Designed especially for neurobiologists, FluoRender is an interactive tool for multi-channel fluorescence microscopy data visualization and analysis.

BrainStimulator is a set of networks that are used in SCIRun to perform simulations of brain stimulation such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and magnetic transcranial stimulation (TMS).

Developing software tools for science has always been a central vision of the SCI Institute.

Scientific Computing

Numerical simulation of real-world phenomena provides fertile ground for building interdisciplinary relationships. The SCI Institute has a long tradition of building these relationships in a win-win fashion – a win for the theoretical and algorithmic development of numerical modeling and simulation techniques and a win for the discipline-specific science of interest. High-order and adaptive methods, uncertainty quantification, complexity analysis, and parallelization are just some of the topics being investigated by SCI faculty. These areas of computing are being applied to a wide variety of engineering applications ranging from fluid mechanics and solid mechanics to bioelectricity.

Martin Berzins

Parallel Computing
GPUs

Mike Kirby

Finite Element Methods
Uncertainty Quantification
GPUs

Valerio Pascucci

Scientific Data Management

Chris Johnson

Problem Solving Environments

Ross Whitaker

GPUs

Chuck Hansen

GPUs

Amir Arzani

Scientific machine learning
Data-driven fluid flow modeling

Funded Research Projects:

Optimal Approximation Algorithms in High Dimensions

Akil Narayan
The increasing power of modern computational hardware has enabled computer-based simulation of sophisticated mathematical models that resolve important physical phenomena in great detail. With the advent of these computational abilities has come an increased demand to include more complex physical interactions in the models, and thus an increased strain on computational resources. Modern engineering design utilizes such models, and these design problems typically involve (1) numerous tunable parameters that affect reliability, cost, and failure, (2) uncertainty about external influences manifesting as randomness in the model, and (3) epistemic ignorance involving model form uncertainty. In realistic applications, the collection of these effects leads to predictions that depend on a cumulatively high-dimensional parameter. This project focuses on development and deployment of novel, near-optimal experimental design and sampling algorithms for the accurate and efficient simulation of physical models parameterized by high-dimensional inputs. The work of this project involves the application of recently developed approximation theory results in the computational arena, targeted advances that extend theoretical mathematics for computational purposes, and the development and implementation of algorithms for large-scale computations.

The technical aspects of this project are designed to provide feasible computational algorithms and concrete mathematical guarantees for tasks in high-dimensional approximation. The three major core components for the completion of this task involve the design, implementation, and analysis of algorithms that leverage optimality characteristics of (1) random and deterministic experimental and sampling design, (2) computational algorithms for identifying efficient sampling schemes, and (3) strategies and techniques for emerging approximation paradigms such as sparse approximation and dimension reduction. A crosscutting theme is application of these methods to problems of modern interest in scientific computing. This project involves fundamental contributions to the fields of applied approximation theory and computational approximation methods through the development of applications-oriented sampling designs with provable near-optimality. Theoretical investigations of this project connect classical techniques in approximation and linear algebra with emerging algorithms in data reduction and reduced order modeling. The implementation of these algorithms will significantly enhance theoretical understanding and computational feasibility for goal-oriented design, parameter study and reduction, sparse and compressive representations, model verification and calibration, and data-driven simulations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence Pilot Study

Ewa Deelman, Valerio Pascucci, Anirban Mandal, Jaroslaw Nabrzyski, Robert Ricci
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States

NSF's major multi-user research facilities (large facilities) are sophisticated research instruments and platforms - such as large telescopes, interferometers and distributed sensor arrays - that serve diverse scientific disciplines from astronomy and physics to geoscience and biological science. Large facilities are increasingly dependent on advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) - computing, data and software systems, networking, and associated human capital - to enable broad delivery and analysis of facility-generated data. As a result of these cyber infrastructure tools, scientists and the public gain new insights into fundamental questions about the structure and history of the universe, the world we live in today, and how our plants and animals may change in the coming decades. The goal of this pilot project is to develop a model for a Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence (CI CoE) that facilitates community building and sharing and applies knowledge of best practices and innovative solutions for facility CI.

