. We examine the possibility of building such a time machine in an open universe. Specifically, we consider initial data specified on an edgeless, noncompact, spacelike hypersurface, for which the total momentum is timelike (i.e., not the momentum of a Gott spacetime). In contrast to the case of a closed universe (in which Gott pairs, although not CTC's, can be produced from the decay of stationary particles), we find that there is never enough energy for a Gott-like time machine to evolve from the specified data; it is impossible to accelerate two particles to a sufficiently high velocity. Thus, the no-CTC theorems of Tipler and Hawking are enforced in an open (2+1)-dimensional universe by a mechanism different from that which operates in a closed universe. In proving our result, we develop a simple method to understand the inequalities that restrict the result of combining momenta in (2+1)-dimensional gravity.

Aspects of image recognition in Vivid Technologies' dual-energy x-ray system for explosives detection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Eilbert, Richard F.; Krug, Kristoph D.

1993-04-01

The Vivid Rapid Explosives Detection Systems is a true dual energy x-ray machine employing precision x-ray data acquisition in combination with unique algorithms and massive computation capability. Data from the system's 960 detectors is digitally stored and processed by powerful supermicro-computers organized as an expandable array of parallel processors. The algorithms operate on the dual energy attenuation image data to recognize and define objects in the milieu of the baggage contents. Each object is then systematically examined for a match to a specific effective atomic number, density, and mass threshold. Material properties are determined by comparing the relative attenuations of the 75 kVp and 150 kVp beams and electronically separating the object from its local background. Other heuristic algorithms search for specific configurations and provide additional information. The machine automatically detects explosive materials and identifies bomb components in luggage with high specificity and throughput, X-ray dose is comparable to that of current airport x-ray machines. The machine is also configured to find heroin, cocaine, and US currency by selecting appropriate settings on-site. Since January 1992, production units have been operationally deployed at U.S. and European airports for improved screening of checked baggage.

Solving Navier-Stokes equations on a massively parallel processor; The 1 GFLOP performance

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Saati, A.; Biringen, S.; Farhat, C.

This paper reports on experience in solving large-scale fluid dynamics problems on the Connection Machine model CM-2. The authors have implemented a parallel version of the MacCormack scheme for the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations. By using triad floating point operations and reducing the number of interprocessor communications, they have achieved a sustained performance rate of 1.42 GFLOPS.

Particle simulation on heterogeneous distributed supercomputers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Becker, Jeffrey C.; Dagum, Leonardo

1993-01-01

We describe the implementation and performance of a three dimensional particle simulation distributed between a Thinking Machines CM-2 and a Cray Y-MP. These are connected by a combination of two high-speed networks: a high-performance parallel interface (HIPPI) and an optical network (UltraNet). This is the first application to use this configuration at NASA Ames Research Center. We describe our experience implementing and using the application and report the results of several timing measurements. We show that the distribution of applications across disparate supercomputing platforms is feasible and has reasonable performance. In addition, several practical aspects of the computing environment are discussed.

Shock waves generated by sudden expansions of a water jet

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Salinas-Vázquez, M.; Echeverría, C.; Porta, D.; Stern, C. E.; Ascanio, G.; Vicente, W.; Aguayo, J. P.

2018-07-01

Direct shadowgraph with parallel light combined with high-speed recording has been used to analyze the water jet of a cutting machine. The use of image processing allowed observing sudden expansions in the jet diameter as well as estimating the jet velocity by means of the Mach angle, obtaining velocities of about 500 m s^{-1}. The technique used here revealed the development of hydrodynamic instabilities in the jet. Additionally, this is the first reporting of the onset of shock waves generated by small fluctuations of a continuous flow of water at high velocity surrounded by air, a result confirmed by a transient computational fluid dynamics simulation.

Hybrid MPI+OpenMP Programming of an Overset CFD Solver and Performance Investigations

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Djomehri, M. Jahed; Jin, Haoqiang H.; Biegel, Bryan (Technical Monitor)

2002-01-01

This report describes a two level parallelization of a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) solver with multi-zone overset structured grids. The approach is based on a hybrid MPI+OpenMP programming model suitable for shared memory and clusters of shared memory machines. The performance investigations of the hybrid application on an SGI Origin2000 (O2K) machine is reported using medium and large scale test problems.

Structure development in melt processing isotactic polypropylene, polypropylene blends/compounds and dynamically vulcanized polyolefin TPEs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yu, Yishan

The influence of various fillers, nucleating agents and ethylene propylene diene terpolymer (EPDM) additive on crystalline modification (alpha-, beta- and smectic forms) and crystalline orientation of polypropylene in die extrudates, melt spun filaments, thick rods, blow molded bottles and injection molded parts of isotactic polypropylene (PP), its blends/compounds and dynamically vulcanized polypropylene thermoplastic elastomers (TPEs) were experimentally studied under a range of cooling and processing conditions. The phenomena of crystallization, polymorphism and orientation in processing of both thin and thick samples (filaments, rods, bottles and injection molded parts) were simulated through transport laws incorporating polymer crystallization kinetics. Continuous cooling transformation (CCT) curves for the various material systems investigated were developed under quiescent and uniaxial stress conditions. We applied experimental data on polymorphism of thin sections to predict crystalline structure variation in thick parts. The predictions were consistent with experiments. For filaments, the polypropylene crystalline orientation-spinline stress relationship is generally similar for the neat PP, blends/compounds and TPEs. However, the blends and TPEs have much lower birefringence apparently due to a lack of orientation in the rubber phase. It was shown that the polypropylene contribution to the birefringence for the neat PP and its blends is the same at the same spinline stress. For bottles, the inflation pressures used have little effect on orientation of either polypropylene crystals or disc-shaped talc filler. The talc discs are highly oriented parallel to the bottle surface. For the bottles without talc, the orientation of polypropylene crystallographic axes are low. The polypropylene crystallographic b-axes in the talc filled bottles are more highly oriented. For injection molded parts, it was found that a low orientation layer exists between the part surface and an intermediate highly oriented layer in the parts of neat PP and its blends/compounds. The thickness of this layer increases as the injection pressure decreases. This layer was not formed in the TPE parts. This would seem to be associated with the TPEs exhibiting a yield stress in shear flow and not exhibiting fountain flow in mold filling. For all parts studied, the orientation characteristics of polypropylene crystallographic axes in the highly oriented layer are similar from sample to sample. The strong orientation of the c-axis parallel to the machine direction and the b-axis perpendicular to the machine direction are observed in the highly oriented layer. The talc discs in both the highly oriented layer and the intermediate position are highly oriented parallel to the part face due to melt flow. At intermediate position in the talc-filled parts, the polypropylene crystallographic (040) planes prefer to align themselves parallel to the part surface but are not so well oriented when the talc is absent.

Integration of Modelling and Graphics to Create an Infrared Signal Processing Test Bed

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sethi, H. R.; Ralph, John E.

1989-03-01

The work reported in this paper was carried out as part of a contract with MoD (PE) UK. It considers the problems associated with realistic modelling of a passive infrared system in an operational environment. Ideally all aspects of the system and environment should be integrated into a complete end-to-end simulation but in the past limited computing power has prevented this. Recent developments in workstation technology and the increasing availability of parallel processing techniques makes the end-to-end simulation possible. However the complexity and speed of such simulations means difficulties for the operator in controlling the software and understanding the results. These difficulties can be greatly reduced by providing an extremely user friendly interface and a very flexible, high power, high resolution colour graphics capability. Most system modelling is based on separate software simulation of the individual components of the system itself and its environment. These component models may have their own characteristic inbuilt assumptions and approximations, may be written in the language favoured by the originator and may have a wide variety of input and output conventions and requirements. The models and their limitations need to be matched to the range of conditions appropriate to the operational scenerio. A comprehensive set of data bases needs to be generated by the component models and these data bases must be made readily available to the investigator. Performance measures need to be defined and displayed in some convenient graphics form. Some options are presented for combining available hardware and software to create an environment within which the models can be integrated, and which provide the required man-machine interface, graphics and computing power. The impact of massively parallel processing and artificial intelligence will be discussed. Parallel processing will make real time end-to-end simulation possible and will greatly improve the graphical visualisation of the model output data. Artificial intelligence should help to enhance the man-machine interface.

Hybrid Optimization Parallel Search PACKage

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

2009-11-10

HOPSPACK is open source software for solving optimization problems without derivatives. Application problems may have a fully nonlinear objective function, bound constraints, and linear and nonlinear constraints. Problem variables may be continuous, integer-valued, or a mixture of both. The software provides a framework that supports any derivative-free type of solver algorithm. Through the framework, solvers request parallel function evaluation, which may use MPI (multiple machines) or multithreading (multiple processors/cores on one machine). The framework provides a Cache and Pending Cache of saved evaluations that reduces execution time and facilitates restarts. Solvers can dynamically create other algorithms to solve subproblems, amore » useful technique for handling multiple start points and integer-valued variables. HOPSPACK ships with the Generating Set Search (GSS) algorithm, developed at Sandia as part of the APPSPACK open source software project.« less

Distributed computing methodology for training neural networks in an image-guided diagnostic application.

PubMed

Plagianakos, V P; Magoulas, G D; Vrahatis, M N

2006-03-01

Distributed computing is a process through which a set of computers connected by a network is used collectively to solve a single problem. In this paper, we propose a distributed computing methodology for training neural networks for the detection of lesions in colonoscopy. Our approach is based on partitioning the training set across multiple processors using a parallel virtual machine. In this way, interconnected computers of varied architectures can be used for the distributed evaluation of the error function and gradient values, and, thus, training neural networks utilizing various learning methods. The proposed methodology has large granularity and low synchronization, and has been implemented and tested. Our results indicate that the parallel virtual machine implementation of the training algorithms developed leads to considerable speedup, especially when large network architectures and training sets are used.

Machine Learning Based Online Performance Prediction for Runtime Parallelization and Task Scheduling

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Li, J; Ma, X; Singh, K

2008-10-09

With the emerging many-core paradigm, parallel programming must extend beyond its traditional realm of scientific applications. Converting existing sequential applications as well as developing next-generation software requires assistance from hardware, compilers and runtime systems to exploit parallelism transparently within applications. These systems must decompose applications into tasks that can be executed in parallel and then schedule those tasks to minimize load imbalance. However, many systems lack a priori knowledge about the execution time of all tasks to perform effective load balancing with low scheduling overhead. In this paper, we approach this fundamental problem using machine learning techniques first to generatemore » performance models for all tasks and then applying those models to perform automatic performance prediction across program executions. We also extend an existing scheduling algorithm to use generated task cost estimates for online task partitioning and scheduling. We implement the above techniques in the pR framework, which transparently parallelizes scripts in the popular R language, and evaluate their performance and overhead with both a real-world application and a large number of synthetic representative test scripts. Our experimental results show that our proposed approach significantly improves task partitioning and scheduling, with maximum improvements of 21.8%, 40.3% and 22.1% and average improvements of 15.9%, 16.9% and 4.2% for LMM (a real R application) and synthetic test cases with independent and dependent tasks, respectively.« less

Full f-p Shell Calculation of {sup 51}Ca and {sup 51}Sc

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Novoselsky, A.; Vallieres, M.; Laadan, O.

The spectra and the electromagnetic transitions of the nuclei {sup 51}Ca and {sup 51}Sc with 11 nucleons in the {ital f-p} shell are described in the nuclear shell-model approach by using two different two-body effective interactions. The full {ital f-p} shell basis functions are used with no truncation. The new parallel shell-model computer code DUPSM (Drexel University parallel shell model), that we recently developed, has been used. The calculations have been done on the MOSIX parallel machine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. {copyright} {ital 1997} {ital The American Physical Society}

An efficient parallel algorithm for the solution of a tridiagonal linear system of equations

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Stone, H. S.

1971-01-01

Tridiagonal linear systems of equations are solved on conventional serial machines in a time proportional to N, where N is the number of equations. The conventional algorithms do not lend themselves directly to parallel computations on computers of the ILLIAC IV class, in the sense that they appear to be inherently serial. An efficient parallel algorithm is presented in which computation time grows as log sub 2 N. The algorithm is based on recursive doubling solutions of linear recurrence relations, and can be used to solve recurrence relations of all orders.

Scalability and Portability of Two Parallel Implementations of ADI

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Phung, Thanh; VanderWijngaart, Rob F.

1994-01-01

Two domain decompositions for the implementation of the NAS Scalar Penta-diagonal Parallel Benchmark on MIMD systems are investigated, namely transposition and multi-partitioning. Hardware platforms considered are the Intel iPSC/860 and Paragon XP/S-15, and clusters of SGI workstations on ethernet, communicating through PVM. It is found that the multi-partitioning strategy offers the kind of coarse granularity that allows scaling up to hundreds of processors on a massively parallel machine. Moreover, efficiency is retained when the code is ported verbatim (save message passing syntax) to a PVM environment on a modest size cluster of workstations.

Design and implementation of a reliable and cost-effective cloud computing infrastructure: the INFN Napoli experience

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Capone, V.; Esposito, R.; Pardi, S.; Taurino, F.; Tortone, G.

2012-12-01

Over the last few years we have seen an increasing number of services and applications needed to manage and maintain cloud computing facilities. This is particularly true for computing in high energy physics, which often requires complex configurations and distributed infrastructures. In this scenario a cost effective rationalization and consolidation strategy is the key to success in terms of scalability and reliability. In this work we describe an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud computing system, with high availability and redundancy features, which is currently in production at INFN-Naples and ATLAS Tier-2 data centre. The main goal we intended to achieve was a simplified method to manage our computing resources and deliver reliable user services, reusing existing hardware without incurring heavy costs. A combined usage of virtualization and clustering technologies allowed us to consolidate our services on a small number of physical machines, reducing electric power costs. As a result of our efforts we developed a complete solution for data and computing centres that can be easily replicated using commodity hardware. Our architecture consists of 2 main subsystems: a clustered storage solution, built on top of disk servers running GlusterFS file system, and a virtual machines execution environment. GlusterFS is a network file system able to perform parallel writes on multiple disk servers, providing this way live replication of data. High availability is also achieved via a network configuration using redundant switches and multiple paths between hypervisor hosts and disk servers. We also developed a set of management scripts to easily perform basic system administration tasks such as automatic deployment of new virtual machines, adaptive scheduling of virtual machines on hypervisor hosts, live migration and automated restart in case of hypervisor failures.

Solving very large, sparse linear systems on mesh-connected parallel computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Opsahl, Torstein; Reif, John

1987-01-01

The implementation of Pan and Reif's Parallel Nested Dissection (PND) algorithm on mesh connected parallel computers is described. This is the first known algorithm that allows very large, sparse linear systems of equations to be solved efficiently in polylog time using a small number of processors. How the processor bound of PND can be matched to the number of processors available on a given parallel computer by slowing down the algorithm by constant factors is described. Also, for the important class of problems where G(A) is a grid graph, a unique memory mapping that reduces the inter-processor communication requirements of PND to those that can be executed on mesh connected parallel machines is detailed. A description of an implementation on the Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor (MPP), located at Goddard is given. Also, a detailed discussion of data mappings and performance issues is given.

JSD: Parallel Job Accounting on the IBM SP2

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Saphir, William; Jones, James Patton; Walter, Howard (Technical Monitor)

1995-01-01

The IBM SP2 is one of the most promising parallel computers for scientific supercomputing - it is fast and usually reliable. One of its biggest problems is a lack of robust and comprehensive system software. Among other things, this software allows a collection of Unix processes to be treated as a single parallel application. It does not, however, provide accounting for parallel jobs other than what is provided by AIX for the individual process components. Without parallel job accounting, it is not possible to monitor system use, measure the effectiveness of system administration strategies, or identify system bottlenecks. To address this problem, we have written jsd, a daemon that collects accounting data for parallel jobs. jsd records information in a format that is easily machine- and human-readable, allowing us to extract the most important accounting information with very little effort. jsd also notifies system administrators in certain cases of system failure.

Linux Kernel Co-Scheduling and Bulk Synchronous Parallelism

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Jones, Terry R

2012-01-01

This paper describes a kernel scheduling algorithm that is based on coscheduling principles and that is intended for parallel applications running on 1000 cores or more. Experimental results for a Linux implementation on a Cray XT5 machine are presented. The results indicate that Linux is a suitable operating system for this new scheduling scheme, and that this design provides a dramatic improvement in scaling performance for synchronizing collective operations at scale.

The force on the flex: Global parallelism and portability

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jordan, H. F.

1986-01-01

A parallel programming methodology, called the force, supports the construction of programs to be executed in parallel by an unspecified, but potentially large, number of processes. The methodology was originally developed on a pipelined, shared memory multiprocessor, the Denelcor HEP, and embodies the primitive operations of the force in a set of macros which expand into multiprocessor Fortran code. A small set of primitives is sufficient to write large parallel programs, and the system has been used to produce 10,000 line programs in computational fluid dynamics. The level of complexity of the force primitives is intermediate. It is high enough to mask detailed architectural differences between multiprocessors but low enough to give the user control over performance. The system is being ported to a medium scale multiprocessor, the Flex/32, which is a 20 processor system with a mixture of shared and local memory. Memory organization and the type of processor synchronization supported by the hardware on the two machines lead to some differences in efficient implementations of the force primitives, but the user interface remains the same. An initial implementation was done by retargeting the macros to Flexible Computer Corporation's ConCurrent C language. Subsequently, the macros were caused to directly produce the system calls which form the basis for ConCurrent C. The implementation of the Fortran based system is in step with Flexible Computer Corporations's implementation of a Fortran system in the parallel environment.

