Interactive High Performance Volume Rendering

This thesis is about Direct Volume Rendering on high performance computing systems. As direct rendering methods do not create a lower-dimensional geometric representation, the whole scientific dataset must be kept in memory. Thus, this family of algorithms has a tremendous resource demand. Direct Volume Rendering algorithms in general are well suited to be implemented for dedicated graphics hardware. Nevertheless, high performance computing systems often do not provide resources for hardware accelerated rendering, so that the visualization algorithm must be implemented for the available general-purpose hardware. Ever growing datasets that imply copying large amounts of data from the compute system to the workstation of the scientist, and the need to review intermediate simulation results, make porting Direct Volume Rendering to high performance computing systems highly relevant. The contribution of this thesis is twofold. As part of the first contribution, after devising a software architecture for general implementations of Direct Volume Rendering on highly parallel platforms, parallelization issues and implementation details for various modern architectures are discussed. The contribution results in a highly parallel implementation that tackles several platforms. The second contribution is concerned with the display phase of the “Distributed Volume Rendering Pipeline”. Rendering on a high performance computing system typically implies displaying the rendered result at a remote location. This thesis presents a remote rendering technique that is capable of hiding latency and can thus be used in an interactive environment

A review of modeling approaches in activated sludge systems

The feasibility of using models to understand processes, predict and/or simulate, control, monitor and optimize WasteWater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) has been explored by a number of researchers. Mathematical modeling provides a powerful tool for design, operational assistance, forecast future behavior and control. A good model not only elucidates a better understanding of the complicated biological and chemical fundamentals but is also essential for process design, process start-up, dynamics predictions, process control and process optimization. This paper reviews developments and the application of different modeling approaches to wastewater treatment plants, especially activated sludge systems and processes therein in the last decade. In addition, we present an opinion on the wider wastewater treatment related research issues that need to be addressed through modeling.Key words: Mathematical modeling, water, wastewater, wastewater treatment plants, activated sludge systems

Proceedings, MSVSCC 2015

The Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center (VMASC) of Old Dominion University hosted the 2015 Modeling, Simulation, & Visualization Student capstone Conference on April 16th. The Capstone Conference features students in Modeling and Simulation, undergraduates and graduate degree programs, and fields from many colleges and/or universities. Students present their research to an audience of fellow students, faculty, judges, and other distinguished guests. For the students, these presentations afford them the opportunity to impart their innovative research to members of the M&S community from academic, industry, and government backgrounds. Also participating in the conference are faculty and judges who have volunteered their time to impart direct support to their students’ research, facilitate the various conference tracks, serve as judges for each of the tracks, and provide overall assistance to this conference. 2015 marks the ninth year of the VMASC Capstone Conference for Modeling, Simulation and Visualization. This year our conference attracted a number of fine student written papers and presentations, resulting in a total of 51 research works that were presented. This year’s conference had record attendance thanks to the support from the various different departments at Old Dominion University, other local Universities, and the United States Military Academy, at West Point. We greatly appreciated all of the work and energy that has gone into this year’s conference, it truly was a highly collaborative effort that has resulted in a very successful symposium for the M&S community and all of those involved. Below you will find a brief summary of the best papers and best presentations with some simple statistics of the overall conference contribution. Followed by that is a table of contents that breaks down by conference track category with a copy of each included body of work. Thank you again for your time and your contribution as this conference is designed to continuously evolve and adapt to better suit the authors and M&S supporters. Dr.Yuzhong Shen Graduate Program Director, MSVE Capstone Conference Chair John ShullGraduate Student, MSVE Capstone Conference Student Chai

HPC-enabling technologies for high-fidelity combustion simulations

With the increase in computational power in the last decade and the forthcoming Exascale supercomputers, a new horizon in computational modelling and simulation is envisioned in combustion science. Considering the multiscale and multiphysics characteristics of turbulent reacting flows, combustion simulations are considered as one of the most computationally demanding applications running on cutting-edge supercomputers. Exascale computing opens new frontiers for the simulation of combustion systems as more realistic conditions can be achieved with high-fidelity methods. However, an efficient use of these computing architectures requires methodologies that can exploit all levels of parallelism. The efficient utilization of the next generation of supercomputers needs to be considered from a global perspective, that is, involving physical modelling and numerical methods with methodologies based on High-Performance Computing (HPC) and hardware architectures. This review introduces recent developments in numerical methods for large-eddy simulations (LES) and direct-numerical simulations (DNS) to simulate combustion systems, with focus on the computational performance and algorithmic capabilities. Due to the broad scope, a first section is devoted to describe the fundamentals of turbulent combustion, which is followed by a general description of state-of-the-art computational strategies for solving these problems. These applications require advanced HPC approaches to exploit modern supercomputers, which is addressed in the third section. The increasing complexity of new computing architectures, with tightly coupled CPUs and GPUs, as well as high levels of parallelism, requires new parallel models and algorithms exposing the required level of concurrency. Advances in terms of dynamic load balancing, vectorization, GPU acceleration and mesh adaptation have permitted to achieve highly-efficient combustion simulations with data-driven methods in HPC environments. Therefore, dedicated sections covering the use of high-order methods for reacting flows, integration of detailed chemistry and two-phase flows are addressed. Final remarks and directions of future work are given at the end. }The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme under the CoEC project, grant agreement No. 952181 and the CoE RAISE project grant agreement no. 951733.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Optimization Techniques for Mapping Algorithms and Applications onto CUDA GPU Platforms and CPU-GPU Heterogeneous Platforms