The pilot project will explore how such a center would facilitate CI improvements for existing facilities and for the design of new facilities that exploit advanced CI architecture designs and leverage establish tools and solutions. The pilot project will also catalyze a key function of an eventual CI CoE - to provide a forum for exchange of experience and knowledge among CI experts. The project will also gather best practices for large facilities, with the aim of enhancing individual facility CI efforts in the broader CI context. The discussion forum and planning effort for a future CI CoE will also address training and workforce development by expanding the pool of skilled facility CI experts and forging career paths for CI professionals. The result of this work will be a strategic plan for a CI CoE that will be evaluated and refined through community interactions: workshops and direct engagement with the facilities and the broader CI community.

This project is being supported by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering and the Division of Emerging Frontiers in the Directorate for Biological Sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Efficiency and Productivity through Artificial Intelligence

Valerio Pascucci
Efficient cyberinfrastructure (advanced computing, data, software and networking infrastructure) is a critical component of the support that NSF provides for new discoveries in science and engineering. Cyberinfrastructure is complex and traditionally requires years of human hand-tuning to fully achieve maximal performance for scientific users. We propose to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a way to automatically and quickly optimize the performance and broadest use of recent NSF-supported advanced computing resources. Through this pilot effort our ultimate aim is to enable and accelerate scientific advances in widely diverse fields such as biology, chemistry, oceanography, materials science, climate modeling, and cosmology.

As the research cyberinfrastructure grows rapidly in scale and complexity, it is essential to integrate new technologies based on Machine Learning (ML) and AI to ensure that the investments in new hardware and software components result in proportional improvements in performance and capability. This project will undertake a transformative research activity targeting: (1) scaling ML algorithms to make them easily available to the scientific community; and (2) improving cyberinfrastructure efficiency through AI-based predictive models. This technical work will be complemented and informed by a community engagement effort to jointly catalog the state of the art and identify future challenges and opportunities in enabling a new smart cyberinfrastructure.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Robust and Scalable Multi-Fidelity Algorithms for Model-Based Predictions

Akil Narayan
Modern computational models are complex in nature: accurate predictions of physics require detailed and intensive computational resources. As such, development of accurate scientific models has been the area of research emphasis in recent decades. Today’s scientific models involve largescale simulation tools, often with many interdependent components, and sometimes requiring days to complete a single simulation. Adding to this complexity is the presence of uncertainty, which is often encoded into models via parameters or random variables. Any direct approach to analyze the impact of parametric variation on such expensive models is infeasible.
One approach to circumvent this limitation is to utilize hierarchies of models, each with differing computational costs and predictive fidelities. Research in the past few years has demonstrated that intelligent allocation of resources across this ensemble of models can produce predictions with much greater accuracy than concentrating all resources in a single model. Such multi-fidelity procedures hold the potential to optimally utilize ensembles of models to make predictions.

The main components of this proposed project address optimal resource allocation and robust and scalable model reduction, generation, and learning via low-rank multi-fidelity and multilevel procedures. The overall goal is the construction of surrogate models with accuracy guarantees that can be used in design optimization, inference, and general uncertainty quantification scenarios. The tasks associated with this project involve fundamental mathematical and algorithmic advances in low-rank multi-fidelity methods. Error certificates to ensure accuracy will be developed when possible. Kernel learning techniques will be employed to explore problem-dependent low-rank structure and optimize allocation of resources. Algorithmic methods to handle heterogeneous models, data, and parameter spaces will be developed resulting in a comprehensive framework for utilizing low-rank multi-fidelity methods.