Process for hydraulically mining coal. [28 claims

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Shoji, K.; Sieling, R.E.; Taylor, J.T.

The invention is a method for the hydraulic mining of coal of varying hardness. It is described in particular as to coal of the type occurring in the Balmer seam in British Columbia. By the method at least two parallel spaced entries are driven upward through a seam of coal. Monitors are positioned in each entry. Each monitor is horizontally and vertically pivotable, and has nozzle means from which a jet of water under a pressure of about 1900 to 2200 psi is emitted. The high pressure jet cuts the coal, which is then fed to a machine that breaksmore » and crushes the coal into sizes wherein the resultant coal/water slurry will flow down a sloped flume into a dewatering station. The method further embodies differentially retreating along adjacent parallel entries by increments of desirably at least about 40 feet each. By the different retreat system, as a panel of coal is hydraulically mined in one entry, the monitor and associated equipment in a second adjacent parallel entry are moved back the desired increment to the next working position (retreated). When the panel of coal in the first entry is mined, the monitor is retreated in the same manner and hydraulic mining commences in the second adjacent parallel entry. The operation is thus alternated along the length of the parallel entries. 28 claims, 4 figures.« less

A Parameter Communication Optimization Strategy for Distributed Machine Learning in Sensors

PubMed Central

Zhang, Jilin; Tu, Hangdi; Ren, Yongjian; Wan, Jian; Zhou, Li; Li, Mingwei; Wang, Jue; Yu, Lifeng; Zhao, Chang; Zhang, Lei

2017-01-01

In order to utilize the distributed characteristic of sensors, distributed machine learning has become the mainstream approach, but the different computing capability of sensors and network delays greatly influence the accuracy and the convergence rate of the machine learning model. Our paper describes a reasonable parameter communication optimization strategy to balance the training overhead and the communication overhead. We extend the fault tolerance of iterative-convergent machine learning algorithms and propose the Dynamic Finite Fault Tolerance (DFFT). Based on the DFFT, we implement a parameter communication optimization strategy for distributed machine learning, named Dynamic Synchronous Parallel Strategy (DSP), which uses the performance monitoring model to dynamically adjust the parameter synchronization strategy between worker nodes and the Parameter Server (PS). This strategy makes full use of the computing power of each sensor, ensures the accuracy of the machine learning model, and avoids the situation that the model training is disturbed by any tasks unrelated to the sensors. PMID:28934163

Comparison of the MPP with other supercomputers for LANDSAT data processing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ozga, Martin

1987-01-01

The massively parallel processor is compared to the CRAY X-MP and the CYBER-205 for LANDSAT data processing. The maximum likelihood classification algorithm is the basis for comparison since this algorithm is simple to implement and vectorizes very well. The algorithm was implemented on all three machines and tested by classifying the same full scene of LANDSAT multispectral scan data. Timings are compared as well as features of the machines and available software.

Using the GeoFEST Faulted Region Simulation System

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Parker, Jay W.; Lyzenga, Gregory A.; Donnellan, Andrea; Judd, Michele A.; Norton, Charles D.; Baker, Teresa; Tisdale, Edwin R.; Li, Peggy

2004-01-01

GeoFEST (the Geophysical Finite Element Simulation Tool) simulates stress evolution, fault slip and plastic/elastic processes in realistic materials, and so is suitable for earthquake cycle studies in regions such as Southern California. Many new capabilities and means of access for GeoFEST are now supported. New abilities include MPI-based cluster parallel computing using automatic PYRAMID/Parmetis-based mesh partitioning, automatic mesh generation for layered media with rectangular faults, and results visualization that is integrated with remote sensing data. The parallel GeoFEST application has been successfully run on over a half-dozen computers, including Intel Xeon clusters, Itanium II and Altix machines, and the Apple G5 cluster. It is not separately optimized for different machines, but relies on good domain partitioning for load-balance and low communication, and careful writing of the parallel diagonally preconditioned conjugate gradient solver to keep communication overhead low. Demonstrated thousand-step solutions for over a million finite elements on 64 processors require under three hours, and scaling tests show high efficiency when using more than (order of) 4000 elements per processor. The source code and documentation for GeoFEST is available at no cost from Open Channel Foundation. In addition GeoFEST may be used through a browser-based portal environment available to approved users. That environment includes semi-automated geometry creation and mesh generation tools, GeoFEST, and RIVA-based visualization tools that include the ability to generate a flyover animation showing deformations and topography. Work is in progress to support simulation of a region with several faults using 16 million elements, using a strain energy metric to adapt the mesh to faithfully represent the solution in a region of widely varying strain.

CESDIS

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1994-01-01

CESDIS, the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences was developed jointly by NASA, Universities Space Research Association (USRA), and the University of Maryland in 1988 to focus on the design of advanced computing techniques and data systems to support NASA Earth and space science research programs. CESDIS is operated by USRA under contract to NASA. The Director, Associate Director, Staff Scientists, and administrative staff are located on-site at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The primary CESDIS mission is to increase the connection between computer science and engineering research programs at colleges and universities and NASA groups working with computer applications in Earth and space science. Research areas of primary interest at CESDIS include: 1) High performance computing, especially software design and performance evaluation for massively parallel machines; 2) Parallel input/output and data storage systems for high performance parallel computers; 3) Data base and intelligent data management systems for parallel computers; 4) Image processing; 5) Digital libraries; and 6) Data compression. CESDIS funds multiyear projects at U. S. universities and colleges. Proposals are accepted in response to calls for proposals and are selected on the basis of peer reviews. Funds are provided to support faculty and graduate students working at their home institutions. Project personnel visit Goddard during academic recess periods to attend workshops, present seminars, and collaborate with NASA scientists on research projects. Additionally, CESDIS takes on specific research tasks of shorter duration for computer science research requested by NASA Goddard scientists.

Parallelization of Lower-Upper Symmetric Gauss-Seidel Method for Chemically Reacting Flow

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Yoon, Seokkwan; Jost, Gabriele; Chang, Sherry

2005-01-01

Development of technologies for exploration of the solar system has revived an interest in computational simulation of chemically reacting flows since planetary probe vehicles exhibit non-equilibrium phenomena during the atmospheric entry of a planet or a moon as well as the reentry to the Earth. Stability in combustion is essential for new propulsion systems. Numerical solution of real-gas flows often increases computational work by an order-of-magnitude compared to perfect gas flow partly because of the increased complexity of equations to solve. Recently, as part of Project Columbia, NASA has integrated a cluster of interconnected SGI Altix systems to provide a ten-fold increase in current supercomputing capacity that includes an SGI Origin system. Both the new and existing machines are based on cache coherent non-uniform memory access architecture. Lower-Upper Symmetric Gauss-Seidel (LU-SGS) relaxation method has been implemented into both perfect and real gas flow codes including Real-Gas Aerodynamic Simulator (RGAS). However, the vectorized RGAS code runs inefficiently on cache-based shared-memory machines such as SGI system. Parallelization of a Gauss-Seidel method is nontrivial due to its sequential nature. The LU-SGS method has been vectorized on an oblique plane in INS3D-LU code that has been one of the base codes for NAS Parallel benchmarks. The oblique plane has been called a hyperplane by computer scientists. It is straightforward to parallelize a Gauss-Seidel method by partitioning the hyperplanes once they are formed. Another way of parallelization is to schedule processors like a pipeline using software. Both hyperplane and pipeline methods have been implemented using openMP directives. The present paper reports the performance of the parallelized RGAS code on SGI Origin and Altix systems.

Bioinformatics algorithm based on a parallel implementation of a machine learning approach using transducers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Roche-Lima, Abiel; Thulasiram, Ruppa K.

2012-02-01

Finite automata, in which each transition is augmented with an output label in addition to the familiar input label, are considered finite-state transducers. Transducers have been used to analyze some fundamental issues in bioinformatics. Weighted finite-state transducers have been proposed to pairwise alignments of DNA and protein sequences; as well as to develop kernels for computational biology. Machine learning algorithms for conditional transducers have been implemented and used for DNA sequence analysis. Transducer learning algorithms are based on conditional probability computation. It is calculated by using techniques, such as pair-database creation, normalization (with Maximum-Likelihood normalization) and parameters optimization (with Expectation-Maximization - EM). These techniques are intrinsically costly for computation, even worse when are applied to bioinformatics, because the databases sizes are large. In this work, we describe a parallel implementation of an algorithm to learn conditional transducers using these techniques. The algorithm is oriented to bioinformatics applications, such as alignments, phylogenetic trees, and other genome evolution studies. Indeed, several experiences were developed using the parallel and sequential algorithm on Westgrid (specifically, on the Breeze cluster). As results, we obtain that our parallel algorithm is scalable, because execution times are reduced considerably when the data size parameter is increased. Another experience is developed by changing precision parameter. In this case, we obtain smaller execution times using the parallel algorithm. Finally, number of threads used to execute the parallel algorithm on the Breezy cluster is changed. In this last experience, we obtain as result that speedup is considerably increased when more threads are used; however there is a convergence for number of threads equal to or greater than 16.

Research on B Cell Algorithm for Learning to Rank Method Based on Parallel Strategy.

PubMed

Tian, Yuling; Zhang, Hongxian

2016-01-01

For the purposes of information retrieval, users must find highly relevant documents from within a system (and often a quite large one comprised of many individual documents) based on input query. Ranking the documents according to their relevance within the system to meet user needs is a challenging endeavor, and a hot research topic-there already exist several rank-learning methods based on machine learning techniques which can generate ranking functions automatically. This paper proposes a parallel B cell algorithm, RankBCA, for rank learning which utilizes a clonal selection mechanism based on biological immunity. The novel algorithm is compared with traditional rank-learning algorithms through experimentation and shown to outperform the others in respect to accuracy, learning time, and convergence rate; taken together, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm indeed effectively and rapidly identifies optimal ranking functions.

Research on B Cell Algorithm for Learning to Rank Method Based on Parallel Strategy

PubMed Central

Tian, Yuling; Zhang, Hongxian

2016-01-01

For the purposes of information retrieval, users must find highly relevant documents from within a system (and often a quite large one comprised of many individual documents) based on input query. Ranking the documents according to their relevance within the system to meet user needs is a challenging endeavor, and a hot research topic–there already exist several rank-learning methods based on machine learning techniques which can generate ranking functions automatically. This paper proposes a parallel B cell algorithm, RankBCA, for rank learning which utilizes a clonal selection mechanism based on biological immunity. The novel algorithm is compared with traditional rank-learning algorithms through experimentation and shown to outperform the others in respect to accuracy, learning time, and convergence rate; taken together, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm indeed effectively and rapidly identifies optimal ranking functions. PMID:27487242

Gilgamesh: A Multithreaded Processor-In-Memory Architecture for Petaflops Computing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sterling, T. L.; Zima, H. P.

2002-01-01

Processor-in-Memory (PIM) architectures avoid the von Neumann bottleneck in conventional machines by integrating high-density DRAM and CMOS logic on the same chip. Parallel systems based on this new technology are expected to provide higher scalability, adaptability, robustness, fault tolerance and lower power consumption than current MPPs or commodity clusters. In this paper we describe the design of Gilgamesh, a PIM-based massively parallel architecture, and elements of its execution model. Gilgamesh extends existing PIM capabilities by incorporating advanced mechanisms for virtualizing tasks and data and providing adaptive resource management for load balancing and latency tolerance. The Gilgamesh execution model is based on macroservers, a middleware layer which supports object-based runtime management of data and threads allowing explicit and dynamic control of locality and load balancing. The paper concludes with a discussion of related research activities and an outlook to future work.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Chen, Chao; Pouransari, Hadi; Rajamanickam, Sivasankaran

We present a parallel hierarchical solver for general sparse linear systems on distributed-memory machines. For large-scale problems, this fully algebraic algorithm is faster and more memory-efficient than sparse direct solvers because it exploits the low-rank structure of fill-in blocks. Depending on the accuracy of low-rank approximations, the hierarchical solver can be used either as a direct solver or as a preconditioner. The parallel algorithm is based on data decomposition and requires only local communication for updating boundary data on every processor. Moreover, the computation-to-communication ratio of the parallel algorithm is approximately the volume-to-surface-area ratio of the subdomain owned by everymore » processor. We also provide various numerical results to demonstrate the versatility and scalability of the parallel algorithm.« less

Second International Workshop on Software Engineering and Code Design in Parallel Meteorological and Oceanographic Applications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

OKeefe, Matthew (Editor); Kerr, Christopher L. (Editor)

1998-01-01

This report contains the abstracts and technical papers from the Second International Workshop on Software Engineering and Code Design in Parallel Meteorological and Oceanographic Applications, held June 15-18, 1998, in Scottsdale, Arizona. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together software developers in meteorology and oceanography to discuss software engineering and code design issues for parallel architectures, including Massively Parallel Processors (MPP's), Parallel Vector Processors (PVP's), Symmetric Multi-Processors (SMP's), Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) multi-processors, and clusters. Issues to be discussed include: (1) code architectures for current parallel models, including basic data structures, storage allocation, variable naming conventions, coding rules and styles, i/o and pre/post-processing of data; (2) designing modular code; (3) load balancing and domain decomposition; (4) techniques that exploit parallelism efficiently yet hide the machine-related details from the programmer; (5) tools for making the programmer more productive; and (6) the proliferation of programming models (F--, OpenMP, MPI, and HPF).

Automated Long-Term Monitoring of Parallel Microfluidic Operations Applying a Machine Vision-Assisted Positioning Method

PubMed Central

Yip, Hon Ming; Li, John C. S.; Cui, Xin; Gao, Qiannan; Leung, Chi Chiu

2014-01-01

As microfluidics has been applied extensively in many cell and biochemical applications, monitoring the related processes is an important requirement. In this work, we design and fabricate a high-throughput microfluidic device which contains 32 microchambers to perform automated parallel microfluidic operations and monitoring on an automated stage of a microscope. Images are captured at multiple spots on the device during the operations for monitoring samples in microchambers in parallel; yet the device positions may vary at different time points throughout operations as the device moves back and forth on a motorized microscopic stage. Here, we report an image-based positioning strategy to realign the chamber position before every recording of microscopic image. We fabricate alignment marks at defined locations next to the chambers in the microfluidic device as reference positions. We also develop image processing algorithms to recognize the chamber positions in real-time, followed by realigning the chambers to their preset positions in the captured images. We perform experiments to validate and characterize the device functionality and the automated realignment operation. Together, this microfluidic realignment strategy can be a platform technology to achieve precise positioning of multiple chambers for general microfluidic applications requiring long-term parallel monitoring of cell and biochemical activities. PMID:25133248

MIP models and hybrid algorithms for simultaneous job splitting and scheduling on unrelated parallel machines.

PubMed

Eroglu, Duygu Yilmaz; Ozmutlu, H Cenk

2014-01-01

We developed mixed integer programming (MIP) models and hybrid genetic-local search algorithms for the scheduling problem of unrelated parallel machines with job sequence and machine-dependent setup times and with job splitting property. The first contribution of this paper is to introduce novel algorithms which make splitting and scheduling simultaneously with variable number of subjobs. We proposed simple chromosome structure which is constituted by random key numbers in hybrid genetic-local search algorithm (GAspLA). Random key numbers are used frequently in genetic algorithms, but it creates additional difficulty when hybrid factors in local search are implemented. We developed algorithms that satisfy the adaptation of results of local search into the genetic algorithms with minimum relocation operation of genes' random key numbers. This is the second contribution of the paper. The third contribution of this paper is three developed new MIP models which are making splitting and scheduling simultaneously. The fourth contribution of this paper is implementation of the GAspLAMIP. This implementation let us verify the optimality of GAspLA for the studied combinations. The proposed methods are tested on a set of problems taken from the literature and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Apparatus for precision micromachining with lasers

DOEpatents

Chang, J.J.; Dragon, E.P.; Warner, B.E.

1998-04-28

A new material processing apparatus using a short-pulsed, high-repetition-rate visible laser for precision micromachining utilizes a near diffraction limited laser, a high-speed precision two-axis tilt-mirror for steering the laser beam, an optical system for either focusing or imaging the laser beam on the part, and a part holder that may consist of a cover plate and a back plate. The system is generally useful for precision drilling, cutting, milling and polishing of metals and ceramics, and has broad application in manufacturing precision components. Precision machining has been demonstrated through percussion drilling and trepanning using this system. With a 30 W copper vapor laser running at multi-kHz pulse repetition frequency, straight parallel holes with size varying from 500 microns to less than 25 microns and with aspect ratios up to 1:40 have been consistently drilled with good surface finish on a variety of metals. Micromilling and microdrilling on ceramics using a 250 W copper vapor laser have also been demonstrated with good results. Materialographic sections of machined parts show little (submicron scale) recast layer and heat affected zone. 1 fig.

Apparatus for precision micromachining with lasers

DOEpatents

Chang, Jim J.; Dragon, Ernest P.; Warner, Bruce E.