An emerging trend in processor architecture seems to indicate the doubling of the number of cores per chip every two years with same or decreased clock speed. Of particular interest to this thesis is the class of many-core processors, which are becoming more attractive due to their high performance, low cost, and low power consumption. The main goal of this dissertation is to develop optimization techniques for mapping algorithms and applications onto CUDA GPUs and CPU-GPU heterogeneous platforms. The Fast Fourier transform (FFT) constitutes a fundamental tool in computational science and engineering, and hence a GPU-optimized implementation is of paramount importance. We first study the mapping of the 3D FFT onto the recent, CUDA GPUs and develop a new approach that minimizes the number of global memory accesses and overlaps the computations along the different dimensions. We obtain some of the fastest known implementations for the computation of multi-dimensional FFT. We then present a highly multithreaded FFT-based direct Poisson solver that is optimized for the recent NVIDIA GPUs. In addition to the massive multithreading, our algorithm carefully manages the multiple layers of the memory hierarchy so that all global memory accesses are coalesced into 128-bytes device memory transactions. As a result, we have achieved up to 375GFLOPS with a bandwidth of 120GB/s on the GTX 480. We further extend our methodology to deal with CPU-GPU based heterogeneous platforms for the case when the input is too large to fit on the GPU global memory. We develop optimization techniques for memory-bound, and computation-bound application. The main challenge here is to minimize data transfer between the CPU memory and the device memory and to overlap as much as possible these transfers with kernel execution. For memory-bounded applications, we achieve a near-peak effective PCIe bus bandwidth, 9-10GB/s and performance as high as 145 GFLOPS for multi-dimensional FFT computations and for solving the Poisson equation. We extend our CPU-GPU based software pipeline to a computation-bound application-DGEMM, and achieve the illusion of a memory of the CPU memory size and a computation throughput similar to a pure GPU

XSEDE: eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment Third Quarter 2012 Report

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world. It is an integrated cyberinfrastructure ecosystem with singular interfaces for allocations, support, and other key services that researchers can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise.This a report of project activities and highlights from the third quarter of 2012.National Science Foundation, OCI-105357

RSME 2011. Transfer and Industrial Mathematics. Proceedings of the RSME Conference on Transfer and Industrial Mathematics. Santiago de Compostela, July 12-14, 2011

[EN] The RSME Conference on Transfer and Industrial Mathematics is supported by the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society, a scientific society for the promotion of mathematics and its applications as well as the encouragement of research and teaching at all educational levels. The three-day conference presents successful experiences in the field of mathematical knowledge transfer to industry and focuses on the following issues: — Showing how collaboration with industry has opened up new lines of research in the field of mathematics providing high quality contributions to international journals and encouraging the development of doctoral theses. — How the promotion of existing infrastructures has contributed to enhance the transfer of mathematical knowledge to industry. — The presentation of postgraduate programs offering training in mathematics with industrial applications. The conference includes talks from researchers and industry representatives who present their different points of view and experiences with regards to the transfer of mathematical knowledge to industry

Software for Exascale Computing - SPPEXA 2016-2019

This open access book summarizes the research done and results obtained in the second funding phase of the Priority Program 1648 "Software for Exascale Computing" (SPPEXA) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) presented at the SPPEXA Symposium in Dresden during October 21-23, 2019. In that respect, it both represents a continuation of Vol. 113 in Springer’s series Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, the corresponding report of SPPEXA’s first funding phase, and provides an overview of SPPEXA’s contributions towards exascale computing in today's sumpercomputer technology. The individual chapters address one or more of the research directions (1) computational algorithms, (2) system software, (3) application software, (4) data management and exploration, (5) programming, and (6) software tools. The book has an interdisciplinary appeal: scholars from computational sub-fields in computer science, mathematics, physics, or engineering will find it of particular interest