The multi-fidelity procedures devised in this project will also aid in developing novel strategies for model comparison, ranking, discrimination, and genesis. Model comparison and ranking will enable development of a comprehensive multi-fidelity pipeline to automatically learn and update model hierarchies and fidelities. Model generation using the simulation data from a multi-fidelity pipeline allows the automated construction of model emulators that can more easily be explored to detect and exploit low-rank structure.

This project will explore usage of low-rank multi-fidelity methods in two main application areas. The first area is in robust design under uncertainty, which requires robust, accurate, and efficient forward model evaluations. The second area of application is in statistical inference, requiring computationally expensive exploration of posterior distributions. This project will demonstrate the utility of low-rank multi-fidelity methods in acceleration of robust design and inferential tasks. Problems addressed by the work in this project include simulations in topology optimization, nonlocal/fractional differential equation models, modeling of multi-physics solar power receivers, and supersonic channel flow.

UINTAH + HEDGEHOG -- Hybrid Task Graph Execution Library Development for Generalized Work Loads

Martin Berzins
The Overall Objective is to develop a new Uintah runtime environment that demonstrates a flexible approach for accommodating different task execution and state management strategies consistent with a starting point:

1. Uintah uses an asynchronous manytask (AMT) approach that has been shown to strong and weak scale to 256K cores with 16K GPUs on Titan and 768K cores on Mira, through its asynchronous adaptive and over-decomposition based runtime scheduler. This scheduler works on many different and diverse architectures, from many DOE and NSF leadership class machines to Chinas Sunway Tiahulight. In addition this AMT approach when combined with mesh coarsening allows for an efficient approach to resilience.

2. HTGS/Hedgehog is a high performance single node multi-CPU/GPU tasked based system developed at NIST. Internal state management and execution strategies at the level of a single node is maintained within an explicit task graph representation. HTGS/Hedgehog has produced good competitive results on a single node.

3. Demonstrating that the integration of two different task execution paradigms and the sharing of both local and global state can occur with minimal changes to either libraries.

The objective is to integrate the HTGS/Hedgehog Task Graph library into the Uintah Runtime. This new runtime would combine the global state management and multi-nodal execution characteristics of Uintah with the local single node execution facilities of HTGS/Hedgehog. This work would demonstrate and show how state management would be managed with these two different libraries. While the two libraries share many commonalities and architectural similarities, they are distinct in the underlying implementation. Understanding and developing a robust mechanism for sharing global and local state between the two libraries along with integrating the overall resource management strategies and task execution for multiple CPU/GPU architectures is the focus of this work.

The objectives will be carried out by first conducting feasibility studies between two different applications (3D structured grid application and an imaging analysis application) followed by the prototype implementation of new Uintah Scheduler that integrates the HTGS/Hedgehog library at the nodal level. The two different applications will be used demonstrate scalability and performance on both single node and multi-node systems. Finally, the proof-of-concept prototype Uintah Scheduler implementation will be transformed into a production level system in the third year of this effort.

Portable Applications Driven Approach to Scalability on Frontera and Future Exascale Systems

Martin Berzins
The present uncertainty in computer architectures requires software design to allow applications codes to both be able to scale across 20K to 100K nodes and to be able to run portably on a range of possible nodal architectures with a variety of processor technologies being involved, ranging from i86, ARM, GPU to possibly FPGAs. At the same time it isi important to use challenging applications to validate the software solutions and to ensure that they are realistic. This project led by Professor Martin Berzins will use the Frontera system to help address and demonstrate portability for an important class of engineering applications using the Uintah software.

Uintah software employs an asynchronous many task-based approach that has proved to be exceptionally robust at enabling complex engineering applications to run at scale on a broad range of architectures. As new and different architectures require not only the ability to execute tasks asynchronously but to deal with memory hierarchies and to execute efficiently on i86 architectures to GPUs and to a broad range of other possible architectures. Uintah use an approach based upon the Kokkos portability library that makes it possible to build a simple clean loop level interface that enables the loops themselves to execute efficiently on different architectures.