1998-01-01

A new material processing apparatus using a short-pulsed, high-repetition-rate visible laser for precision micromachining utilizes a near diffraction limited laser, a high-speed precision two-axis tilt-mirror for steering the laser beam, an optical system for either focusing or imaging the laser beam on the part, and a part holder that may consist of a cover plate and a back plate. The system is generally useful for precision drilling, cutting, milling and polishing of metals and ceramics, and has broad application in manufacturing precision components. Precision machining has been demonstrated through percussion drilling and trepanning using this system. With a 30 W copper vapor laser running at multi-kHz pulse repetition frequency, straight parallel holes with size varying from 500 microns to less than 25 microns and with aspect ratios up to 1:40 have been consistently drilled with good surface finish on a variety of metals. Micromilling and microdrilling on ceramics using a 250 W copper vapor laser have also been demonstrated with good results. Materialogroaphic sections of machined parts show little (submicron scale) recast layer and heat affected zone.

A hybrid dynamic harmony search algorithm for identical parallel machines scheduling

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Jing; Pan, Quan-Ke; Wang, Ling; Li, Jun-Qing

2012-02-01

In this article, a dynamic harmony search (DHS) algorithm is proposed for the identical parallel machines scheduling problem with the objective to minimize makespan. First, an encoding scheme based on a list scheduling rule is developed to convert the continuous harmony vectors to discrete job assignments. Second, the whole harmony memory (HM) is divided into multiple small-sized sub-HMs, and each sub-HM performs evolution independently and exchanges information with others periodically by using a regrouping schedule. Third, a novel improvisation process is applied to generate a new harmony by making use of the information of harmony vectors in each sub-HM. Moreover, a local search strategy is presented and incorporated into the DHS algorithm to find promising solutions. Simulation results show that the hybrid DHS (DHS_LS) is very competitive in comparison to its competitors in terms of mean performance and average computational time.

Rock sampling. [method for controlling particle size distribution

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Blum, P. (Inventor)

1971-01-01

A method for sampling rock and other brittle materials and for controlling resultant particle sizes is described. The method involves cutting grooves in the rock surface to provide a grouping of parallel ridges and subsequently machining the ridges to provide a powder specimen. The machining step may comprise milling, drilling, lathe cutting or the like; but a planing step is advantageous. Control of the particle size distribution is effected primarily by changing the height and width of these ridges. This control exceeds that obtainable by conventional grinding.

The effects of co-morbidity in defining major depression subtypes associated with long-term course and severity.

PubMed

Wardenaar, K J; van Loo, H M; Cai, T; Fava, M; Gruber, M J; Li, J; de Jonge, P; Nierenberg, A A; Petukhova, M V; Rose, S; Sampson, N A; Schoevers, R A; Wilcox, M A; Alonso, J; Bromet, E J; Bunting, B; Florescu, S E; Fukao, A; Gureje, O; Hu, C; Huang, Y Q; Karam, A N; Levinson, D; Medina Mora, M E; Posada-Villa, J; Scott, K M; Taib, N I; Viana, M C; Xavier, M; Zarkov, Z; Kessler, R C

2014-11-01

Although variation in the long-term course of major depressive disorder (MDD) is not strongly predicted by existing symptom subtype distinctions, recent research suggests that prediction can be improved by using machine learning methods. However, it is not known whether these distinctions can be refined by added information about co-morbid conditions. The current report presents results on this question. Data came from 8261 respondents with lifetime DSM-IV MDD in the World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health (WMH) Surveys. Outcomes included four retrospectively reported measures of persistence/severity of course (years in episode; years in chronic episodes; hospitalization for MDD; disability due to MDD). Machine learning methods (regression tree analysis; lasso, ridge and elastic net penalized regression) followed by k-means cluster analysis were used to augment previously detected subtypes with information about prior co-morbidity to predict these outcomes. Predicted values were strongly correlated across outcomes. Cluster analysis of predicted values found three clusters with consistently high, intermediate or low values. The high-risk cluster (32.4% of cases) accounted for 56.6-72.9% of high persistence, high chronicity, hospitalization and disability. This high-risk cluster had both higher sensitivity and likelihood ratio positive (LR+; relative proportions of cases in the high-risk cluster versus other clusters having the adverse outcomes) than in a parallel analysis that excluded measures of co-morbidity as predictors. Although the results using the retrospective data reported here suggest that useful MDD subtyping distinctions can be made with machine learning and clustering across multiple indicators of illness persistence/severity, replication with prospective data is needed to confirm this preliminary conclusion.

Automation effects in a stereotypical multiloop manual control system. [for aircraft

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hess, R. A.; Mcnally, B. D.

1984-01-01

The increasing reliance of state-of-the art, high performance aircraft on high authority stability and command augmentation systems, in order to obtain satisfactory performance and handling qualities, has made critical the achievement of a better understanding of human capabilities, limitations, and preferences during interactions with complex dynamic systems that involve task allocation between man and machine. An analytical and experimental study has been undertaken to investigate human interaction with a simple, multiloop dynamic system in which human activity was systematically varied by changing the levels of automation. Task definition has led to a control loop structure which parallels that for any multiloop manual control system, and may therefore be considered a stereotype.

Multiprogramming performance degradation - Case study on a shared memory multiprocessor

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dimpsey, R. T.; Iyer, R. K.

1989-01-01

The performance degradation due to multiprogramming overhead is quantified for a parallel-processing machine. Measurements of real workloads were taken, and it was found that there is a moderate correlation between the completion time of a program and the amount of system overhead measured during program execution. Experiments in controlled environments were then conducted to calculate a lower bound on the performance degradation of parallel jobs caused by multiprogramming overhead. The results show that the multiprogramming overhead of parallel jobs consumes at least 4 percent of the processor time. When two or more serial jobs are introduced into the system, this amount increases to 5.3 percent

Architectural requirements for the Red Storm computing system.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Camp, William J.; Tomkins, James Lee

This report is based on the Statement of Work (SOW) describing the various requirements for delivering 3 new supercomputer system to Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) as part of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program. This system is named Red Storm and will be a distributed memory, massively parallel processor (MPP) machine built primarily out of commodity parts. The requirements presented here distill extensive architectural and design experience accumulated over a decade and a half of research, development and production operation of similar machines at Sandia. Red Storm will have an unusually high bandwidth, low latencymore » interconnect, specially designed hardware and software reliability features, a light weight kernel compute node operating system and the ability to rapidly switch major sections of the machine between classified and unclassified computing environments. Particular attention has been paid to architectural balance in the design of Red Storm, and it is therefore expected to achieve an atypically high fraction of its peak speed of 41 TeraOPS on real scientific computing applications. In addition, Red Storm is designed to be upgradeable to many times this initial peak capability while still retaining appropriate balance in key design dimensions. Installation of the Red Storm computer system at Sandia's New Mexico site is planned for 2004, and it is expected that the system will be operated for a minimum of five years following installation.« less

Image-Based Single Cell Profiling: High-Throughput Processing of Mother Machine Experiments

PubMed Central

Sachs, Christian Carsten; Grünberger, Alexander; Helfrich, Stefan; Probst, Christopher; Wiechert, Wolfgang; Kohlheyer, Dietrich; Nöh, Katharina

2016-01-01

Background Microfluidic lab-on-chip technology combined with live-cell imaging has enabled the observation of single cells in their spatio-temporal context. The mother machine (MM) cultivation system is particularly attractive for the long-term investigation of rod-shaped bacteria since it facilitates continuous cultivation and observation of individual cells over many generations in a highly parallelized manner. To date, the lack of fully automated image analysis software limits the practical applicability of the MM as a phenotypic screening tool. Results We present an image analysis pipeline for the automated processing of MM time lapse image stacks. The pipeline supports all analysis steps, i.e., image registration, orientation correction, channel/cell detection, cell tracking, and result visualization. Tailored algorithms account for the specialized MM layout to enable a robust automated analysis. Image data generated in a two-day growth study (≈ 90 GB) is analyzed in ≈ 30 min with negligible differences in growth rate between automated and manual evaluation quality. The proposed methods are implemented in the software molyso (MOther machine AnaLYsis SOftware) that provides a new profiling tool to analyze unbiasedly hitherto inaccessible large-scale MM image stacks. Conclusion Presented is the software molyso, a ready-to-use open source software (BSD-licensed) for the unsupervised analysis of MM time-lapse image stacks. molyso source code and user manual are available at https://github.com/modsim/molyso. PMID:27661996

Using the Statecharts paradigm for simulation of patient flow in surgical care.

PubMed

Sobolev, Boris; Harel, David; Vasilakis, Christos; Levy, Adrian

2008-03-01

Computer simulation of patient flow has been used extensively to assess the impacts of changes in the management of surgical care. However, little research is available on the utility of existing modeling techniques. The purpose of this paper is to examine the capacity of Statecharts, a system of graphical specification, for constructing a discrete-event simulation model of the perioperative process. The Statecharts specification paradigm was originally developed for representing reactive systems by extending the formalism of finite-state machines through notions of hierarchy, parallelism, and event broadcasting. Hierarchy permits subordination between states so that one state may contain other states. Parallelism permits more than one state to be active at any given time. Broadcasting of events allows one state to detect changes in another state. In the context of the peri-operative process, hierarchy provides the means to describe steps within activities and to cluster related activities, parallelism provides the means to specify concurrent activities, and event broadcasting provides the means to trigger a series of actions in one activity according to transitions that occur in another activity. Combined with hierarchy and parallelism, event broadcasting offers a convenient way to describe the interaction of concurrent activities. We applied the Statecharts formalism to describe the progress of individual patients through surgical care as a series of asynchronous updates in patient records generated in reaction to events produced by parallel finite-state machines representing concurrent clinical and managerial activities. We conclude that Statecharts capture successfully the behavioral aspects of surgical care delivery by specifying permissible chronology of events, conditions, and actions.

Parallel Algorithm for GPU Processing; for use in High Speed Machine Vision Sensing of Cotton Lint Trash.

PubMed

Pelletier, Mathew G

2008-02-08

One of the main hurdles standing in the way of optimal cleaning of cotton lint isthe lack of sensing systems that can react fast enough to provide the control system withreal-time information as to the level of trash contamination of the cotton lint. This researchexamines the use of programmable graphic processing units (GPU) as an alternative to thePC's traditional use of the central processing unit (CPU). The use of the GPU, as analternative computation platform, allowed for the machine vision system to gain asignificant improvement in processing time. By improving the processing time, thisresearch seeks to address the lack of availability of rapid trash sensing systems and thusalleviate a situation in which the current systems view the cotton lint either well before, orafter, the cotton is cleaned. This extended lag/lead time that is currently imposed on thecotton trash cleaning control systems, is what is responsible for system operators utilizing avery large dead-band safety buffer in order to ensure that the cotton lint is not undercleaned.Unfortunately, the utilization of a large dead-band buffer results in the majority ofthe cotton lint being over-cleaned which in turn causes lint fiber-damage as well assignificant losses of the valuable lint due to the excessive use of cleaning machinery. Thisresearch estimates that upwards of a 30% reduction in lint loss could be gained through theuse of a tightly coupled trash sensor to the cleaning machinery control systems. Thisresearch seeks to improve processing times through the development of a new algorithm forcotton trash sensing that allows for implementation on a highly parallel architecture.Additionally, by moving the new parallel algorithm onto an alternative computing platform,the graphic processing unit "GPU", for processing of the cotton trash images, a speed up ofover 6.5 times, over optimized code running on the PC's central processing unit "CPU", wasgained. The new parallel algorithm operating on the GPU was able to process a 1024x1024image in less than 17ms. At this improved speed, the image processing system's performance should now be sufficient to provide a system that would be capable of realtimefeed-back control that is in tight cooperation with the cleaning equipment.

Parallel-Batch Scheduling and Transportation Coordination with Waiting Time Constraint

PubMed Central

Gong, Hua; Chen, Daheng; Xu, Ke

2014-01-01

This paper addresses a parallel-batch scheduling problem that incorporates transportation of raw materials or semifinished products before processing with waiting time constraint. The orders located at the different suppliers are transported by some vehicles to a manufacturing facility for further processing. One vehicle can load only one order in one shipment. Each order arriving at the facility must be processed in the limited waiting time. The orders are processed in batches on a parallel-batch machine, where a batch contains several orders and the processing time of the batch is the largest processing time of the orders in it. The goal is to find a schedule to minimize the sum of the total flow time and the production cost. We prove that the general problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. We also demonstrate that the problem with equal processing times on the machine is NP-hard. Furthermore, a dynamic programming algorithm in pseudopolynomial time is provided to prove its ordinarily NP-hardness. An optimal algorithm in polynomial time is presented to solve a special case with equal processing times and equal transportation times for each order. PMID:24883385

Massively Multithreaded Maxflow for Image Segmentation on the Cray XMT-2

PubMed Central

Bokhari, Shahid H.; Çatalyürek, Ümit V.; Gurcan, Metin N.

2014-01-01

SUMMARY Image segmentation is a very important step in the computerized analysis of digital images. The maxflow mincut approach has been successfully used to obtain minimum energy segmentations of images in many fields. Classical algorithms for maxflow in networks do not directly lend themselves to efficient parallel implementations on contemporary parallel processors. We present the results of an implementation of Goldberg-Tarjan preflow-push algorithm on the Cray XMT-2 massively multithreaded supercomputer. This machine has hardware support for 128 threads in each physical processor, a uniformly accessible shared memory of up to 4 TB and hardware synchronization for each 64 bit word. It is thus well-suited to the parallelization of graph theoretic algorithms, such as preflow-push. We describe the implementation of the preflow-push code on the XMT-2 and present the results of timing experiments on a series of synthetically generated as well as real images. Our results indicate very good performance on large images and pave the way for practical applications of this machine architecture for image analysis in a production setting. The largest images we have run are 320002 pixels in size, which are well beyond the largest previously reported in the literature. PMID:25598745

Overview and extensions of a system for routing directed graphs on SIMD architectures

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Tomboulian, Sherryl

1988-01-01

Many problems can be described in terms of directed graphs that contain a large number of vertices where simple computations occur using data from adjacent vertices. A method is given for parallelizing such problems on an SIMD machine model that uses only nearest neighbor connections for communication, and has no facility for local indirect addressing. Each vertex of the graph will be assigned to a processor in the machine. Rules for a labeling are introduced that support the use of a simple algorithm for movement of data along the edges of the graph. Additional algorithms are defined for addition and deletion of edges. Modifying or adding a new edge takes the same time as parallel traversal. This combination of architecture and algorithms defines a system that is relatively simple to build and can do fast graph processing. All edges can be traversed in parallel in time O(T), where T is empirically proportional to the average path length in the embedding times the average degree of the graph. Additionally, researchers present an extension to the above method which allows for enhanced performance by allowing some broadcasting capabilities.

Aerodynamic simulation on massively parallel systems

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Haeuser, Jochem; Simon, Horst D.

1992-01-01

This paper briefly addresses the computational requirements for the analysis of complete configurations of aircraft and spacecraft currently under design to be used for advanced transportation in commercial applications as well as in space flight. The discussion clearly shows that massively parallel systems are the only alternative which is both cost effective and on the other hand can provide the necessary TeraFlops, needed to satisfy the narrow design margins of modern vehicles. It is assumed that the solution of the governing physical equations, i.e., the Navier-Stokes equations which may be complemented by chemistry and turbulence models, is done on multiblock grids. This technique is situated between the fully structured approach of classical boundary fitted grids and the fully unstructured tetrahedra grids. A fully structured grid best represents the flow physics, while the unstructured grid gives best geometrical flexibility. The multiblock grid employed is structured within a block, but completely unstructured on the block level. While a completely unstructured grid is not straightforward to parallelize, the above mentioned multiblock grid is inherently parallel, in particular for multiple instruction multiple datastream (MIMD) machines. In this paper guidelines are provided for setting up or modifying an existing sequential code so that a direct parallelization on a massively parallel system is possible. Results are presented for three parallel systems, namely the Intel hypercube, the Ncube hypercube, and the FPS 500 system. Some preliminary results for an 8K CM2 machine will also be mentioned. The code run is the two dimensional grid generation module of Grid, which is a general two dimensional and three dimensional grid generation code for complex geometries. A system of nonlinear Poisson equations is solved. This code is also a good testcase for complex fluid dynamics codes, since the same datastructures are used. All systems provided good speedups, but message passing MIMD systems seem to be best suited for large miltiblock applications.

Research on computer systems benchmarking

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Smith, Alan Jay (Principal Investigator)

1996-01-01

This grant addresses the topic of research on computer systems benchmarking and is more generally concerned with performance issues in computer systems. This report reviews work in those areas during the period of NASA support under this grant. The bulk of the work performed concerned benchmarking and analysis of CPUs, compilers, caches, and benchmark programs. The first part of this work concerned the issue of benchmark performance prediction. A new approach to benchmarking and machine characterization was reported, using a machine characterizer that measures the performance of a given system in terms of a Fortran abstract machine. Another report focused on analyzing compiler performance. The performance impact of optimization in the context of our methodology for CPU performance characterization was based on the abstract machine model. Benchmark programs are analyzed in another paper. A machine-independent model of program execution was developed to characterize both machine performance and program execution. By merging these machine and program characterizations, execution time can be estimated for arbitrary machine/program combinations. The work was continued into the domain of parallel and vector machines, including the issue of caches in vector processors and multiprocessors. All of the afore-mentioned accomplishments are more specifically summarized in this report, as well as those smaller in magnitude supported by this grant.

Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications, part 1

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Denton, Judith S. (Compiler); Freeman, Michael S. (Compiler); Vereen, Mary (Compiler)

1987-01-01

The application of artificial intelligence to spacecraft and aerospace systems is discussed. Expert systems, robotics, space station automation, fault diagnostics, parallel processing, knowledge representation, scheduling, man-machine interfaces and neural nets are among the topics discussed.

Hierarchical Parallelization of Gene Differential Association Analysis

PubMed Central

2011-01-01

Background Microarray gene differential expression analysis is a widely used technique that deals with high dimensional data and is computationally intensive for permutation-based procedures. Microarray gene differential association analysis is even more computationally demanding and must take advantage of multicore computing technology, which is the driving force behind increasing compute power in recent years. In this paper, we present a two-layer hierarchical parallel implementation of gene differential association analysis. It takes advantage of both fine- and coarse-grain (with granularity defined by the frequency of communication) parallelism in order to effectively leverage the non-uniform nature of parallel processing available in the cutting-edge systems of today. Results Our results show that this hierarchical strategy matches data sharing behavior to the properties of the underlying hardware, thereby reducing the memory and bandwidth needs of the application. The resulting improved efficiency reduces computation time and allows the gene differential association analysis code to scale its execution with the number of processors. The code and biological data used in this study are downloadable from http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/biostat/people/faculty/hu.cfm. Conclusions The performance sweet spot occurs when using a number of threads per MPI process that allows the working sets of the corresponding MPI processes running on the multicore to fit within the machine cache. Hence, we suggest that practitioners follow this principle in selecting the appropriate number of MPI processes and threads within each MPI process for their cluster configurations. We believe that the principles of this hierarchical approach to parallelization can be utilized in the parallelization of other computationally demanding kernels. PMID:21936916

Hierarchical parallelization of gene differential association analysis.

PubMed

Needham, Mark; Hu, Rui; Dwarkadas, Sandhya; Qiu, Xing

2011-09-21

Microarray gene differential expression analysis is a widely used technique that deals with high dimensional data and is computationally intensive for permutation-based procedures. Microarray gene differential association analysis is even more computationally demanding and must take advantage of multicore computing technology, which is the driving force behind increasing compute power in recent years. In this paper, we present a two-layer hierarchical parallel implementation of gene differential association analysis. It takes advantage of both fine- and coarse-grain (with granularity defined by the frequency of communication) parallelism in order to effectively leverage the non-uniform nature of parallel processing available in the cutting-edge systems of today. Our results show that this hierarchical strategy matches data sharing behavior to the properties of the underlying hardware, thereby reducing the memory and bandwidth needs of the application. The resulting improved efficiency reduces computation time and allows the gene differential association analysis code to scale its execution with the number of processors. The code and biological data used in this study are downloadable from http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/biostat/people/faculty/hu.cfm. The performance sweet spot occurs when using a number of threads per MPI process that allows the working sets of the corresponding MPI processes running on the multicore to fit within the machine cache. Hence, we suggest that practitioners follow this principle in selecting the appropriate number of MPI processes and threads within each MPI process for their cluster configurations. We believe that the principles of this hierarchical approach to parallelization can be utilized in the parallelization of other computationally demanding kernels.

Segmentation of remotely sensed data using parallel region growing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Tilton, J. C.; Cox, S. C.

1983-01-01

The improved spatial resolution of the new earth resources satellites will increase the need for effective utilization of spatial information in machine processing of remotely sensed data. One promising technique is scene segmentation by region growing. Region growing can use spatial information in two ways: only spatially adjacent regions merge together, and merging criteria can be based on region-wide spatial features. A simple region growing approach is described in which the similarity criterion is based on region mean and variance (a simple spatial feature). An effective way to implement region growing for remote sensing is as an iterative parallel process on a large parallel processor. A straightforward parallel pixel-based implementation of the algorithm is explored and its efficiency is compared with sequential pixel-based, sequential region-based, and parallel region-based implementations. Experimental results from on aircraft scanner data set are presented, as is a discussioon of proposed improvements to the segmentation algorithm.

Parallel, Asynchronous Executive (PAX): System concepts, facilities, and architecture

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jones, W. H.

1983-01-01

The Parallel, Asynchronous Executive (PAX) is a software operating system simulation that allows many computers to work on a single problem at the same time. PAX is currently implemented on a UNIVAC 1100/42 computer system. Independent UNIVAC runstreams are used to simulate independent computers. Data are shared among independent UNIVAC runstreams through shared mass-storage files. PAX has achieved the following: (1) applied several computing processes simultaneously to a single, logically unified problem; (2) resolved most parallel processor conflicts by careful work assignment; (3) resolved by means of worker requests to PAX all conflicts not resolved by work assignment; (4) provided fault isolation and recovery mechanisms to meet the problems of an actual parallel, asynchronous processing machine. Additionally, one real-life problem has been constructed for the PAX environment. This is CASPER, a collection of aerodynamic and structural dynamic problem simulation routines. CASPER is not discussed in this report except to provide examples of parallel-processing techniques.

Evaluation of Cache-based Superscalar and Cacheless Vector Architectures for Scientific Computations

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Oliker, Leonid; Carter, Jonathan; Shalf, John; Skinner, David; Ethier, Stephane; Biswas, Rupak; Djomehri, Jahed; VanderWijngaart, Rob

2003-01-01

The growing gap between sustained and peak performance for scientific applications has become a well-known problem in high performance computing. The recent development of parallel vector systems offers the potential to bridge this gap for a significant number of computational science codes and deliver a substantial increase in computing capabilities. This paper examines the intranode performance of the NEC SX6 vector processor and the cache-based IBM Power3/4 superscalar architectures across a number of key scientific computing areas. First, we present the performance of a microbenchmark suite that examines a full spectrum of low-level machine characteristics. Next, we study the behavior of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks using some simple optimizations. Finally, we evaluate the perfor- mance of several numerical codes from key scientific computing domains. Overall results demonstrate that the SX6 achieves high performance on a large fraction of our application suite and in many cases significantly outperforms the RISC-based architectures. However, certain classes of applications are not easily amenable to vectorization and would likely require extensive reengineering of both algorithm and implementation to utilize the SX6 effectively.

Parallel grid generation algorithm for distributed memory computers

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Moitra, Stuti; Moitra, Anutosh

1994-01-01

A parallel grid-generation algorithm and its implementation on the Intel iPSC/860 computer are described. The grid-generation scheme is based on an algebraic formulation of homotopic relations. Methods for utilizing the inherent parallelism of the grid-generation scheme are described, and implementation of multiple levELs of parallelism on multiple instruction multiple data machines are indicated. The algorithm is capable of providing near orthogonality and spacing control at solid boundaries while requiring minimal interprocessor communications. Results obtained on the Intel hypercube for a blended wing-body configuration are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. Fortran implementations bAsed on the native programming model of the iPSC/860 computer and the Express system of software tools are reported. Computational gains in execution time speed-up ratios are given.

Distributed and parallel approach for handle and perform huge datasets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Konopko, Joanna

2015-12-01

Big Data refers to the dynamic, large and disparate volumes of data comes from many different sources (tools, machines, sensors, mobile devices) uncorrelated with each others. It requires new, innovative and scalable technology to collect, host and analytically process the vast amount of data. Proper architecture of the system that perform huge data sets is needed. In this paper, the comparison of distributed and parallel system architecture is presented on the example of MapReduce (MR) Hadoop platform and parallel database platform (DBMS). This paper also analyzes the problem of performing and handling valuable information from petabytes of data. The both paradigms: MapReduce and parallel DBMS are described and compared. The hybrid architecture approach is also proposed and could be used to solve the analyzed problem of storing and processing Big Data.

Distributed intelligence for supervisory control

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wolfe, W. J.; Raney, S. D.

1987-01-01

Supervisory control systems must deal with various types of intelligence distributed throughout the layers of control. Typical layers are real-time servo control, off-line planning and reasoning subsystems and finally, the human operator. Design methodologies must account for the fact that the majority of the intelligence will reside with the human operator. Hierarchical decompositions and feedback loops as conceptual building blocks that provide a common ground for man-machine interaction are discussed. Examples of types of parallelism and parallel implementation on several classes of computer architecture are also discussed.

Proof of Concept for the Rewrite Rule Machine: Interensemble Studies

DTIC Science & Technology

1994-02-23

34 -,,, S2 •fbo fibo 0 1 Figure 1: Concurrent Rewriting of Fibonacci Expressions exploit a problem’s parallelism at several levels. We call this...property multigrain concurrency; it makes the RRM very well suited for solving not only homogeneous problems, but also complex, locally homogeneous but...interprocessor message passing over a network-is not well suited to data parallelism. A key goal of the RRM is to combine the best of these two approaches in a

Linux Kernel Co-Scheduling For Bulk Synchronous Parallel Applications

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Jones, Terry R

2011-01-01

This paper describes a kernel scheduling algorithm that is based on co-scheduling principles and that is intended for parallel applications running on 1000 cores or more where inter-node scalability is key. Experimental results for a Linux implementation on a Cray XT5 machine are presented.1 The results indicate that Linux is a suitable operating system for this new scheduling scheme, and that this design provides a dramatic improvement in scaling performance for synchronizing collective operations at scale.

A heuristic for suffix solutions

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Bilgory, A.; Gajski, D.D.

1986-01-01

The suffix problem has appeared in solutions of recurrence systems for parallel and pipelined machines and more recently in the design of gate and silicon compilers. In this paper the authors present two algorithms. The first algorithm generates parallel suffix solutions with minimum cost for a given length, time delay, availability of initial values, and fanout. This algorithm generates a minimal solution for any length n and depth range log/sub 2/ N to N. The second algorithm reduces the size of the solutions generated by the first algorithm.

VLSI-based video event triggering for image data compression

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Williams, Glenn L.

1994-02-01

Long-duration, on-orbit microgravity experiments require a combination of high resolution and high frame rate video data acquisition. The digitized high-rate video stream presents a difficult data storage problem. Data produced at rates of several hundred million bytes per second may require a total mission video data storage requirement exceeding one terabyte. A NASA-designed, VLSI-based, highly parallel digital state machine generates a digital trigger signal at the onset of a video event. High capacity random access memory storage coupled with newly available fuzzy logic devices permits the monitoring of a video image stream for long term (DC-like) or short term (AC-like) changes caused by spatial translation, dilation, appearance, disappearance, or color change in a video object. Pre-trigger and post-trigger storage techniques are then adaptable to archiving only the significant video images.

VLSI-based Video Event Triggering for Image Data Compression

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Williams, Glenn L.

1994-01-01

Long-duration, on-orbit microgravity experiments require a combination of high resolution and high frame rate video data acquisition. The digitized high-rate video stream presents a difficult data storage problem. Data produced at rates of several hundred million bytes per second may require a total mission video data storage requirement exceeding one terabyte. A NASA-designed, VLSI-based, highly parallel digital state machine generates a digital trigger signal at the onset of a video event. High capacity random access memory storage coupled with newly available fuzzy logic devices permits the monitoring of a video image stream for long term (DC-like) or short term (AC-like) changes caused by spatial translation, dilation, appearance, disappearance, or color change in a video object. Pre-trigger and post-trigger storage techniques are then adaptable to archiving only the significant video images.

Automated solar module assembly line

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bycer, M.

1980-01-01

The solar module assembly machine which Kulicke and Soffa delivered under this contract is a cell tabbing and stringing machine, and capable of handling a variety of cells and assembling strings up to 4 feet long which then can be placed into a module array up to 2 feet by 4 feet in a series of parallel arrangement, and in a straight or interdigitated array format. The machine cycle is 5 seconds per solar cell. This machine is primarily adapted to 3 inch diameter round cells with two tabs between cells. Pulsed heat is used as the bond technique for solar cell interconnects. The solar module assembly machine unloads solar cells from a cassette, automatically orients them, applies flux and solders interconnect ribbons onto the cells. It then inverts the tabbed cells, connects them into cell strings, and delivers them into a module array format using a track mounted vacuum lance, from which they are taken to test and cleaning benches prior to final encapsulation into finished solar modules. Throughout the machine the solar cell is handled very carefully, and any contact with the collector side of the cell is avoided or minimized.

Human settlement history between Sunda and Sahul: a focus on East Timor (Timor-Leste) and the Pleistocenic mtDNA diversity.

PubMed

Gomes, Sibylle M; Bodner, Martin; Souto, Luis; Zimmermann, Bettina; Huber, Gabriela; Strobl, Christina; Röck, Alexander W; Achilli, Alessandro; Olivieri, Anna; Torroni, Antonio; Côrte-Real, Francisco; Parson, Walther

2015-02-14

Distinct, partly competing, "waves" have been proposed to explain human migration in(to) today's Island Southeast Asia and Australia based on genetic (and other) evidence. The paucity of high quality and high resolution data has impeded insights so far. In this study, one of the first in a forensic environment, we used the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGM) for generating complete mitogenome sequences via stand-alone massively parallel sequencing and describe a standard data validation practice. In this first representative investigation on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation of East Timor (Timor-Leste) population including >300 individuals, we put special emphasis on the reconstruction of the initial settlement, in particular on the previously poorly resolved haplogroup P1, an indigenous lineage of the Southwest Pacific region. Our results suggest a colonization of southern Sahul (Australia) >37 kya, limited subsequent exchange, and a parallel incubation of initial settlers in northern Sahul (New Guinea) followed by westward migrations <28 kya. The temporal proximity and possible coincidence of these latter dispersals, which encompassed autochthonous haplogroups, with the postulated "later" events of (South) East Asian origin pinpoints a highly dynamic migratory phase.

Massively parallel implementation of 3D-RISM calculation with volumetric 3D-FFT.

PubMed

Maruyama, Yutaka; Yoshida, Norio; Tadano, Hiroto; Takahashi, Daisuke; Sato, Mitsuhisa; Hirata, Fumio

2014-07-05

A new three-dimensional reference interaction site model (3D-RISM) program for massively parallel machines combined with the volumetric 3D fast Fourier transform (3D-FFT) was developed, and tested on the RIKEN K supercomputer. The ordinary parallel 3D-RISM program has a limitation on the number of parallelizations because of the limitations of the slab-type 3D-FFT. The volumetric 3D-FFT relieves this limitation drastically. We tested the 3D-RISM calculation on the large and fine calculation cell (2048(3) grid points) on 16,384 nodes, each having eight CPU cores. The new 3D-RISM program achieved excellent scalability to the parallelization, running on the RIKEN K supercomputer. As a benchmark application, we employed the program, combined with molecular dynamics simulation, to analyze the oligomerization process of chymotrypsin Inhibitor 2 mutant. The results demonstrate that the massive parallel 3D-RISM program is effective to analyze the hydration properties of the large biomolecular systems. Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Halvade-RNA: Parallel variant calling from transcriptomic data using MapReduce.

PubMed

Decap, Dries; Reumers, Joke; Herzeel, Charlotte; Costanza, Pascal; Fostier, Jan

2017-01-01

Given the current cost-effectiveness of next-generation sequencing, the amount of DNA-seq and RNA-seq data generated is ever increasing. One of the primary objectives of NGS experiments is calling genetic variants. While highly accurate, most variant calling pipelines are not optimized to run efficiently on large data sets. However, as variant calling in genomic data has become common practice, several methods have been proposed to reduce runtime for DNA-seq analysis through the use of parallel computing. Determining the effectively expressed variants from transcriptomics (RNA-seq) data has only recently become possible, and as such does not yet benefit from efficiently parallelized workflows. We introduce Halvade-RNA, a parallel, multi-node RNA-seq variant calling pipeline based on the GATK Best Practices recommendations. Halvade-RNA makes use of the MapReduce programming model to create and manage parallel data streams on which multiple instances of existing tools such as STAR and GATK operate concurrently. Whereas the single-threaded processing of a typical RNA-seq sample requires ∼28h, Halvade-RNA reduces this runtime to ∼2h using a small cluster with two 20-core machines. Even on a single, multi-core workstation, Halvade-RNA can significantly reduce runtime compared to using multi-threading, thus providing for a more cost-effective processing of RNA-seq data. Halvade-RNA is written in Java and uses the Hadoop MapReduce 2.0 API. It supports a wide range of distributions of Hadoop, including Cloudera and Amazon EMR.

Heuristic for Critical Machine Based a Lot Streaming for Two-Stage Hybrid Production Environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vivek, P.; Saravanan, R.; Chandrasekaran, M.; Pugazhenthi, R.

2017-03-01

Lot streaming in Hybrid flowshop [HFS] is encountered in many real world problems. This paper deals with a heuristic approach for Lot streaming based on critical machine consideration for a two stage Hybrid Flowshop. The first stage has two identical parallel machines and the second stage has only one machine. In the second stage machine is considered as a critical by valid reasons these kind of problems is known as NP hard. A mathematical model developed for the selected problem. The simulation modelling and analysis were carried out in Extend V6 software. The heuristic developed for obtaining optimal lot streaming schedule. The eleven cases of lot streaming were considered. The proposed heuristic was verified and validated by real time simulation experiments. All possible lot streaming strategies and possible sequence under each lot streaming strategy were simulated and examined. The heuristic consistently yielded optimal schedule consistently in all eleven cases. The identification procedure for select best lot streaming strategy was suggested.

