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Electron Turbulence at Nanoscale Junctions

Nano Letters

Bushong, Neil; Laros, James H.; Di Ventra, Massimiliano

Electron transport through a nanostructure can be characterized in part using concepts from classical fluid dynamics. Hence, it is natural to ask how far the analogy can be taken and whether the electron liquid can exhibit nonlinear dynamical effects such as turbulence. Here we present an ab initio study of the electron dynamics in nanojunctions which reveals that the latter indeed exhibits behavior quite similar to that of a classical fluid. In particular, we find that a transition from laminar to turbulent flow occurs with increasing current, corresponding to increasing Reynolds numbers. These findings reveal unexpected features of electron dynamics and shed new light on our understanding of transport properties of nanoscale systems.

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Experimental Demonstration of a Cheap and Accurate Phase Estimation

Physical Review Letters

Rudinger, Kenneth M.; Kimmel, Shelby; Lobser, Daniel L.; Maunz, Peter L.

We demonstrate an experimental implementation of robust phase estimation (RPE) to learn the phase of a single-qubit rotation on a trapped Yb+ ion qubit. We show this phase can be estimated with an uncertainty below 4×10-4 rad using as few as 176 total experimental samples, and our estimates exhibit Heisenberg scaling. Unlike standard phase estimation protocols, RPE neither assumes perfect state preparation and measurement, nor requires access to ancillae. We crossvalidate the results of RPE with the more resource-intensive protocol of gate set tomography.

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Write-optimized skip lists

Proceedings of the ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems

Bender, Michael A.; Farach-Colton, Martin; Johnson, Rob; Mauras, Simon; Mayer, Tyler; Phillips, Cynthia A.; Xu, Helen

The skip list is an elegant dictionary data structure that is commonly deployed in RAM. A skip list with N elements supports searches, inserts, and deletes in O (log N) operations with high probability (w.h.p.) and range queries returning K elements in O(log N + K) operations w.h.p. A seemingly natural way to generalize the skip list to external memory with block size B is to "promote" with probability 1/B, rather than 1/2. However, there are practical and theoretical obstacles to getting the skip list to retain its efficient performance, space bounds, and high-probability guarantees. We give an external-memory skip list that achieves write-optimized bounds. That is, for 0 < ϵ < 1, range queries take O(logBϵ N + K/B) I/Os w.h.p. and insertions and deletions take O((logBϵ N)/B1-ϵ) amortized I/Os w.h.p. Our write-optimized skip list inherits the virtue of simplicity from RAM skip lists. Moreover, it matches or beats the asymptotic bounds of prior write-optimized data structures such as Bϵ trees or LSM trees. These data structures are deployed in high-performance databases and file systems. The main technical challenge in proving our bounds comes from the fact that there are so few levels in the skip list, an aspect of the data structure that is essential to getting strong external-memory bounds. We use extremal-graph coloring to show that it is possible to decompose paths in the skip list into uncorrelated groups, regardless of the insertion/deletion pattern. Thus, we achieve our bounds by averaging over these uncorrelated paths rather than by averaging over uncorrelated levels, as in the standard skip list.

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XVis: Visualization for the Extreme-Scale Scientific-Computation Ecosystem: Mid-year report FY17 Q2

Moreland, Kenneth D.; Pugmire, David; Rogers, David; Childs, Hank; Ma, Kwan-Liu; Geveci, Berk

The XVis project brings together the key elements of research to enable scientific discovery at extreme scale. Scientific computing will no longer be purely about how fast computations can be performed. Energy constraints, processor changes, and I/O limitations necessitate significant changes in both the software applications used in scientific computation and the ways in which scientists use them. Components for modeling, simulation, analysis, and visualization must work together in a computational ecosystem, rather than working independently as they have in the past. This project provides the necessary research and infrastructure for scientific discovery in this new computational ecosystem by addressing four interlocking challenges: emerging processor technology, in situ integration, usability, and proxy analysis.