The work program will first port and evaluate existing Uintah architectures to Frontera and then consider new applications that apply the Uintah methodology to areas such as unstructured mesh calculations and particle methods applied to biomedical problems. The work program described here covers the application of these ideas to Frontera. The main effort will be through other funded projects, but any funding variability will be accomodated through an adaptive appropach to the applications space.

Collaborative Research: Detecting and Preventing Covid-19 with Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Machine Learning

Bao Wang
We are facing scientific challenges caused by the COVID-19, including detecting COVID-19 accurately and preventing its spread efficiently. Cutting-edge machine learning technologies, especially modern deep learning arts, provide feasible avenues to resolve these challenges. Deep learning-based computational imaging algorithms facilitate accurate and rapid COVID-19 diagnosis; sequential modeling with recurrent neural networks or transformers enables accurate and real-time COVID-19 spread prediction. However, most existing black-box deep learning research on the COVID-19 is the alchemy of turning unstructured data into gold and based on systematic trial and error. The current deep learning-based COVID-19 research raises many untrustworthy issues, including unreliable diagnosis, data privacy sacrifice, and lack of interpretability. Lacking interpretable and reliable predictions puts substantial strains on practitioners to leverage deep learning approaches to detect and prevent COVID-19. Data privacy constraints bring us many unraveling challenges. Thus, developing trustworthy machine learning algorithms while preserving data privacy is crucial to detect and prevent COVID-19.

We are a team of researchers with different expertise and common research interests, who jointly seek to develop theoretically principled decentralized machine learning algorithms that can provide reliable predictions. Furthermore, we focus on applying these machine learning algorithms to accurately and rapidly diagnose COVID-19 patients and predict the virus spread. We propose a challenging but walkable path towards developing privacy-preserving machine learning algorithms to detect and prevent COVID-19. We will integrate our expertise synergistically to develop privacy-preserving decentralized machine learning algorithms with performance guarantees and a high-throughput and low-latency software package to accurately and rapidly detect COVID-19 and effectively prevent its spread. As such, we propose three interconnected thrusts to develop novel neural network architectures based on mathematical principles, efficient privacy-preserving decentralized optimization algorithms, algorithms for spatiotemporal data forecasting and medical image processing and analysis, and an integrated software package to assist fighting against the coronavirus. Each thrust contains multiple theoretical explorations and numerical validation.

Intellectual Merit:
The proposal's intellectual merit include: (i) development of robust and mathematically principled recurrent neural networks for accurate real-time spatio-temporal forecasting, (ii) development of novel efficient federated and decentralized machine learning algorithms with a performance guarantee, (iii) leveraging the stochastic differential equations theory to develop new privacy-preserving machine learning mechanisms, (iv) construction of new epidemiology models-principled recurrent neural networks with accurate and interpretable predictions, (v) development of trustworthy deep learning-based frameworks for COVID-19 diagnosis from multi-modal medical measurements.

Broader Impacts:
The broader impacts of this project are in applying the proposed algorithms and their analysis over a wide range of science and engineering disciplines, such as scientific and medical image analysis, epidemic forecasting, patient monitoring, and microscopic imaging. The projects shall train a diverse body of the graduate and undergraduate students at Michigan State University, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Utah through collaborative education and research activities in applied mathematics, statistics, computer science, data science, physics, and social science. The project also plans to have research activities involving under-represented students in three universities located in three states. Besides the interdisciplinary collaboration across other institutions, we also aim to establish industrial partnerships to extend the proposed project's impact. The developed software will be shared with the general public through Github.

Sub-Pilot-Scale Production of High-Value Products for U.S. Coals

Chris Johnson
The primary objectives of this project are to: 1) provide sub-pilot scale verification of lab-scale developments on the production of isotropic and mesophase coal-tar pitch (CTP) for carbon fiber production, using coals from five U.S. coal-producing regions (UT, WY, WV, AK, IL); 2) investigate the production of a high-value b-SiC byproduct using residual coal char from the tar production process, and 3) develop an extensive database and suite of tools for data analysis and economic modeling, to relate process conditions to product quality, to assess the economic viability of coals from different regions for producing specific high-value products.