Performance Comparison of HPF and MPI Based NAS Parallel Benchmarks

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Saini, Subhash

1997-01-01

Compilers supporting High Performance Form (HPF) features first appeared in late 1994 and early 1995 from Applied Parallel Research (APR), Digital Equipment Corporation, and The Portland Group (PGI). IBM introduced an HPF compiler for the IBM RS/6000 SP2 in April of 1996. Over the past two years, these implementations have shown steady improvement in terms of both features and performance. The performance of various hardware/ programming model (HPF and MPI) combinations will be compared, based on latest NAS Parallel Benchmark results, thus providing a cross-machine and cross-model comparison. Specifically, HPF based NPB results will be compared with MPI based NPB results to provide perspective on performance currently obtainable using HPF versus MPI or versus hand-tuned implementations such as those supplied by the hardware vendors. In addition, we would also present NPB, (Version 1.0) performance results for the following systems: DEC Alpha Server 8400 5/440, Fujitsu CAPP Series (VX, VPP300, and VPP700), HP/Convex Exemplar SPP2000, IBM RS/6000 SP P2SC node (120 MHz), NEC SX-4/32, SGI/CRAY T3E, and SGI Origin2000. We would also present sustained performance per dollar for Class B LU, SP and BT benchmarks.

KNBD: A Remote Kernel Block Server for Linux

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Becker, Jeff

1999-01-01

I am developing a prototype of a Linux remote disk block server whose purpose is to serve as a lower level component of a parallel file system. Parallel file systems are an important component of high performance supercomputers and clusters. Although supercomputer vendors such as SGI and IBM have their own custom solutions, there has been a void and hence a demand for such a system on Beowulf-type PC Clusters. Recently, the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS) project at Clemson University has begun to address this need (1). Although their system provides much of the functionality of (and indeed was inspired by) the equivalent file systems in the commercial supercomputer market, their system is all in user-space. Migrating their 10 services to the kernel could provide a performance boost, by obviating the need for expensive system calls. Thanks to Pavel Machek, the Linux kernel has provided the network block device (2) with kernels 2.1.101 and later. You can configure this block device to redirect reads and writes to a remote machine's disk. This can be used as a building block for constructing a striped file system across several nodes.

Finite element computation on nearest neighbor connected machines

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mcaulay, A. D.

1984-01-01

Research aimed at faster, more cost effective parallel machines and algorithms for improving designer productivity with finite element computations is discussed. A set of 8 boards, containing 4 nearest neighbor connected arrays of commercially available floating point chips and substantial memory, are inserted into a commercially available machine. One-tenth Mflop (64 bit operation) processors provide an 89% efficiency when solving the equations arising in a finite element problem for a single variable regular grid of size 40 by 40 by 40. This is approximately 15 to 20 times faster than a much more expensive machine such as a VAX 11/780 used in double precision. The efficiency falls off as faster or more processors are envisaged because communication times become dominant. A novel successive overrelaxation algorithm which uses cyclic reduction in order to permit data transfer and computation to overlap in time is proposed.

Position error compensation via a variable reluctance sensor applied to a Hybrid Vehicle Electric machine.

PubMed

Bucak, Ihsan Ömür

2010-01-01

In the automotive industry, electromagnetic variable reluctance (VR) sensors have been extensively used to measure engine position and speed through a toothed wheel mounted on the crankshaft. In this work, an application that already uses the VR sensing unit for engine and/or transmission has been chosen to infer, this time, the indirect position of the electric machine in a parallel Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) system. A VR sensor has been chosen to correct the position of the electric machine, mainly because it may still become critical in the operation of HEVs to avoid possible vehicle failures during the start-up and on-the-road, especially when the machine is used with an internal combustion engine. The proposed method uses Chi-square test and is adaptive in a sense that it derives the compensation factors during the shaft operation and updates them in a timely fashion.

Position Error Compensation via a Variable Reluctance Sensor Applied to a Hybrid Vehicle Electric Machine

PubMed Central

Bucak, İhsan Ömür

2010-01-01

In the automotive industry, electromagnetic variable reluctance (VR) sensors have been extensively used to measure engine position and speed through a toothed wheel mounted on the crankshaft. In this work, an application that already uses the VR sensing unit for engine and/or transmission has been chosen to infer, this time, the indirect position of the electric machine in a parallel Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) system. A VR sensor has been chosen to correct the position of the electric machine, mainly because it may still become critical in the operation of HEVs to avoid possible vehicle failures during the start-up and on-the-road, especially when the machine is used with an internal combustion engine. The proposed method uses Chi-square test and is adaptive in a sense that it derives the compensation factors during the shaft operation and updates them in a timely fashion. PMID:22294906

Machine Learning Toolkit for Extreme Scale

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

2014-03-31

Support Vector Machines (SVM) is a popular machine learning technique, which has been applied to a wide range of domains such as science, finance, and social networks for supervised learning. MaTEx undertakes the challenge of designing a scalable parallel SVM training algorithm for large scale systems, which includes commodity multi-core machines, tightly connected supercomputers and cloud computing systems. Several techniques are proposed for improved speed and memory space usage including adaptive and aggressive elimination of samples for faster convergence , and sparse format representation of data samples. Several heuristics for earliest possible to lazy elimination of non-contributing samples are consideredmore » in MaTEx. In many cases, where an early sample elimination might result in a false positive, low overhead mechanisms for reconstruction of key data structures are proposed. The proposed algorithm and heuristics are implemented and evaluated on various publicly available datasets« less

Using PVM to host CLIPS in distributed environments

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Myers, Leonard; Pohl, Kym

1994-01-01

It is relatively easy to enhance CLIPS (C Language Integrated Production System) to support multiple expert systems running in a distributed environment with heterogeneous machines. The task is minimized by using the PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) code from Oak Ridge Labs to provide the distributed utility. PVM is a library of C and FORTRAN subprograms that supports distributive computing on many different UNIX platforms. A PVM deamon is easily installed on each CPU that enters the virtual machine environment. Any user with rsh or rexec access to a machine can use the one PVM deamon to obtain a generous set of distributed facilities. The ready availability of both CLIPS and PVM makes the combination of software particularly attractive for budget conscious experimentation of heterogeneous distributive computing with multiple CLIPS executables. This paper presents a design that is sufficient to provide essential message passing functions in CLIPS and enable the full range of PVM facilities.

Biomorphic architectures for autonomous Nanosat designs

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hasslacher, Brosl; Tilden, Mark W.

1995-01-01

Modern space tool design is the science of making a machine both massively complex while at the same time extremely robust and dependable. We propose a novel nonlinear control technique that produces capable, self-organizing, micron-scale space machines at low cost and in large numbers by parallel silicon assembly. Experiments using biomorphic architectures (with ideal space attributes) have produced a wide spectrum of survival-oriented machines that are reliably domesticated for work applications in specific environments. In particular, several one-chip satellite prototypes show interesting control properties that can be turned into numerous application-specific machines for autonomous, disposable space tasks. We believe that the real power of these architectures lies in their potential to self-assemble into larger, robust, loosely coupled structures. Assembly takes place at hierarchical space scales, with different attendant properties, allowing for inexpensive solutions to many daunting work tasks. The nature of biomorphic control, design, engineering options, and applications are discussed.

Ordered fast Fourier transforms on a massively parallel hypercube multiprocessor

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Tong, Charles; Swarztrauber, Paul N.

1991-01-01

The present evaluation of alternative, massively parallel hypercube processor-applicable designs for ordered radix-2 decimation-in-frequency FFT algorithms gives attention to the reduction of computation time-dominating communication. A combination of the order and computational phases of the FFT is accordingly employed, in conjunction with sequence-to-processor maps which reduce communication. Two orderings, 'standard' and 'cyclic', in which the order of the transform is the same as that of the input sequence, can be implemented with ease on the Connection Machine (where orderings are determined by geometries and priorities. A parallel method for trigonometric coefficient computation is presented which does not employ trigonometric functions or interprocessor communication.

Craniux: A LabVIEW-Based Modular Software Framework for Brain-Machine Interface Research

PubMed Central

Degenhart, Alan D.; Kelly, John W.; Ashmore, Robin C.; Collinger, Jennifer L.; Tyler-Kabara, Elizabeth C.; Weber, Douglas J.; Wang, Wei

2011-01-01

This paper presents “Craniux,” an open-access, open-source software framework for brain-machine interface (BMI) research. Developed in LabVIEW, a high-level graphical programming environment, Craniux offers both out-of-the-box functionality and a modular BMI software framework that is easily extendable. Specifically, it allows researchers to take advantage of multiple features inherent to the LabVIEW environment for on-the-fly data visualization, parallel processing, multithreading, and data saving. This paper introduces the basic features and system architecture of Craniux and describes the validation of the system under real-time BMI operation using simulated and real electrocorticographic (ECoG) signals. Our results indicate that Craniux is able to operate consistently in real time, enabling a seamless work flow to achieve brain control of cursor movement. The Craniux software framework is made available to the scientific research community to provide a LabVIEW-based BMI software platform for future BMI research and development. PMID:21687575

On the impact of approximate computation in an analog DeSTIN architecture.

PubMed

Young, Steven; Lu, Junjie; Holleman, Jeremy; Arel, Itamar

2014-05-01

Deep machine learning (DML) holds the potential to revolutionize machine learning by automating rich feature extraction, which has become the primary bottleneck of human engineering in pattern recognition systems. However, the heavy computational burden renders DML systems implemented on conventional digital processors impractical for large-scale problems. The highly parallel computations required to implement large-scale deep learning systems are well suited to custom hardware. Analog computation has demonstrated power efficiency advantages of multiple orders of magnitude relative to digital systems while performing nonideal computations. In this paper, we investigate typical error sources introduced by analog computational elements and their impact on system-level performance in DeSTIN--a compositional deep learning architecture. These inaccuracies are evaluated on a pattern classification benchmark, clearly demonstrating the robustness of the underlying algorithm to the errors introduced by analog computational elements. A clear understanding of the impacts of nonideal computations is necessary to fully exploit the efficiency of analog circuits.

Craniux: a LabVIEW-based modular software framework for brain-machine interface research.

PubMed

Degenhart, Alan D; Kelly, John W; Ashmore, Robin C; Collinger, Jennifer L; Tyler-Kabara, Elizabeth C; Weber, Douglas J; Wang, Wei

2011-01-01

This paper presents "Craniux," an open-access, open-source software framework for brain-machine interface (BMI) research. Developed in LabVIEW, a high-level graphical programming environment, Craniux offers both out-of-the-box functionality and a modular BMI software framework that is easily extendable. Specifically, it allows researchers to take advantage of multiple features inherent to the LabVIEW environment for on-the-fly data visualization, parallel processing, multithreading, and data saving. This paper introduces the basic features and system architecture of Craniux and describes the validation of the system under real-time BMI operation using simulated and real electrocorticographic (ECoG) signals. Our results indicate that Craniux is able to operate consistently in real time, enabling a seamless work flow to achieve brain control of cursor movement. The Craniux software framework is made available to the scientific research community to provide a LabVIEW-based BMI software platform for future BMI research and development.

Meta-RaPS Algorithm for the Aerial Refueling Scheduling Problem

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Kaplan, Sezgin; Arin, Arif; Rabadi, Ghaith

2011-01-01

The Aerial Refueling Scheduling Problem (ARSP) can be defined as determining the refueling completion times for each fighter aircraft (job) on multiple tankers (machines). ARSP assumes that jobs have different release times and due dates, The total weighted tardiness is used to evaluate schedule's quality. Therefore, ARSP can be modeled as a parallel machine scheduling with release limes and due dates to minimize the total weighted tardiness. Since ARSP is NP-hard, it will be more appropriate to develop a pproimate or heuristic algorithm to obtain solutions in reasonable computation limes. In this paper, Meta-Raps-ATC algorithm is implemented to create high quality solutions. Meta-RaPS (Meta-heuristic for Randomized Priority Search) is a recent and promising meta heuristic that is applied by introducing randomness to a construction heuristic. The Apparent Tardiness Rule (ATC), which is a good rule for scheduling problems with tardiness objective, is used to construct initial solutions which are improved by an exchanging operation. Results are presented for generated instances.

Hedging bets: Applying New Zealand's gambling machine regime to cannabis legalization.

PubMed

Caulkins, Jonathan P

2018-03-01

Cannabis legalization is often falsely depicted as a binary choice between status quo prohibition and legalizing production and distribution by (regulated) for-profit industry. There are, however, many more prudent architectures for legalization, such as restricting production and distribution licenses to not-for-profit entities. Wilkins describes how New Zealand applied that concept to gambling machines and proposes a parallel for cannabis legalization. Greater investment in proposing good designs along these lines, including attending to governance structures, would be valuable. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A new self-regulated self-excited single-phase induction generator using a squirrel cage three-phase induction machine

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Fukami, Tadashi; Imamura, Michinori; Kaburaki, Yuichi

1995-12-31

A new single-phase capacitor self-excited induction generator with self-regulating feature is presented. The new generator consists of a squirrel cage three-phase induction machine and three capacitors connected in series and parallel with a single phase load. The voltage regulation of this generator is very small due to the effect of the three capacitors. Moreover, since a Y-connected stator winding is employed, the waveform of the output voltage becomes sinusoidal. In this paper the system configuration and the operating principle of the new generator are explained, and the basic characteristics are also investigated by means of a simple analysis and experimentsmore » with a laboratory machine.« less

Center for Parallel Optimization

DTIC Science & Technology

1993-09-30

BOLLING AFB DC 20332-0001 _ii _ 11. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 12a. DISTRIBUTION/ AVAILABILITY STATEMENT 12b. DISTRIBUTION CODE APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE...Machines Corporation, March 16-19, 1993 , A Branch- and-Bound Method for Mixed Integer Programming on the CM-.5 "* Dr. Roberto Musmanno, University of

Before They Can Speak, They Must Know.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cromie, William J.; Edson, Lee

1984-01-01

Intelligent relationships with people are among the goals for tomorrow's computers. Knowledge-based systems used and being developed to achieve these goals are discussed. Automatic learning, producing inferences, parallelism, program languages, friendly machines, computer vision, and biomodels are among the topics considered. (JN)

A bibliography on parallel and vector numerical algorithms

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ortega, James M.; Voigt, Robert G.; Romine, Charles H.

1988-01-01

This is a bibliography on numerical methods. It also includes a number of other references on machine architecture, programming language, and other topics of interest to scientific computing. Certain conference proceedings and anthologies which have been published in book form are also listed.

A bibliography on parallel and vector numerical algorithms

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ortega, J. M.; Voigt, R. G.

1987-01-01

This is a bibliography of numerical methods. It also includes a number of other references on machine architecture, programming language, and other topics of interest to scientific computing. Certain conference proceedings and anthologies which have been published in book form are listed also.

A bibliography on parallel and vector numerical algorithms

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ortega, James M.; Voigt, Robert G.; Romine, Charles H.

1990-01-01

This is a bibliography on numerical methods. It also includes a number of other references on machine architecture, programming language, and other topics of interest to scientific computing. Certain conference proceedings and anthologies which have been published in book form are also listed.

Constraint-Based Scheduling System

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Zweben, Monte; Eskey, Megan; Stock, Todd; Taylor, Will; Kanefsky, Bob; Drascher, Ellen; Deale, Michael; Daun, Brian; Davis, Gene

1995-01-01

Report describes continuing development of software for constraint-based scheduling system implemented eventually on massively parallel computer. Based on machine learning as means of improving scheduling. Designed to learn when to change search strategy by analyzing search progress and learning general conditions under which resource bottleneck occurs.

MIP Models and Hybrid Algorithms for Simultaneous Job Splitting and Scheduling on Unrelated Parallel Machines

PubMed Central

Ozmutlu, H. Cenk

2014-01-01

We developed mixed integer programming (MIP) models and hybrid genetic-local search algorithms for the scheduling problem of unrelated parallel machines with job sequence and machine-dependent setup times and with job splitting property. The first contribution of this paper is to introduce novel algorithms which make splitting and scheduling simultaneously with variable number of subjobs. We proposed simple chromosome structure which is constituted by random key numbers in hybrid genetic-local search algorithm (GAspLA). Random key numbers are used frequently in genetic algorithms, but it creates additional difficulty when hybrid factors in local search are implemented. We developed algorithms that satisfy the adaptation of results of local search into the genetic algorithms with minimum relocation operation of genes' random key numbers. This is the second contribution of the paper. The third contribution of this paper is three developed new MIP models which are making splitting and scheduling simultaneously. The fourth contribution of this paper is implementation of the GAspLAMIP. This implementation let us verify the optimality of GAspLA for the studied combinations. The proposed methods are tested on a set of problems taken from the literature and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. PMID:24977204

Parallel processing optimization strategy based on MapReduce model in cloud storage environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cui, Jianming; Liu, Jiayi; Li, Qiuyan

2017-05-01

Currently, a large number of documents in the cloud storage process employed the way of packaging after receiving all the packets. From the local transmitter this stored procedure to the server, packing and unpacking will consume a lot of time, and the transmission efficiency is low as well. A new parallel processing algorithm is proposed to optimize the transmission mode. According to the operation machine graphs model work, using MPI technology parallel execution Mapper and Reducer mechanism. It is good to use MPI technology to implement Mapper and Reducer parallel mechanism. After the simulation experiment of Hadoop cloud computing platform, this algorithm can not only accelerate the file transfer rate, but also shorten the waiting time of the Reducer mechanism. It will break through traditional sequential transmission constraints and reduce the storage coupling to improve the transmission efficiency.

