Analyzing Trajectory Gaps for Possible Rendezvous: A Summary of Results

Given trajectory data with gaps, we investigate methods to identify possible rendezvous regions. Societal applications include improving maritime safety and regulations. The challenges come from two aspects. If trajectory data are not available around the rendezvous then either linear or shortest-path interpolation may fail to detect the possible rendezvous. Furthermore, the problem is computationally expensive due to the large number of gaps and associated trajectories. In this paper, we first use the plane sweep algorithm as a baseline. Then we propose a new filtering framework using the concept of a space-time grid. Experimental results and case study on real-world maritime trajectory data show that the proposed approach substantially improves the Area Pruning Efficiency over the baseline technique

Coupling methods for non-matching meshes through distributed Lagrange multipliers

Nature and engineering commonly present multi-physics problems, i.e., complex systems involving a number of mutually interacting subsystems that can be modelled by (non linearly coupled) Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). As a tool to numerically model such problems, we study the fictitious domain method with Lagrange multipliers. After introducing an example model problem, a constrained Poisson equation, where the constraint is applied either to a codimension one domain or to a codimension zero domain, we deal with the technical problems related to the implementation of the coupled system, with a focus on the computation of coupling matrices, and the numerical coupling between arbitrarily distributed non-matching meshes. To conclude, we use the fictitious domain method to study composites materials, in particular fiber reinforced materials. After introducing the necessary tools of continuum mechanics and differential geometry, we develop a full three-dimensional model, where the effect of the fibers is imposed through a distributed Lagrange multiplier approach. We study our model using inf-sup conditions from Mixed Finite Elements, and derive a one-dimensional model where the coupling is achieved introducing some additional modellistic hypotheses

Reducing communication in sparse solvers

Sparse matrix operations dominate the cost of many scientific applications. In parallel, the performance and scalability of these operations is limited by irregular point-to-point communication. Multiple methods are investigated throughout this dissertation for reducing the cost associated with communication throughout sparse matrix operations. Algorithmic changes reduce communication requirements, but also affect accuracy of the operation, leading to reduced convergence of scientific codes. We investigate a method of systematically removing relatively small non-zeros throughout an algebraic multigrid hierarchy, yielding significant reductions to the cost of sparse matrix-vector multiplication that outweigh affects of reduced accuracy of the multiplication. Therefore, the reduction in per-iteration communication costs outweigh the cost of extra solver iterations. As a result, sparsification yields improvement of both the performance and scalability of algebraic multigrid. Alterations to the parallel implementation of MPI communication also yield reduced costs with no effect on accuracy. We investigate methods of agglomerating messages on-node before injecting into the network, reducing the amount of costly inter-node communication. This node-aware communication yields improvements to both performance and scalability of matrix operations, particularly in strong scaling studies. Furthermore, we show an improvement in the cost of algebraic multigrid as a result of reduced communication costs in sparse matrix operations. Finally, performance models can be used to analyze the costs of matrix operations, indicating the source of dominant communication costs, such as initializing messages or transporting bytes of data. We investigate methods of improving traditional performance models of irregular point-to-point communication through the addition of node-awareness, queue search costs, and network contention penalties

Parallel, distributed-memory implementation of a sparse-grid method for time-dependent advection-diffusion problems

A workable approach for modernizing existing software into parallel/distributed applications is through coarse-grain restructuring. If, for instance, entire subroutines of legacy code can be plugged into a new structure, the investment required for the re-discovery of the d

A protocol reconfiguration and optimization system for MPI

Modern high performance computing (HPC) applications, for example adaptive mesh refinement and multi-physics codes, have dynamic communication characteristics which result in poor performance on current Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementations. The degraded application performance can be attributed to a mismatch between changing application requirements and static communication library functionality. To improve the performance of these applications, MPI libraries should change their protocol functionality in response to changing application requirements, and tailor their functionality to take advantage of hardware capabilities. This dissertation describes Protocol Reconfiguration and Optimization system for MPI (PRO-MPI), a framework for constructing profile-driven reconfigurable MPI libraries; these libraries use past application characteristics (profiles) to dynamically change their functionality to match the changing application requirements. The framework addresses the challenges of designing and implementing the reconfigurable MPI libraries, which include collecting and reasoning about application characteristics to drive the protocol reconfiguration and defining abstractions required for implementing these reconfigurations. Two prototype reconfigurable MPI implementations based on the framework - Open PRO-MPI and Cactus PRO-MPI - are also presented to demonstrate the utility of the framework. To demonstrate the effectiveness of reconfigurable MPI libraries, this dissertation presents experimental results to show the impact of using these libraries on the application performance. The results show that PRO-MPI improves the performance of important HPC applications and benchmarks. They also show that HyperCLaw performance improves by approximately 22% when exact profiles are available, and HyperCLaw performance improves by approximately 18% when only approximate profiles are available

A sampling-based approach for communication libraries auto-tuning

International audienceCommunication performance is a critical issue in HPC applications, and many solutions have been proposed on the literature (algorithmic, protocols, etc.) In the meantime, computing nodes become massively multicore, leading to a real imbalance between the number of communication sources and the number of physical communication resources. Thus it is now mandatory to share network boards between computation flows, and to take this sharing into account while performing communication optimizations. In previous papers, we have proposed a model and a framework for on-the-fly optimizations of multiplexed concurrent communication flows, and implemented this model in the \nm communication library. This library features optimization strategies able for example to aggregate several messages to reduce the number of packets emitted on the network, or to split messages to use several NICs at the same time. In this paper, we study the tuning of these dynamic optimization strategies. We show that some parameters and thresholds (\rdv threshold, aggregation packet size) depend on the actual hardware, both host and NICs. We propose and implement a method based on sampling of the actual hardware to auto-tune our strategies. Moreover, we show that multi-rail can greatly benefit from performance predictions. We propose an approach for multi-rail that dynamically balance the data between NICs using predictions based on sampling

Physics-based multiscale coupling for full core nuclear reactor simulation

Numerical simulation of nuclear reactors is a key technology in the quest for improvements in efficiency, safety, and reliability of both existing and future reactor designs. Historically, simulation of an entire reactor was accomplished by linking together multiple existing codes that each simulated a subset of the relevant multiphysics phenomena. Recent advances in the MOOSE (Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment) framework have enabled a new approach: multiple domain-specific applications, all built on the same software framework, are efficiently linked to create a cohesive application. This is accomplished with a flexible coupling capability that allows for a variety of different data exchanges to occur simultaneously on high performance parallel computational hardware. Examples based on the KAIST-3A benchmark core, as well as a simplified Westinghouse AP-1000 configuration, demonstrate the power of this new framework for tackling—in a coupled, multiscale manner—crucial reactor phenomena such as CRUD-induced power shift and fuel shuffle.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and EngineeringIdaho National Laboratory (Contract DE-AC07-05ID14517