The University of Utah will use a 0.5 ton/day rotary reactor to pyrolyze coals to produce tars suitable for upgrading to coal tar pitch. The same reactor technology will be used in a second stage to perform the tar upgrading to either mesophase or isotropic pitch, depending on the properties of the original coal. The University of Wyoming will spin the product pitch into carbon fiber, to assess fiber quality arising from different coals and from different processing conditions. The solid char byproduct from coal pyrolysis will be used by the University of Wyoming to produce b-SiC. The University of Utah will work with Marshall University to develop a novel database, coupled with detailed economic models and analysis tools, to provide a means for understanding correlations between coal properties, process conditions and product quality, to allow assessment of the potential economic viability of coals from different regions for producing specific high-value products. Access to these some of these computational tools will become available to the public through a web-based community portal.

This effort is a major step towards providing a low-cost carbon fiber product from coal for potential use in automotive and other important markets, and will also lead to new economic development opportunities for communities with coal-based economies.

Experimental Characterization and Modeling of Failure in Post-Buckled Composite Stiffened Panels with a Scarf Repair

Alliance for Multiscale Modeling of Electronic Materials for an Energy Efficient Army

Mike Kirby
The objective of this Alliance is to conduct fundamental research to create MSME to support development of future electronic materials and devices for the Army. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) envisions the MultiScale multidisciplinary Modeling of Electronic materials (MSME) Collaborative Research Alliance (CRA) which will bring together government, industrial, and academic institutions to undertake the fundamental research necessary to enable the quantitative understanding of electronic materials from the smallest to the largest relevant scales.

Augmented Design Through Analysis and Visualization Facilitating Better Designs and Enhanced Designers

In Situ Feature Extraction and Visualization from Discontinuous Galerkin Based High-Order Methods

Mike Kirby
The use of simulation science as a means of scientific inquiry is increasing at a tremendous rate. The process of mathematically modeling physical phenomena, estimating key modeling parameters, numerically approximating the solution, and computationally solving the resulting algorithm has inundated the scientific and engineering worlds, allowing for rapid advances in our understanding and utilization of the world around us. The efficacy of simulation science has been, in part, due to two critical components: (1) the identification and minimization of the error budget (e.g. modeling, discretization and uncertainty errors), and equally importantly, (2) evaluation mechanisms (such as visualization) by which the investigator assimilates the data produced through simulation. The latter allows for further refinement of the simulation science process (through model correction, increased numerical resolution, or algorithm debugging, etc.) and makes possible scientific statements about the physical phenomena being investigated.

Tremendous effort has been exerted over many decades in the pursuit of numerical methods that are both flexible and accurate, hence providing sufficient fidelity to be employed in the numerical solution of a large number of models, and sufficient analysis of accuracy to allow researchers to focus their attention on model refinement and uncertainty quantification. High-order finite element methods (also known as spectral/hp element methods), using either the continuous Galerkin or discontinuous Galerkin formulation, have reached a level of sophistication that allows them to be commonly applied to a diverse set of real-life engineering problems in computational solid mechanics, fluid dynamics, acoustics and electromagnetics. Many of the physical problems of interest are, unfortunately, not steady-state --- leading to simulations that must run for a long time (days, weeks and in some cases months). Thus, in the absence of creative solutions, datasets can easily consume all available storage and networking resources. Examples of such simulations within fluid dynamics include all simulations in which the fluid is in transition or fully turbulent. With regards to ARO interests, problems in turbo-machinery and rotorcraft, where aspects of the geometry are rotating and/or sliding past one other, fall into this category. High-order finite element methods are now beginning to be used to simulate these physical systems due to their inherent ability to capture complex structures (such as vortices) with little numerical dissipation and dispersion. The transient nature of these simulations complicates the data handling (post processing requires the time history) and renders single snap-shots of the solution insufficient to understand the time-varying nature of the physics.