The factorization of large composite numbers on the MPP

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mckurdy, Kathy J.; Wunderlich, Marvin C.

1987-01-01

The continued fraction method for factoring large integers (CFRAC) was an ideal algorithm to be implemented on a massively parallel computer such as the Massively Parallel Processor (MPP). After much effort, the first 60 digit number was factored on the MPP using about 6 1/2 hours of array time. Although this result added about 10 digits to the size number that could be factored using CFRAC on a serial machine, it was already badly beaten by the implementation of Davis and Holdridge on the CRAY-1 using the quadratic sieve, an algorithm which is clearly superior to CFRAC for large numbers. An algorithm is illustrated which is ideally suited to the single instruction multiple data (SIMD) massively parallel architecture and some of the modifications which were needed in order to make the parallel implementation effective and efficient are described.

Parallel ALLSPD-3D: Speeding Up Combustor Analysis Via Parallel Processing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Fricker, David M.

1997-01-01

The ALLSPD-3D Computational Fluid Dynamics code for reacting flow simulation was run on a set of benchmark test cases to determine its parallel efficiency. These test cases included non-reacting and reacting flow simulations with varying numbers of processors. Also, the tests explored the effects of scaling the simulation with the number of processors in addition to distributing a constant size problem over an increasing number of processors. The test cases were run on a cluster of IBM RS/6000 Model 590 workstations with ethernet and ATM networking plus a shared memory SGI Power Challenge L workstation. The results indicate that the network capabilities significantly influence the parallel efficiency, i.e., a shared memory machine is fastest and ATM networking provides acceptable performance. The limitations of ethernet greatly hamper the rapid calculation of flows using ALLSPD-3D.

Multiscale asymmetric orthogonal wavelet kernel for linear programming support vector learning and nonlinear dynamic systems identification.

PubMed

Lu, Zhao; Sun, Jing; Butts, Kenneth

2014-05-01

Support vector regression for approximating nonlinear dynamic systems is more delicate than the approximation of indicator functions in support vector classification, particularly for systems that involve multitudes of time scales in their sampled data. The kernel used for support vector learning determines the class of functions from which a support vector machine can draw its solution, and the choice of kernel significantly influences the performance of a support vector machine. In this paper, to bridge the gap between wavelet multiresolution analysis and kernel learning, the closed-form orthogonal wavelet is exploited to construct new multiscale asymmetric orthogonal wavelet kernels for linear programming support vector learning. The closed-form multiscale orthogonal wavelet kernel provides a systematic framework to implement multiscale kernel learning via dyadic dilations and also enables us to represent complex nonlinear dynamics effectively. To demonstrate the superiority of the proposed multiscale wavelet kernel in identifying complex nonlinear dynamic systems, two case studies are presented that aim at building parallel models on benchmark datasets. The development of parallel models that address the long-term/mid-term prediction issue is more intricate and challenging than the identification of series-parallel models where only one-step ahead prediction is required. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed multiscale kernel learning.

Comparison of Origin 2000 and Origin 3000 Using NAS Parallel Benchmarks

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Turney, Raymond D.

2001-01-01

This report describes results of benchmark tests on the Origin 3000 system currently being installed at the NASA Ames National Advanced Supercomputing facility. This machine will ultimately contain 1024 R14K processors. The first part of the system, installed in November, 2000 and named mendel, is an Origin 3000 with 128 R12K processors. For comparison purposes, the tests were also run on lomax, an Origin 2000 with R12K processors. The BT, LU, and SP application benchmarks in the NAS Parallel Benchmark Suite and the kernel benchmark FT were chosen to determine system performance and measure the impact of changes on the machine as it evolves. Having been written to measure performance on Computational Fluid Dynamics applications, these benchmarks are assumed appropriate to represent the NAS workload. Since the NAS runs both message passing (MPI) and shared-memory, compiler directive type codes, both MPI and OpenMP versions of the benchmarks were used. The MPI versions used were the latest official release of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, version 2.3. The OpenMP versiqns used were PBN3b2, a beta version that is in the process of being released. NPB 2.3 and PBN 3b2 are technically different benchmarks, and NPB results are not directly comparable to PBN results.

Scalability of Parallel Spatial Direct Numerical Simulations on Intel Hypercube and IBM SP1 and SP2

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Joslin, Ronald D.; Hanebutte, Ulf R.; Zubair, Mohammad

1995-01-01

The implementation and performance of a parallel spatial direct numerical simulation (PSDNS) approach on the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube and IBM SP1 and SP2 parallel computers is documented. Spatially evolving disturbances associated with the laminar-to-turbulent transition in boundary-layer flows are computed with the PSDNS code. The feasibility of using the PSDNS to perform transition studies on these computers is examined. The results indicate that PSDNS approach can effectively be parallelized on a distributed-memory parallel machine by remapping the distributed data structure during the course of the calculation. Scalability information is provided to estimate computational costs to match the actual costs relative to changes in the number of grid points. By increasing the number of processors, slower than linear speedups are achieved with optimized (machine-dependent library) routines. This slower than linear speedup results because the computational cost is dominated by FFT routine, which yields less than ideal speedups. By using appropriate compile options and optimized library routines on the SP1, the serial code achieves 52-56 M ops on a single node of the SP1 (45 percent of theoretical peak performance). The actual performance of the PSDNS code on the SP1 is evaluated with a "real world" simulation that consists of 1.7 million grid points. One time step of this simulation is calculated on eight nodes of the SP1 in the same time as required by a Cray Y/MP supercomputer. For the same simulation, 32-nodes of the SP1 and SP2 are required to reach the performance of a Cray C-90. A 32 node SP1 (SP2) configuration is 2.9 (4.6) times faster than a Cray Y/MP for this simulation, while the hypercube is roughly 2 times slower than the Y/MP for this application. KEY WORDS: Spatial direct numerical simulations; incompressible viscous flows; spectral methods; finite differences; parallel computing.

Age-forming aluminum panels

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Baxter, G. I.

1976-01-01

Contoured-stiffened 63 by 337 inch 2124 aluminum alloy panels are machined in-the-flat to make integral, tapered T-capped stringers, parallel with longitudinal centerline. Aging fixture, which includes net contour formers made from lofted contour templates, has eggcrate-like structure for use in forming and checking panels.

Xenon Formal Security Policy Model

DTIC Science & Technology

2007-08-14

munication primitives such as locks or semaphores , machine instruction results, hypercall results, traps, and interrupts. For an informal example...communicated on the corresponding side of the parallel oper- ator. Events that are in X ∪ Y are synchronized over the two processes. So if we define

First Annual Workshop on Space Operations Automation and Robotics (SOAR 87)

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Griffin, Sandy (Editor)

1987-01-01

Several topics relative to automation and robotics technology are discussed. Automation of checkout, ground support, and logistics; automated software development; man-machine interfaces; neural networks; systems engineering and distributed/parallel processing architectures; and artificial intelligence/expert systems are among the topics covered.

Using Technology in Pre-School Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Can-Yasar, Munevver; Inal, Gozde; Uyanik, Ozgun; Kandir, Adalet

2012-01-01

Technology is the collection of machines, processes, methods, transactions, systems, administration and supervision mechanism, which serves as a bridge between science and practice and helps meet human needs using available information, materials, sources and energy. The developments in technology and educational aims follow a parallelism, which…

Machine Learning for Flood Prediction in Google Earth Engine

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kuhn, C.; Tellman, B.; Max, S. A.; Schwarz, B.

2015-12-01

With the increasing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery, dynamic flood mapping in near real time is becoming a reachable goal for decision-makers. This talk describes a newly developed framework for predicting biophysical flood vulnerability using public data, cloud computing and machine learning. Our objective is to define an approach to flood inundation modeling using statistical learning methods deployed in a cloud-based computing platform. Traditionally, static flood extent maps grounded in physically based hydrologic models can require hours of human expertise to construct at significant financial cost. In addition, desktop modeling software and limited local server storage can impose restraints on the size and resolution of input datasets. Data-driven, cloud-based processing holds promise for predictive watershed modeling at a wide range of spatio-temporal scales. However, these benefits come with constraints. In particular, parallel computing limits a modeler's ability to simulate the flow of water across a landscape, rendering traditional routing algorithms unusable in this platform. Our project pushes these limits by testing the performance of two machine learning algorithms, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forests, at predicting flood extent. Constructed in Google Earth Engine, the model mines a suite of publicly available satellite imagery layers to use as algorithm inputs. Results are cross-validated using MODIS-based flood maps created using the Dartmouth Flood Observatory detection algorithm. Model uncertainty highlights the difficulty of deploying unbalanced training data sets based on rare extreme events.

WATERLOPP V2/64: A highly parallel machine for numerical computation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ostlund, Neil S.

1985-07-01

Current technological trends suggest that the high performance scientific machines of the future are very likely to consist of a large number (greater than 1024) of processors connected and communicating with each other in some as yet undetermined manner. Such an assembly of processors should behave as a single machine in obtaining numerical solutions to scientific problems. However, the appropriate way of organizing both the hardware and software of such an assembly of processors is an unsolved and active area of research. It is particularly important to minimize the organizational overhead of interprocessor comunication, global synchronization, and contention for shared resources if the performance of a large number ( n) of processors is to be anything like the desirable n times the performance of a single processor. In many situations, adding a processor actually decreases the performance of the overall system since the extra organizational overhead is larger than the extra processing power added. The systolic loop architecture is a new multiple processor architecture which attemps at a solution to the problem of how to organize a large number of asynchronous processors into an effective computational system while minimizing the organizational overhead. This paper gives a brief overview of the basic systolic loop architecture, systolic loop algorithms for numerical computation, and a 64-processor implementation of the architecture, WATERLOOP V2/64, that is being used as a testbed for exploring the hardware, software, and algorithmic aspects of the architecture.

Compliance analysis of a 3-DOF spindle head by considering gravitational effects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Qi; Wang, Manxin; Huang, Tian; Chetwynd, Derek G.

2015-01-01

The compliance modeling is one of the most significant issues in the stage of preliminary design for parallel kinematic machine(PKM). The gravity ignored in traditional compliance analysis has a significant effect on pose accuracy of tool center point(TCP) when a PKM is horizontally placed. By taking gravity into account, this paper presents a semi-analytical approach for compliance analysis of a 3-DOF spindle head named the A3 head. The architecture behind the A3 head is a 3-R PS parallel mechanism having one translational and two rotational movement capabilities, which can be employed to form the main body of a 5-DOF hybrid kinematic machine especially designed for high-speed machining of large aircraft components. The force analysis is carried out by considering both the externally applied wrench imposed upon the platform as well as gravity of all moving components. Then, the deflection analysis is investigated to establish the relationship between the deflection twist and compliances of all joints and links using semi-analytical method. The merits of this approach lie in that platform deflection twist throughout the entire task workspace can be evaluated in a very efficient manner. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by the FEA and experiment at different configurations and the results show that the discrepancy of the compliances is less than 0.04 μm/N-1 and that of the deformations is less than 10μm. The computational and experimental results show that the deflection twist induced by gravity forces of the moving components has significant bearings on pose accuracy of the platform, providing an informative guidance for the improvement of the current design. The proposed approach can be easily applied to the compliance analysis of PKM by considering gravitational effects and to evaluate the deformation caused by gravity throughout the entire workspace.

Unstructured grids on SIMD torus machines

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bjorstad, Petter E.; Schreiber, Robert

1994-01-01

Unstructured grids lead to unstructured communication on distributed memory parallel computers, a problem that has been considered difficult. Here, we consider adaptive, offline communication routing for a SIMD processor grid. Our approach is empirical. We use large data sets drawn from supercomputing applications instead of an analytic model of communication load. The chief contribution of this paper is an experimental demonstration of the effectiveness of certain routing heuristics. Our routing algorithm is adaptive, nonminimal, and is generally designed to exploit locality. We have a parallel implementation of the router, and we report on its performance.

HACC: Extreme Scaling and Performance Across Diverse Architectures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Habib, Salman; Morozov, Vitali; Frontiere, Nicholas; Finkel, Hal; Pope, Adrian; Heitmann, Katrin

2013-11-01

Supercomputing is evolving towards hybrid and accelerator-based architectures with millions of cores. The HACC (Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code) framework exploits this diverse landscape at the largest scales of problem size, obtaining high scalability and sustained performance. Developed to satisfy the science requirements of cosmological surveys, HACC melds particle and grid methods using a novel algorithmic structure that flexibly maps across architectures, including CPU/GPU, multi/many-core, and Blue Gene systems. We demonstrate the success of HACC on two very different machines, the CPU/GPU system Titan and the BG/Q systems Sequoia and Mira, attaining unprecedented levels of scalable performance. We demonstrate strong and weak scaling on Titan, obtaining up to 99.2% parallel efficiency, evolving 1.1 trillion particles. On Sequoia, we reach 13.94 PFlops (69.2% of peak) and 90% parallel efficiency on 1,572,864 cores, with 3.6 trillion particles, the largest cosmological benchmark yet performed. HACC design concepts are applicable to several other supercomputer applications.

Algorithms and software used in selecting structure of machine-training cluster based on neurocomputers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Romanchuk, V. A.; Lukashenko, V. V.

2018-05-01

The technique of functioning of a control system by a computing cluster based on neurocomputers is proposed. Particular attention is paid to the method of choosing the structure of the computing cluster due to the fact that the existing methods are not effective because of a specialized hardware base - neurocomputers, which are highly parallel computer devices with an architecture different from the von Neumann architecture. A developed algorithm for choosing the computational structure of a cloud cluster is described, starting from the direction of data transfer in the flow control graph of the program and its adjacency matrix.

Extended Logic Intelligent Processing System for a Sensor Fusion Processor Hardware

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Stoica, Adrian; Thomas, Tyson; Li, Wei-Te; Daud, Taher; Fabunmi, James

2000-01-01

The paper presents the hardware implementation and initial tests from a low-power, highspeed reconfigurable sensor fusion processor. The Extended Logic Intelligent Processing System (ELIPS) is described, which combines rule-based systems, fuzzy logic, and neural networks to achieve parallel fusion of sensor signals in compact low power VLSI. The development of the ELIPS concept is being done to demonstrate the interceptor functionality which particularly underlines the high speed and low power requirements. The hardware programmability allows the processor to reconfigure into different machines, taking the most efficient hardware implementation during each phase of information processing. Processing speeds of microseconds have been demonstrated using our test hardware.

Quantum Monte Carlo for large chemical systems: implementing efficient strategies for petascale platforms and beyond.

PubMed

Scemama, Anthony; Caffarel, Michel; Oseret, Emmanuel; Jalby, William

2013-04-30

Various strategies to implement efficiently quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations for large chemical systems are presented. These include: (i) the introduction of an efficient algorithm to calculate the computationally expensive Slater matrices. This novel scheme is based on the use of the highly localized character of atomic Gaussian basis functions (not the molecular orbitals as usually done), (ii) the possibility of keeping the memory footprint minimal, (iii) the important enhancement of single-core performance when efficient optimization tools are used, and (iv) the definition of a universal, dynamic, fault-tolerant, and load-balanced framework adapted to all kinds of computational platforms (massively parallel machines, clusters, or distributed grids). These strategies have been implemented in the QMC=Chem code developed at Toulouse and illustrated with numerical applications on small peptides of increasing sizes (158, 434, 1056, and 1731 electrons). Using 10-80 k computing cores of the Curie machine (GENCI-TGCC-CEA, France), QMC=Chem has been shown to be capable of running at the petascale level, thus demonstrating that for this machine a large part of the peak performance can be achieved. Implementation of large-scale QMC simulations for future exascale platforms with a comparable level of efficiency is expected to be feasible. Copyright © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Real-time machine vision system using FPGA and soft-core processor

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Malik, Abdul Waheed; Thörnberg, Benny; Meng, Xiaozhou; Imran, Muhammad

2012-06-01

This paper presents a machine vision system for real-time computation of distance and angle of a camera from reference points in the environment. Image pre-processing, component labeling and feature extraction modules were modeled at Register Transfer (RT) level and synthesized for implementation on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). The extracted image component features were sent from the hardware modules to a soft-core processor, MicroBlaze, for computation of distance and angle. A CMOS imaging sensor operating at a clock frequency of 27MHz was used in our experiments to produce a video stream at the rate of 75 frames per second. Image component labeling and feature extraction modules were running in parallel having a total latency of 13ms. The MicroBlaze was interfaced with the component labeling and feature extraction modules through Fast Simplex Link (FSL). The latency for computing distance and angle of camera from the reference points was measured to be 2ms on the MicroBlaze, running at 100 MHz clock frequency. In this paper, we present the performance analysis, device utilization and power consumption for the designed system. The FPGA based machine vision system that we propose has high frame speed, low latency and a power consumption that is much lower compared to commercially available smart camera solutions.