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Enabling Diverse Software Stacks on Supercomputers using High Performance Virtual Clusters

Younge, Andrew J.; Pedretti, Kevin; Grant, Ryan; Brightwell, Ron

While large-scale simulations have been the hallmark of the High Performance Computing (HPC) community for decades, Large Scale Data Analytics (LSDA) workloads are gaining attention within the scientific community not only as a processing component to large HPC simulations, but also as standalone scientific tools for knowledge discovery. With the path towards Exascale, new HPC runtime systems are also emerging in a way that differs from classical distributed com- puting models. However, system software for such capabilities on the latest extreme-scale DOE supercomputing needs to be enhanced to more appropriately support these types of emerging soft- ware ecosystems. In this paper, we propose the use of Virtual Clusters on advanced supercomputing resources to enable systems to support not only HPC workloads, but also emerging big data stacks. Specifi- cally, we have deployed the KVM hypervisor within Cray's Compute Node Linux on a XC-series supercomputer testbed. We also use libvirt and QEMU to manage and provision VMs directly on compute nodes, leveraging Ethernet-over-Aries network emulation. To our knowledge, this is the first known use of KVM on a true MPP supercomputer. We investigate the overhead our solution using HPC benchmarks, both evaluating single-node performance as well as weak scaling of a 32-node virtual cluster. Overall, we find single node performance of our solution using KVM on a Cray is very efficient with near-native performance. However overhead increases by up to 20% as virtual cluster size increases, due to limitations of the Ethernet-over-Aries bridged network. Furthermore, we deploy Apache Spark with large data analysis workloads in a Virtual Cluster, ef- fectively demonstrating how diverse software ecosystems can be supported by High Performance Virtual Clusters.

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Percept User Manual

Carnes, Brian C.; Kennon, Stephen

This document is the main user guide for the Sierra/Percept capabilities including the mesh_adapt and mesh_transfer tools. Basic capabilities for uniform mesh refinement (UMR) and mesh transfers are discussed. Examples are used to provide illustration. Future versions of this manual will include more advanced features such as geometry and mesh smoothing. Additionally, all the options for the mesh_adapt code will be described in detail. Capabilities for local adaptivity in the context of offline adaptivity will also be included. This page intentionally left blank.

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USACM Thematic Workshop On Uncertainty Quantification And Data-Driven Modeling

Stewart, James R.

The USACM Thematic Workshop on Uncertainty Quantification and Data-Driven Modeling was held on March 23-24, 2017, in Austin, TX. The organizers of the technical program were James R. Stewart of Sandia National Laboratories and Krishna Garikipati of University of Michigan. The administrative organizer was Ruth Hengst, who serves as Program Coordinator for the USACM. The organization of this workshop was coordinated through the USACM Technical Thrust Area on Uncertainty Quantification and Probabilistic Analysis. The workshop website (http://uqpm2017.usacm.org) includes the presentation agenda as well as links to several of the presentation slides (permission to access the presentations was granted by each of those speakers, respectively). Herein, this final report contains the complete workshop program that includes the presentation agenda, the presentation abstracts, and the list of posters.

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Embedded ensemble propagation for improving performance, portability, and scalability of uncertainty quantification on emerging computational architectures

SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing

Phipps, Eric T.; D'Elia, Marta D.; Edwards, Harold C.; Hoemmen, Mark F.; Hu, Jonathan J.; Rajamanickam, Sivasankaran R.

In this study, quantifying simulation uncertainties is a critical component of rigorous predictive simulation. A key component of this is forward propagation of uncertainties in simulation input data to output quantities of interest. Typical approaches involve repeated sampling of the simulation over the uncertain input data, and can require numerous samples when accurately propagating uncertainties from large numbers of sources. Often simulation processes from sample to sample are similar and much of the data generated from each sample evaluation could be reused. We explore a new method for implementing sampling methods that simultaneously propagates groups of samples together in an embedded fashion, which we call embedded ensemble propagation. We show how this approach takes advantage of properties of modern computer architectures to improve performance by enabling reuse between samples, reducing memory bandwidth requirements, improving memory access patterns, improving opportunities for fine-grained parallelization, and reducing communication costs. We describe a software technique for implementing embedded ensemble propagation based on the use of C++ templates and describe its integration with various scientific computing libraries within Trilinos. We demonstrate improved performance, portability and scalability for the approach applied to the simulation of partial differential equations on a variety of CPU, GPU, and accelerator architectures, including up to 131,072 cores on a Cray XK7 (Titan).

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The Portals 4.1 Network Programming Interface

Barrett, Brian; Brightwell, Ronald B.; Grant, Ryan E.; Hemmert, Karl S.; Laros, James H.; Wheeler, Kyle; Underwood, Keith; Riesen, Rolf; Maccabe, Arthur B.; Hudson, Trammel

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 tar geted to the next generation of machines employing advanced network interface architectures that support enh anced offload capabilities.

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Results 4001–4100 of 9,998
Results 4001–4100 of 9,998