Objective
Our research objectives are two-fold: (1) We will generate "high-order FEM" appropriate dimensionality reduction feature extraction methods such as vortex cores which can be accomplished as part of an in situ data processing pipeline. (2) Given the exploratory nature inherent in analyzing and visualizing transient phenomena, we may specify regions of interest in an in situ fashion within a simulation field based upon the visualization objective, extract and transmit the result of working on relevant high-order FEM information to our visualization system, and then reconstruct the visualization features of interest with the cognizance of V&V.

Publications in Scientific Computing:

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Crash Early, Crash Often, Explain Well: Practical Formal Correctness Checking of Million-core Problem Solving Environments for HPC
D.C.B. de Oliveira, Z. Rakamaric, G. Gopalakrishnan, A. Humphrey, Q. Meng, M. Berzins. In Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013), pp. (accepted). 2013.

While formal correctness checking methods have been deployed at scale in a number of important practical domains, we believe that such an experiment has yet to occur in the domain of high performance computing at the scale of a million CPU cores. This paper presents preliminary results from the Uintah Runtime Verification (URV) project that has been launched with this objective. Uintah is an asynchronous task-graph based problem-solving environment that has shown promising results on problems as diverse as fluid-structure interaction and turbulent combustion at well over 200K cores to date. Uintah has been tested on leading platforms such as Kraken, Keenland, and Titan consisting of multicore CPUs and GPUs, incorporates several innovative design features, and is following a roadmap for development well into the million core regime. The main results from the URV project to date are crystallized in two observations: (1) A diverse array of well-known ideas from lightweight formal methods and testing/observing HPC systems at scale have an excellent chance of succeeding. The real challenges are in finding out exactly which combinations of ideas to deploy, and where. (2) Large-scale problem solving environments for HPC must be designed such that they can be \"crashed early\" (at smaller scales of deployment) and \"crashed often\" (have effective ways of input generation and schedule perturbation that cause vulnerabilities to be attacked with higher probability). Furthermore, following each crash, one must \"explain well\" (given the extremely obscure ways in which an error finally manifests itself, we must develop ways to record information leading up to the crash in informative ways, to minimize offsite debugging burden). Our plans to achieve these goals and to measure our success are described. We also highlight some of the broadly applicable concepts and approaches.

Keywords: Uintah

Past, Present, and Future Scalability of the Uintah Software
M. Berzins, J. Schmidt, Q. Meng, A. Humphrey. In Proceedings of the Blue Waters Extreme Scaling Workshop 2012, pp. Article No.: 6. 2013.

The past, present and future scalability of the Uintah Software framework is considered with the intention of describing a successful approach to large scale parallelism and also considering how this approach may need to be extended for future architectures. Uintah allows the solution of large scale fluid-structure interaction problems through the use of fluid flow solvers coupled with particle-based solids methods. In addition Uintah uses a combustion solver to tackle a broad and challenging class of turbulent combustion problems. A unique feature of Uintah is that it uses an asynchronous task-based approach with automatic load balancing to solve complex problems using techniques such as adaptive mesh refinement. At present, Uintah is able to make full use of present-day massively parallel machines as the result of three phases of development over the past dozen years. These development phases have led to an adaptive scalable run-time system that is capable of independently scheduling tasks to multiple CPUs cores and GPUs on a node. In the case of solving incompressible low-mach number applications it is also necessary to use linear solvers and to consider the challenges of radiation problems. The approaches adopted to achieve present scalability are described and their extensions to possible future architectures is considered.