Momentum and velocity of the ablated material in laser machining of carbon fiber preforms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mucha, P.; Speker, N.; Weber, R.; Graf, T.

2013-11-01

The automation in fabrication of CFRP (carbon-fiber-reinforced plastics) parts demands efficient and low-cost machining technologies. In conventional cutting technologies, tool-wear and low process speeds are some of the reasons for high costs. Thus, the use of lasers is an attractive option for cutting CF-preforms. A typical effect degrading the quality in laser cutting CF-preform is a bulged cutting edge. This effect is assumed to be caused by interaction of the fibers with the ablated material, which leaves the kerf at high velocity. Hence, a method for measuring the momentum and the velocity of the vapor is presented in this article. To measure the momentum of the ablated material, the CF-preform is mounted on a precision scale while cutting it with a laser. The direction of the momentum was determined by measuring the momentum parallel and orthogonal to the CF-preform surface. A change of the direction of the momentum with different cutting-speeds is assessed at constant laser-power. Averaged velocities of the ablation products of up to 300 m/s were determined by measuring the ablated mass and the momentum.

Simplify and Accelerate Earth Science Data Preparation to Systemize Machine Learning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kuo, K. S.; Rilee, M. L.; Oloso, A.

2017-12-01

Data preparation is the most laborious and time-consuming part of machine learning. The effort required is usually more than linearly proportional to the varieties of data used. From a system science viewpoint, useful machine learning in Earth Science likely involves diverse datasets. Thus, simplifying data preparation to ease the systemization of machine learning in Earth Science is of immense value. The technologies we have developed and applied to an array database, SciDB, are explicitly designed for the purpose, including the innovative SpatioTemporal Adaptive-Resolution Encoding (STARE), a remapping tool suite, and an efficient implementation of connected component labeling (CCL). STARE serves as a universal Earth data representation that homogenizes data varieties and facilitates spatiotemporal data placement as well as alignment, to maximize query performance on massively parallel, distributed computing resources for a major class of analysis. Moreover, it converts spatiotemporal set operations into fast and efficient integer interval operations, supporting in turn moving-object analysis. Integrative analysis requires more than overlapping spatiotemporal sets. For example, meaningful comparison of temperature fields obtained with different means and resolutions requires their transformation to the same grid. Therefore, remapping has been implemented to enable integrative analysis. Finally, Earth Science investigations are generally studies of phenomena, e.g. tropical cyclone, atmospheric river, and blizzard, through their associated events, like hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Unfortunately, except for a few high-impact phenomena, comprehensive episodic records are lacking. Consequently, we have implemented an efficient CCL tracking algorithm, enabling event-based investigations within climate data records beyond mere event presence. In summary, we have implemented the core unifying capabilities on a Big Data technology to enable systematic machine learning in Earth Science.

Rosen's (M,R) system as an X-machine.

PubMed

Palmer, Michael L; Williams, Richard A; Gatherer, Derek

2016-11-07

Robert Rosen's (M,R) system is an abstract biological network architecture that is allegedly both irreducible to sub-models of its component states and non-computable on a Turing machine. (M,R) stands as an obstacle to both reductionist and mechanistic presentations of systems biology, principally due to its self-referential structure. If (M,R) has the properties claimed for it, computational systems biology will not be possible, or at best will be a science of approximate simulations rather than accurate models. Several attempts have been made, at both empirical and theoretical levels, to disprove this assertion by instantiating (M,R) in software architectures. So far, these efforts have been inconclusive. In this paper, we attempt to demonstrate why - by showing how both finite state machine and stream X-machine formal architectures fail to capture the self-referential requirements of (M,R). We then show that a solution may be found in communicating X-machines, which remove self-reference using parallel computation, and then synthesise such machine architectures with object-orientation to create a formal basis for future software instantiations of (M,R) systems. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A hybrid flowshop scheduling model considering dedicated machines and lot-splitting for the solar cell industry

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Li-Chih; Chen, Yin-Yann; Chen, Tzu-Li; Cheng, Chen-Yang; Chang, Chin-Wei

2014-10-01

This paper studies a solar cell industry scheduling problem, which is similar to traditional hybrid flowshop scheduling (HFS). In a typical HFS problem, the allocation of machine resources for each order should be scheduled in advance. However, the challenge in solar cell manufacturing is the number of machines that can be adjusted dynamically to complete the job. An optimal production scheduling model is developed to explore these issues, considering the practical characteristics, such as hybrid flowshop, parallel machine system, dedicated machines, sequence independent job setup times and sequence dependent job setup times. The objective of this model is to minimise the makespan and to decide the processing sequence of the orders/lots in each stage, lot-splitting decisions for the orders and the number of machines used to satisfy the demands in each stage. From the experimental results, lot-splitting has significant effect on shortening the makespan, and the improvement effect is influenced by the processing time and the setup time of orders. Therefore, the threshold point to improve the makespan can be identified. In addition, the model also indicates that more lot-splitting approaches, that is, the flexibility of allocating orders/lots to machines is larger, will result in a better scheduling performance.

Design and application of the falling vertical sorting machine

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zuo, Ping; Peng, Tao; Yang, Hai

2018-04-01

In the process of tobacco production, it is necessary to pack the smoke according to the needs of different customers. A sorting machine is used to pick up the cigarette at present, there is a launch channel machine, a percussible vertical machine, But in the sorting process, the rolling channel machine is different in terms of the quality of smoke and the frictional force. It is difficult to ensure the location and posture of the belt sorting line, which causes the manipulator to not grasp. The strike type vertical machine is difficult to control the parallelism of the smoke. Now this team has developed a falling sorting machine, which has solved the smoke drop of a cigarette to the transmission belt. There will not be no code, can satisfy most of the different types of smoke sorting and no damage to smoke status. The dynamic characteristics such as the angular error of the opening and closing mechanism are carried out by ADAMS software. The simulation results show that the maximum angular error is 0.016rad. Through the test of the device, the goods falling speed is 7031/hour, the good of the falling position error within 2mm, meet the crawl accuracy requirements of the palletizing robot.

Theoretical and experimental research on machine tool servo system for ultra-precision position compensation on CNC lathe

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ma, Zhichao; Hu, Leilei; Zhao, Hongwei; Wu, Boda; Peng, Zhenxing; Zhou, Xiaoqin; Zhang, Hongguo; Zhu, Shuai; Xing, Lifeng; Hu, Huang

2010-08-01

The theories and techniques for improving machining accuracy via position control of diamond tool's tip and raising resolution of cutting depth on precise CNC lathes have been extremely focused on. A new piezo-driven ultra-precision machine tool servo system is designed and tested to improve manufacturing accuracy of workpiece. The mathematical model of machine tool servo system is established and the finite element analysis is carried out on parallel plate flexure hinges. The output position of diamond tool's tip driven by the machine tool servo system is tested via a contact capacitive displacement sensor. Proportional, integral, derivative (PID) feedback is also implemented to accommodate and compensate dynamical change owing cutting forces as well as the inherent non-linearity factors of the piezoelectric stack during cutting process. By closed loop feedback controlling strategy, the tracking error is limited to 0.8 μm. Experimental results have shown the proposed machine tool servo system could provide a tool positioning resolution of 12 nm, which is much accurate than the inherent CNC resolution magnitude. The stepped shaft of aluminum specimen with a step increment of cutting depth of 1 μm is tested, and the obtained contour illustrates the displacement command output from controller is accurately and real-time reflected on the machined part.

Sentence alignment using feed forward neural network.

PubMed

Fattah, Mohamed Abdel; Ren, Fuji; Kuroiwa, Shingo

2006-12-01

Parallel corpora have become an essential resource for work in multi lingual natural language processing. However, sentence aligned parallel corpora are more efficient than non-aligned parallel corpora for cross language information retrieval and machine translation applications. In this paper, we present a new approach to align sentences in bilingual parallel corpora based on feed forward neural network classifier. A feature parameter vector is extracted from the text pair under consideration. This vector contains text features such as length, punctuate score, and cognate score values. A set of manually prepared training data has been assigned to train the feed forward neural network. Another set of data was used for testing. Using this new approach, we could achieve an error reduction of 60% over length based approach when applied on English-Arabic parallel documents. Moreover this new approach is valid for any language pair and it is quite flexible approach since the feature parameter vector may contain more/less or different features than that we used in our system such as lexical match feature.

Recent advances in PDF modeling of turbulent reacting flows

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Leonard, Andrew D.; Dai, F.

1995-01-01

This viewgraph presentation concludes that a Monte Carlo probability density function (PDF) solution successfully couples with an existing finite volume code; PDF solution method applied to turbulent reacting flows shows good agreement with data; and PDF methods must be run on parallel machines for practical use.

A Topological Model for Parallel Algorithm Design

DTIC Science & Technology

1991-09-01

by Charles Babbage in 1842-(250): When a long series of identical computations is to be performed, ... the machine can ... give several results at...Papers. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1964. 250. P. Morrison and E. Morrison. Charles Babbagc and His Calculating Engincs. Dover, New York, 1961. 251

Photography/Digital Imaging: Parallel & Paradoxical Histories.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Witte, Mary Stieglitz

With the introduction of photography and photomechanical printing processes in the 19th century, the first age of machine pictures and reproductions emerged. The 20th century introduced computer image processing systems, creating a digital imaging revolution. Rather than concentrating on the adversarial aspects of the computer's influence on…

Proxy-equation paradigm: A strategy for massively parallel asynchronous computations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mittal, Ankita; Girimaji, Sharath

2017-09-01

Massively parallel simulations of transport equation systems call for a paradigm change in algorithm development to achieve efficient scalability. Traditional approaches require time synchronization of processing elements (PEs), which severely restricts scalability. Relaxing synchronization requirement introduces error and slows down convergence. In this paper, we propose and develop a novel "proxy equation" concept for a general transport equation that (i) tolerates asynchrony with minimal added error, (ii) preserves convergence order and thus, (iii) expected to scale efficiently on massively parallel machines. The central idea is to modify a priori the transport equation at the PE boundaries to offset asynchrony errors. Proof-of-concept computations are performed using a one-dimensional advection (convection) diffusion equation. The results demonstrate the promise and advantages of the present strategy.

Use of parallel computing for analyzing big data in EEG studies of ambiguous perception

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Maksimenko, Vladimir A.; Grubov, Vadim V.; Kirsanov, Daniil V.

2018-02-01

Problem of interaction between human and machine systems through the neuro-interfaces (or brain-computer interfaces) is an urgent task which requires analysis of large amount of neurophysiological EEG data. In present paper we consider the methods of parallel computing as one of the most powerful tools for processing experimental data in real-time with respect to multichannel structure of EEG. In this context we demonstrate the application of parallel computing for the estimation of the spectral properties of multichannel EEG signals, associated with the visual perception. Using CUDA C library we run wavelet-based algorithm on GPUs and show possibility for detection of specific patterns in multichannel set of EEG data in real-time.

Shared Memory Parallelization of an Implicit ADI-type CFD Code

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hauser, Th.; Huang, P. G.

1999-01-01

A parallelization study designed for ADI-type algorithms is presented using the OpenMP specification for shared-memory multiprocessor programming. Details of optimizations specifically addressed to cache-based computer architectures are described and performance measurements for the single and multiprocessor implementation are summarized. The paper demonstrates that optimization of memory access on a cache-based computer architecture controls the performance of the computational algorithm. A hybrid MPI/OpenMP approach is proposed for clusters of shared memory machines to further enhance the parallel performance. The method is applied to develop a new LES/DNS code, named LESTool. A preliminary DNS calculation of a fully developed channel flow at a Reynolds number of 180, Re(sub tau) = 180, has shown good agreement with existing data.

Robotic inspection of fiber reinforced composites using phased array UT

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Stetson, Jeffrey T.; De Odorico, Walter

2014-02-01

Ultrasound is the current NDE method of choice to inspect large fiber reinforced airframe structures. Over the last 15 years Cartesian based scanning machines using conventional ultrasound techniques have been employed by all airframe OEMs and their top tier suppliers to perform these inspections. Technical advances in both computing power and commercially available, multi-axis robots now facilitate a new generation of scanning machines. These machines use multiple end effector tools taking full advantage of phased array ultrasound technologies yielding substantial improvements in inspection quality and productivity. This paper outlines the general architecture for these new robotic scanning systems as well as details the variety of ultrasonic techniques available for use with them including advances such as wide area phased array scanning and sound field adaptation for non-flat, non-parallel surfaces.

Application of coordinate transform on ball plate calibration

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wei, Hengzheng; Wang, Weinong; Ren, Guoying; Pei, Limei

2015-02-01

For the ball plate calibration method with coordinate measurement machine (CMM) equipped with laser interferometer, it is essential to adjust the ball plate parallel to the direction of laser beam. It is very time-consuming. To solve this problem, a method based on coordinate transformation between machine system and object system is presented. With the fixed points' coordinates of the ball plate measured in the object system and machine system, the transformation matrix between the coordinate systems is calculated. The laser interferometer measurement data error due to the placement of ball plate can be corrected with this transformation matrix. Experimental results indicate that this method is consistent with the handy adjustment method. It avoids the complexity of ball plate adjustment. It also can be applied to the ball beam calibration.

Multilevel-Dc-Bus Inverter For Providing Sinusoidal And Pwm Electrical Machine Voltages

DOEpatents

Su, Gui-Jia [Knoxville, TN

2005-11-29

A circuit for controlling an ac machine comprises a full bridge network of commutation switches which are connected to supply current for a corresponding voltage phase to the stator windings, a plurality of diodes, each in parallel connection to a respective one of the commutation switches, a plurality of dc source connections providing a multi-level dc bus for the full bridge network of commutation switches to produce sinusoidal voltages or PWM signals, and a controller connected for control of said dc source connections and said full bridge network of commutation switches to output substantially sinusoidal voltages to the stator windings. With the invention, the number of semiconductor switches is reduced to m+3 for a multi-level dc bus having m levels. A method of machine control is also disclosed.

Large space structures fabrication experiment. [on-orbit fabrication of graphite/thermoplastic beams

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1978-01-01

The fabrication machine used for the rolltrusion and on-orbit forming of graphite thermoplastic (CTP) strip material into structural sections is described. The basic process was analytically developed parallel with, and integrated into the conceptual design of, a flight experiment machine for producing a continuous triangular cross section truss. The machine and its associated ancillary equipment are mounted on a Space Lab pallet. Power, thermal control, and instrumentation connections are made during ground installation. Observation, monitoring, caution and warning, and control panels and displays are installed at the payload specialist station in the orbiter. The machine is primed before flight by initiation of beam forming, to include attachment of the first set of cross members and anchoring of the diagonal cords. Control of the experiment will be from the orbiter mission specialist station. Normal operation is by automatic processing control software. Machine operating data are displayed and recorded on the ground. Data is processed and formatted to show progress of the major experiment parameters including stable operation, physical symmetry, joint integrity, and structural properties.

Construction and Design of a full size sTGC prototype for the ATLAS New Small Wheel upgrade

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

NONE

For the forthcoming Phase-I upgrade to the LHC (2018/19), the first station of the ATLAS muon end-cap system, Small Wheel, will need to be replaced. The New Small Wheel (NSW) will have to operate in a high background radiation region while reconstructing muon tracks with high precision as well as furnishing information for the Level-1 trigger. In particular, the precision reconstruction of tracks requires a spatial resolution of about 100 μm, and the Level-1 trigger track segments have to be reconstructed with an angular resolution of approximately 1 mrad. The NSW will have two chamber technologies, one primarily devoted tomore » the Level-1 trigger function the small-strip Thin Gap Chambers (sTGC) and one dedicated to precision tracking, Micromegas detectors, (MM). The single sTGC planes of a quadruplet consists of an anode layer of 50 μm gold plated tungsten wire sandwiched between two resistive cathode layers. Behind one of the resistive cathode layers, a PCB with precise machined strips (thus the name sTGC's) spaced every 3.2 mm allows to achieve the position resolution that ranges from 70 to 150 μm, depending on the incident particle angle. Behind the second cathode, a PCB that contains an arrangement of pads, allows for a fast coincidence between successive sTGC layers to tag the passage of a track and reads only the corresponding strips for triggering. To be able to profit from the high accuracy of each of the sTGC planes for trigger purposes, their relative geometrical position between planes has to be controlled to within a precision of about 40 μm in their parallelism, as well (due to the various incident angles), to within a precision of 80 μm in the relative distance between the planes to achieve the overall angular resolution of 1 mrad. The needed accuracy in the position and parallelism of the strips is achieved by machining brass inserts together when machining the strip patterns into the cathode boards in a single step. The inserts can then be used as external references on a granite table. Precision methods are used to maintain high accuracy when combining four single detector gaps first into two doublets and then into a quadruplet. We will present results on the ongoing construction of full size (∼1 x 1 m) sTGC quadruplet prototypes before full construction starts in 2015. (authors)« less

Global Load Balancing with Parallel Mesh Adaption on Distributed-Memory Systems

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Biswas, Rupak; Oliker, Leonid; Sohn, Andrew

1996-01-01

Dynamic mesh adaption on unstructured grids is a powerful tool for efficiently computing unsteady problems to resolve solution features of interest. Unfortunately, this causes load imbalance among processors on a parallel machine. This paper describes the parallel implementation of a tetrahedral mesh adaption scheme and a new global load balancing method. A heuristic remapping algorithm is presented that assigns partitions to processors such that the redistribution cost is minimized. Results indicate that the parallel performance of the mesh adaption code depends on the nature of the adaption region and show a 35.5X speedup on 64 processors of an SP2 when 35% of the mesh is randomly adapted. For large-scale scientific computations, our load balancing strategy gives almost a sixfold reduction in solver execution times over non-balanced loads. Furthermore, our heuristic remapper yields processor assignments that are less than 3% off the optimal solutions but requires only 1% of the computational time.

