PaPaS: A Portable, Lightweight, and Generic Framework for Parallel Parameter Studies

The current landscape of scientific research is widely based on modeling and simulation, typically with complexity in the simulation's flow of execution and parameterization properties. Execution flows are not necessarily straightforward since they may need multiple processing tasks and iterations. Furthermore, parameter and performance studies are common approaches used to characterize a simulation, often requiring traversal of a large parameter space. High-performance computers offer practical resources at the expense of users handling the setup, submission, and management of jobs. This work presents the design of PaPaS, a portable, lightweight, and generic workflow framework for conducting parallel parameter and performance studies. Workflows are defined using parameter files based on keyword-value pairs syntax, thus removing from the user the overhead of creating complex scripts to manage the workflow. A parameter set consists of any combination of environment variables, files, partial file contents, and command line arguments. PaPaS is being developed in Python 3 with support for distributed parallelization using SSH, batch systems, and C++ MPI. The PaPaS framework will run as user processes, and can be used in single/multi-node and multi-tenant computing systems. An example simulation using the BehaviorSpace tool from NetLogo and a matrix multiply using OpenMP are presented as parameter and performance studies, respectively. The results demonstrate that the PaPaS framework offers a simple method for defining and managing parameter studies, while increasing resource utilization.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, PEARC '18: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, July 22--26, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA, US

Heterogeneous hierarchical workflow composition

Workflow systems promise scientists an automated end-to-end path from hypothesis to discovery. However, expecting any single workflow system to deliver such a wide range of capabilities is impractical. A more practical solution is to compose the end-to-end workflow from more than one system. With this goal in mind, the integration of task-based and in situ workflows is explored, where the result is a hierarchical heterogeneous workflow composed of subworkflows, with different levels of the hierarchy using different programming, execution, and data models. Materials science use cases demonstrate the advantages of such heterogeneous hierarchical workflow composition.This work is a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center within the Joint Laboratory for Extreme-Scale Computing. This research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, under contract number DE-AC02- 06CH11357, program manager Laura Biven, and by the Spanish Government (SEV2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract TIN2015-65316-P), by Generalitat de Catalunya (contract 2014-SGR-1051).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Development and implementation of a LabVIEW based SCADA system for a meshed multi-terminal VSC-HVDC grid scaled platform

This project is oriented to the development of a Supervisory, Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) software to control and supervise electrical variables from a scaled platform that represents a meshed HVDC grid employing National Instruments hardware and LabVIEW logic environment. The objective is to obtain real time visualization of DC and AC electrical variables and a lossless data stream acquisition. The acquisition system hardware elements have been configured, tested and installed on the grid platform. The system is composed of three chassis, each inside of a VSC terminal cabinet, with integrated Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), one of them connected via PCI bus to a local processor and the rest too via Ethernet through a switch. Analogical acquisition modules were A/D conversion takes place are inserted into the chassis. A personal computer is used as host, screen terminal and storing space. There are two main access modes to the FPGAs through the real time system. It has been implemented a Scan mode VI to monitor all the grid DC signals and a faster FPGA access mode VI to monitor one converter AC and DC values. The FPGA application consists of two tasks running at different rates and a FIFO has been implemented to communicate between them without data loss. Multiple structures have been tested on the grid platform and evaluated, ensuring the compliance of previously established specifications, such as sampling and scanning rate, screen refreshment or possible data loss. Additionally a turbine emulator was implemented and tested in Labview for further testing

Simulation of Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees in Membrane Computing with P-Lingua and Automatic Programming

Methods based on Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs) have been widely used in robotics to solve motion planning problems. On the other hand, in the membrane computing framework, models based on Enzymatic Numerical P systems (ENPS) have been applied to robot controllers, but today there is a lack of planning algorithms based on membrane computing for robotics. With this motivation, we provide a variant of ENPS called Random Enzymatic Numerical P systems with Proteins and Shared Memory (RENPSM) addressed to implement RRT algorithms and we illustrate it by simulating the bidirectional RRT algorithm. This paper is an extension of [21]a. The software presented in [21] was an ad-hoc simulator, i.e, a tool for simulating computations of one and only one model that has been hard-coded. The main contribution of this paper with respect to [21] is the introduction of a novel solution for membrane computing simulators based on automatic programming. First, we have extended the P-Lingua syntax –a language to define membrane computing models– to write RENPSM models. Second, we have implemented a new parser based on Flex and Bison to read RENPSM models and produce source code in C language for multicore processors with OpenMP. Finally, additional experiments are presented.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad TIN2017-89842-

GRAPHICAL CONFIGURATION PROGRAMMING - THE STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION, CONSTRUCTION AND EVOLUTION OF SOFTWARE SYSTEMS USING GRAPHICS

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