Keywords: netl, Uintah, parallelism, scalability, adaptive mesh refinement, linear equations

Data and Range-Bounded Polynomials in ENO Methods
M. Berzins. In Journal of Computational Science, Vol. 4, No. 1-2, pp. 62--70. 2013.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jocs.2012.04.006

Essentially Non-Oscillatory (ENO) methods and Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory (WENO) methods are of fundamental importance in the numerical solution of hyperbolic equations. A key property of such equations is that the solution must remain positive or lie between bounds. A modification of the polynomials used in ENO methods to ensure that the modified polynomials are either bounded by adjacent values (data-bounded) or lie within a specified range (range-bounded) is considered. It is shown that this approach helps both in the range boundedness in the preservation of extrema in the ENO polynomial solution.

Effect of deltoid tension and humeral version in reverse total shoulder arthroplasty: a biomechanical study
H.B. Henninger, Barg A, A.E. Anderson, K.N. Bachus, R.Z. Tashjian, R.T. Burks. In Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 483–-490. 2012.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jse.2011.01.040

Background
No clear recommendations exist regarding optimal humeral component version and deltoid tension in reverse total shoulder arthroplasty (TSA).

Materials and methods
A biomechanical shoulder simulator tested humeral versions (0°, 10°, 20° retroversion) and implant thicknesses (-3, 0, +3 mm from baseline) after reverse TSA in human cadavers. Abduction and external rotation ranges of motion as well as abduction and dislocation forces were quantified for native arms and arms implanted with 9 combinations of humeral version and implant thickness.

Results
Resting abduction angles increased significantly (up to 30°) after reverse TSA compared with native shoulders. With constant posterior cuff loads, native arms externally rotated 20°, whereas no external rotation occurred in implanted arms (20° net internal rotation). Humeral version did not affect rotational range of motion but did alter resting abduction. Abduction forces decreased 30% vs native shoulders but did not change when version or implant thickness was altered. Humeral center of rotation was shifted 17 mm medially and 12 mm inferiorly after implantation. The force required for lateral dislocation was 60% less than anterior and was not affected by implant thickness or version.

Conclusion
Reverse TSA reduced abduction forces compared with native shoulders and resulted in limited external rotation and abduction ranges of motion. Because abduction force was reduced for all implants, the choice of humeral version and implant thickness should focus on range of motion. Lateral dislocation forces were less than anterior forces; thus, levering and inferior/posterior impingement may be a more probable basis for dislocation (laterally) than anteriorly directed forces.

Keywords: Shoulder, reverse arthroplasty, deltoid tension, humeral version, biomechanical simulator

Extreme-Scale Visual Analytics
P.C. Wong, H. Shen, V. Pascucci. In IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 23--25. 2012.
DOI: 10.1109/MCG.2012.73

Extreme-scale visual analytics (VA) is about applying VA to extreme-scale data. The articles in this special issue examine advances related to extreme-scale VA problems, their analytical and computational challenges, and their real-world applications.

Atrial Fibrosis Quantified Using Late Gadolinium Enhancement MRI is AssociatedWith Sinus Node Dysfunction Requiring Pacemaker Implant
N.W. Akoum, C.J. McGann, G. Vergara, T. Badger, R. Ranjan, C. Mahnkopf, E.G. Kholmovski, R.S. Macleod, N.F. Marrouche. In Journal of Cardiovascular Electrophysiology, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 44--50. 2012.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-8167.2011.02140.x

Atrial Fibrosis and Sinus Node Dysfunction. Introduction: Sinus node dysfunction (SND) commonly manifests with atrial arrhythmias alternating with sinus pauses and sinus bradycardia. The underlying process is thought to be because of atrial fibrosis. We assessed the value of atrial fibrosis, quantified using Late Gadolinium Enhanced-MRI (LGE-MRI), in predicting significant SND requiring pacemaker implant.

Methods: Three hundred forty-four patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) presenting for catheter ablation underwent LGE-MRI. Left atrial (LA) fibrosis was quantified in all patients and right atrial (RA) fibrosis in 134 patients. All patients underwent catheter ablation with pulmonary vein isolation with posterior wall and septal debulking. Patients were followed prospectively for 329 ± 245 days. Ambulatory monitoring was instituted every 3 months. Symptomatic pauses and bradycardia were treated with pacemaker implantation per published guidelines.