MapReduce Based Parallel Neural Networks in Enabling Large Scale Machine Learning

PubMed Central

Yang, Jie; Huang, Yuan; Xu, Lixiong; Li, Siguang; Qi, Man

2015-01-01

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been widely used in pattern recognition and classification applications. However, ANNs are notably slow in computation especially when the size of data is large. Nowadays, big data has received a momentum from both industry and academia. To fulfill the potentials of ANNs for big data applications, the computation process must be speeded up. For this purpose, this paper parallelizes neural networks based on MapReduce, which has become a major computing model to facilitate data intensive applications. Three data intensive scenarios are considered in the parallelization process in terms of the volume of classification data, the size of the training data, and the number of neurons in the neural network. The performance of the parallelized neural networks is evaluated in an experimental MapReduce computer cluster from the aspects of accuracy in classification and efficiency in computation. PMID:26681933

MapReduce Based Parallel Neural Networks in Enabling Large Scale Machine Learning.

PubMed

Liu, Yang; Yang, Jie; Huang, Yuan; Xu, Lixiong; Li, Siguang; Qi, Man

2015-01-01

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been widely used in pattern recognition and classification applications. However, ANNs are notably slow in computation especially when the size of data is large. Nowadays, big data has received a momentum from both industry and academia. To fulfill the potentials of ANNs for big data applications, the computation process must be speeded up. For this purpose, this paper parallelizes neural networks based on MapReduce, which has become a major computing model to facilitate data intensive applications. Three data intensive scenarios are considered in the parallelization process in terms of the volume of classification data, the size of the training data, and the number of neurons in the neural network. The performance of the parallelized neural networks is evaluated in an experimental MapReduce computer cluster from the aspects of accuracy in classification and efficiency in computation.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Kurth, Thorsten; Pochinsky, Andrew; Sarje, Abhinav

Practitioners of lattice QCD/QFT have been some of the primary pioneer users of the state-of-the-art high-performance-computing systems, and contribute towards the stress tests of such new machines as soon as they become available. As with all aspects of high-performance-computing, I/O is becoming an increasingly specialized component of these systems. In order to take advantage of the latest available high-performance I/O infrastructure, to ensure reliability and backwards compatibility of data files, and to help unify the data structures used in lattice codes, we have incorporated parallel HDF5 I/O into the SciDAC supported USQCD software stack. Here we present the design andmore » implementation of this I/O framework. Our HDF5 implementation outperforms optimized QIO at the 10-20% level and leaves room for further improvement by utilizing appropriate dataset chunking.« less

Parallel processing of embossing dies with ultrafast lasers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jarczynski, Manfred; Mitra, Thomas; Brüning, Stephan; Du, Keming; Jenke, Gerald

2018-02-01

Functionalization of surfaces equips products and components with new features like hydrophilic behavior, adjustable gloss level, light management properties, etc. Small feature sizes demand diffraction-limited spots and adapted fluence for different materials. Through the availability of high power fast repeating ultrashort pulsed lasers and efficient optical processing heads delivering diffraction-limited small spot size of around 10μm it is feasible to achieve fluences higher than an adequate patterning requires. Hence, parallel processing is becoming of interest to increase the throughput and allow mass production of micro machined surfaces. The first step on the roadmap of parallel processing for cylinder embossing dies was realized with an eight- spot processing head based on ns-fiber laser with passive optical beam splitting, individual spot switching by acousto optical modulation and an advanced imaging. Patterning of cylindrical embossing dies shows a high efficiency of nearby 80%, diffraction-limited and equally spaced spots with pitches down to 25μm achieved by a compression using cascaded prism arrays. Due to the nanoseconds laser pulses the ablation shows the typical surrounding material deposition of a hot process. In the next step the processing head was adapted to a picosecond-laser source and the 500W fiber laser was replaced by an ultrashort pulsed laser with 300W, 12ps and a repetition frequency of up to 6MHz. This paper presents details about the processing head design and the analysis of ablation rates and patterns on steel, copper and brass dies. Furthermore, it gives an outlook on scaling the parallel processing head from eight to 16 individually switched beamlets to increase processing throughput and optimized utilization of the available ultrashort pulsed laser energy.

Method and apparatus for tensile testing of metal foil

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wade, O. W. (Inventor)

1976-01-01

A method for obtaining accurate and reproducible results in the tensile testing of metal foils in tensile testing machines is described. Before the test specimen are placed in the machine, foil side edges are worked until they are parallel and flaw free. The specimen are also aligned between and secured to grip end members. An aligning apparatus employed in the method is comprised of an alignment box with a longitudinal bottom wall and two upright side walls, first and second removable grip end members at each end of the box, and a means for securing the grip end members within the box.

Hierarchical analytical and simulation modelling of human-machine systems with interference

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Braginsky, M. Ya; Tarakanov, D. V.; Tsapko, S. G.; Tsapko, I. V.; Baglaeva, E. A.

2017-01-01

The article considers the principles of building the analytical and simulation model of the human operator and the industrial control system hardware and software. E-networks as the extension of Petri nets are used as the mathematical apparatus. This approach allows simulating complex parallel distributed processes in human-machine systems. The structural and hierarchical approach is used as the building method for the mathematical model of the human operator. The upper level of the human operator is represented by the logical dynamic model of decision making based on E-networks. The lower level reflects psychophysiological characteristics of the human-operator.

Myria: Scalable Analytics as a Service

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Howe, B.; Halperin, D.; Whitaker, A.

2014-12-01

At the UW eScience Institute, we're working to empower non-experts, especially in the sciences, to write and use data-parallel algorithms. To this end, we are building Myria, a web-based platform for scalable analytics and data-parallel programming. Myria's internal model of computation is the relational algebra extended with iteration, such that every program is inherently data-parallel, just as every query in a database is inherently data-parallel. But unlike databases, iteration is a first class concept, allowing us to express machine learning tasks, graph traversal tasks, and more. Programs can be expressed in a number of languages and can be executed on a number of execution environments, but we emphasize a particular language called MyriaL that supports both imperative and declarative styles and a particular execution engine called MyriaX that uses an in-memory column-oriented representation and asynchronous iteration. We deliver Myria over the web as a service, providing an editor, performance analysis tools, and catalog browsing features in a single environment. We find that this web-based "delivery vector" is critical in reaching non-experts: they are insulated from irrelevant effort technical work associated with installation, configuration, and resource management. The MyriaX backend, one of several execution runtimes we support, is a main-memory, column-oriented, RDBMS-on-the-worker system that supports cyclic data flows as a first-class citizen and has been shown to outperform competitive systems on 100-machine cluster sizes. I will describe the Myria system, give a demo, and present some new results in large-scale oceanographic microbiology.

The Research and Implementation of MUSER CLEAN Algorithm Based on OpenCL

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Feng, Y.; Chen, K.; Deng, H.; Wang, F.; Mei, Y.; Wei, S. L.; Dai, W.; Yang, Q. P.; Liu, Y. B.; Wu, J. P.

2017-03-01

It's urgent to carry out high-performance data processing with a single machine in the development of astronomical software. However, due to the different configuration of the machine, traditional programming techniques such as multi-threading, and CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture)+GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) have obvious limitations in portability and seamlessness between different operation systems. The OpenCL (Open Computing Language) used in the development of MUSER (MingantU SpEctral Radioheliograph) data processing system is introduced. And the Högbom CLEAN algorithm is re-implemented into parallel CLEAN algorithm by the Python language and PyOpenCL extended package. The experimental results show that the CLEAN algorithm based on OpenCL has approximately equally operating efficiency compared with the former CLEAN algorithm based on CUDA. More important, the data processing in merely CPU (Central Processing Unit) environment of this system can also achieve high performance, which has solved the problem of environmental dependence of CUDA+GPU. Overall, the research improves the adaptability of the system with emphasis on performance of MUSER image clean computing. In the meanwhile, the realization of OpenCL in MUSER proves its availability in scientific data processing. In view of the high-performance computing features of OpenCL in heterogeneous environment, it will probably become the preferred technology in the future high-performance astronomical software development.

Virtual Manufacturing Techniques Designed and Applied to Manufacturing Activities in the Manufacturing Integration and Technology Branch

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Shearrow, Charles A.

1999-01-01

One of the identified goals of EM3 is to implement virtual manufacturing by the time the year 2000 has ended. To realize this goal of a true virtual manufacturing enterprise the initial development of a machinability database and the infrastructure must be completed. This will consist of the containment of the existing EM-NET problems and developing machine, tooling, and common materials databases. To integrate the virtual manufacturing enterprise with normal day to day operations the development of a parallel virtual manufacturing machinability database, virtual manufacturing database, virtual manufacturing paradigm, implementation/integration procedure, and testable verification models must be constructed. Common and virtual machinability databases will include the four distinct areas of machine tools, available tooling, common machine tool loads, and a materials database. The machine tools database will include the machine envelope, special machine attachments, tooling capacity, location within NASA-JSC or with a contractor, and availability/scheduling. The tooling database will include available standard tooling, custom in-house tooling, tool properties, and availability. The common materials database will include materials thickness ranges, strengths, types, and their availability. The virtual manufacturing databases will consist of virtual machines and virtual tooling directly related to the common and machinability databases. The items to be completed are the design and construction of the machinability databases, virtual manufacturing paradigm for NASA-JSC, implementation timeline, VNC model of one bridge mill and troubleshoot existing software and hardware problems with EN4NET. The final step of this virtual manufacturing project will be to integrate other production sites into the databases bringing JSC's EM3 into a position of becoming a clearing house for NASA's digital manufacturing needs creating a true virtual manufacturing enterprise.

Optimizing Irregular Applications for Energy and Performance on the Tilera Many-core Architecture

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Chavarría-Miranda, Daniel; Panyala, Ajay R.; Halappanavar, Mahantesh

Optimizing applications simultaneously for energy and performance is a complex problem. High performance, parallel, irregular applications are notoriously hard to optimize due to their data-dependent memory accesses, lack of structured locality and complex data structures and code patterns. Irregular kernels are growing in importance in applications such as machine learning, graph analytics and combinatorial scientific computing. Performance- and energy-efficient implementation of these kernels on modern, energy efficient, multicore and many-core platforms is therefore an important and challenging problem. We present results from optimizing two irregular applications { the Louvain method for community detection (Grappolo), and high-performance conjugate gradient (HPCCG) {more » on the Tilera many-core system. We have significantly extended MIT's OpenTuner auto-tuning framework to conduct a detailed study of platform-independent and platform-specific optimizations to improve performance as well as reduce total energy consumption. We explore the optimization design space along three dimensions: memory layout schemes, compiler-based code transformations, and optimization of parallel loop schedules. Using auto-tuning, we demonstrate whole node energy savings of up to 41% relative to a baseline instantiation, and up to 31% relative to manually optimized variants.« less

High-Performance I/O: HDF5 for Lattice QCD

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Kurth, Thorsten; Pochinsky, Andrew; Sarje, Abhinav

2015-01-01

Practitioners of lattice QCD/QFT have been some of the primary pioneer users of the state-of-the-art high-performance-computing systems, and contribute towards the stress tests of such new machines as soon as they become available. As with all aspects of high-performance-computing, I/O is becoming an increasingly specialized component of these systems. In order to take advantage of the latest available high-performance I/O infrastructure, to ensure reliability and backwards compatibility of data files, and to help unify the data structures used in lattice codes, we have incorporated parallel HDF5 I/O into the SciDAC supported USQCD software stack. Here we present the design andmore » implementation of this I/O framework. Our HDF5 implementation outperforms optimized QIO at the 10-20% level and leaves room for further improvement by utilizing appropriate dataset chunking.« less

A video event trigger for high frame rate, high resolution video technology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Williams, Glenn L.

1991-12-01

When video replaces film the digitized video data accumulates very rapidly, leading to a difficult and costly data storage problem. One solution exists for cases when the video images represent continuously repetitive 'static scenes' containing negligible activity, occasionally interrupted by short events of interest. Minutes or hours of redundant video frames can be ignored, and not stored, until activity begins. A new, highly parallel digital state machine generates a digital trigger signal at the onset of a video event. High capacity random access memory storage coupled with newly available fuzzy logic devices permits the monitoring of a video image stream for long term or short term changes caused by spatial translation, dilation, appearance, disappearance, or color change in a video object. Pretrigger and post-trigger storage techniques are then adaptable for archiving the digital stream from only the significant video images.

High-Performance I/O: HDF5 for Lattice QCD

DOE PAGES

Kurth, Thorsten; Pochinsky, Andrew; Sarje, Abhinav; ...

2017-05-09

Practitioners of lattice QCD/QFT have been some of the primary pioneer users of the state-of-the-art high-performance-computing systems, and contribute towards the stress tests of such new machines as soon as they become available. As with all aspects of high-performance-computing, I/O is becoming an increasingly specialized component of these systems. In order to take advantage of the latest available high-performance I/O infrastructure, to ensure reliability and backwards compatibility of data files, and to help unify the data structures used in lattice codes, we have incorporated parallel HDF5 I/O into the SciDAC supported USQCD software stack. Here we present the design andmore » implementation of this I/O framework. Our HDF5 implementation outperforms optimized QIO at the 10-20% level and leaves room for further improvement by utilizing appropriate dataset chunking.« less

Particle Laden Turbulence in a Radiation Environment Using a Portable High Preformace Solver Based on the Legion Runtime System

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Torres, Hilario; Iaccarino, Gianluca

2017-11-01

Soleil-X is a multi-physics solver being developed at Stanford University as a part of the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program II. Our goal is to conduct high fidelity simulations of particle laden turbulent flows in a radiation environment for solar energy receiver applications as well as to demonstrate our readiness to effectively utilize next generation Exascale machines. The novel aspect of Soleil-X is that it is built upon the Legion runtime system to enable easy portability to different parallel distributed heterogeneous architectures while also being written entirely in high-level/high-productivity languages (Ebb and Regent). An overview of the Soleil-X software architecture will be given. Results from coupled fluid flow, Lagrangian point particle tracking, and thermal radiation simulations will be presented. Performance diagnostic tools and metrics corresponding the the same cases will also be discussed. US Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration.

A video event trigger for high frame rate, high resolution video technology

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Williams, Glenn L.

1991-01-01

When video replaces film the digitized video data accumulates very rapidly, leading to a difficult and costly data storage problem. One solution exists for cases when the video images represent continuously repetitive 'static scenes' containing negligible activity, occasionally interrupted by short events of interest. Minutes or hours of redundant video frames can be ignored, and not stored, until activity begins. A new, highly parallel digital state machine generates a digital trigger signal at the onset of a video event. High capacity random access memory storage coupled with newly available fuzzy logic devices permits the monitoring of a video image stream for long term or short term changes caused by spatial translation, dilation, appearance, disappearance, or color change in a video object. Pretrigger and post-trigger storage techniques are then adaptable for archiving the digital stream from only the significant video images.

Cylindrical Vector Beams for Rapid Polarization-Dependent Measurements in Atomic Systems

DTIC Science & Technology

2011-12-05

www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=oe-18-24-25035. 16. S. Tripathi and K. C. Toussaint, Jr., “Rapid Mueller matrix polarimetry based on parallelized...optical trapping [11], atom guiding [12], laser machining [13], charged particle acceleration [14,15], and polarimetry [16]. Yet despite numerous

Three-Point Gear/Lead Screw Positioning

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Calco, Frank S.

1993-01-01

Triple-ganged-lead-screw positioning mechanism drives movable plate toward or away from fixed plate and keeps plates parallel to each other. Designed for use in tuning microwave resonant cavity. Other potential applications include adjustable bed plates and cantilever tail stocks in machine tools, adjustable platforms for optical equipment, and lifting platforms.

Parallel Compilation on Virtual Machines in a Development Cloud Environment

DTIC Science & Technology

2013-09-01

the potential impact of a possible course of action. 1-2 2. Approach We performed a simple experiment to determine whether the multiple CPUs...PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESSES 8. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER D-4996 H13 -001206 Institute for Defense Analyses 4850 Mark

The Harmonic Sieve: A Novel Application of Fourier Analysis to Machine Learning Theory and Practice.

DTIC Science & Technology

1995-08-23

1987. [Ros62] F. Rosenblatt. Principles of Neurodynamics : Perceptrons and the Theory of Brain Mechanisms. Spartan Books, 1962. [RHW86] D. E...editors, Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Micro structures of Cognition , volume 1, chapter 8, pages 318-362. MIT Press, 1986