Results: The average patient age was 65 ± 12 years. The average wall fibrosis was 16.7 ± 11.1% in the LA, and 5.3 ± 6.4% in the RA. RA fibrosis was correlated with LA fibrosis (R²= 0.26; P < 0.01). Patients were divided into 4 stages of LA fibrosis (Utah I: 35%). Twenty-two patients (mean atrial fibrosis, 23.9%) required pacemaker implantation during follow-up. Univariate and multivariate analysis identified LA fibrosis stage (OR, 2.2) as a significant predictor for pacemaker implantation with an area under the curve of 0.704.

Conclusions: In patients with AF presenting for catheter ablation, LGE-MRI quantification of atrial fibrosis demonstrates preferential LA involvement. Significant atrial fibrosis is associated with clinically significant SND requiring pacemaker implantation. (J Cardiovasc Electrophysiol, Vol. 23, pp. 44-50, January 2012)

30 Generation of Cloned Transgenic Goats with Cardiac Specific Overexpression of Transforming Growth Factor β1
Q. Meng, J. Hall, H. Rutigliano, X. Zhou, B.R. Sessions, R. Stott, K. Panter, C.J. Davies, R. Ranjan, D. Dosdall, R.S. MacLeod, N. Marrouche, K.L. White, Z. Wang, I.A. Polejaeva. In Reproduction, Fertility and Development, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 162--163. 2012.
DOI: 10.1071/RDv25n1Ab30

Transforming growth factor β1 (TGF-β1) has a potent profibrotic function and is central to signaling cascades involved in interstitial fibrosis, which plays a critical role in the pathobiology of cardiomyopathy and contributes to diastolic and systolic dysfunction. In addition, fibrotic remodeling is responsible for generation of re-entry circuits that promote arrhythmias (Bujak and Frangogiannis 2007 Cardiovasc. Res. 74, 184–195). Due to the small size of the heart, functional electrophysiology of transgenic mice is problematic. Large transgenic animal models have the potential to offer insights into conduction heterogeneity associated with fibrosis and the role of fibrosis in cardiovascular diseases. The goal of this study was to generate transgenic goats overexpressing an active form of TGFβ-1 under control of the cardiac-specific α-myosin heavy chain promoter (α-MHC). A pcDNA3.1DV5-MHC-TGF-β1cys³³ser vector was constructed by subcloning the MHC-TGF-β1 fragment from the plasmid pUC-BM20-MHC-TGF-β1 (Nakajima et al. 2000 Circ. Res. 86, 571–579) into the pcDNA3.1D V5 vector. The Neon transfection system was used to electroporate primary goat fetal fibroblasts. After G418 selection and PCR screening, transgenic cells were used for SCNT. Oocytes were collected by slicing ovaries from an abattoir and matured in vitro in an incubator with 5\% CO₂ in air. Cumulus cells were removed at 21 to 23 h post-maturation. Oocytes were enucleated by aspirating the first polar body and nearby cytoplasm by micromanipulation in Hepes-buffered SOF medium with 10 µg of cytochalasin B mL^–1. Transgenic somatic cells were individually inserted into the perivitelline space and fused with enucleated oocytes using double electrical pulses of 1.8 kV cm^–1 (40 µs each). Reconstructed embryos were activated by ionomycin (5 min) and DMAP and cycloheximide (CHX) treatments. Cloned embryos were cultured in G1 medium for 12 to 60 h in vitro and then transferred into synchronized recipient females. Pregnancy was examined by ultrasonography on day 30 post-transfer. A total of 246 cloned embryos were transferred into 14 recipients that resulted in production of 7 kids. The pregnancy rate was higher in the group cultured for 12 h compared with those cultured 36 to 60 h [44.4\% (n = 9) v. 20\% (n = 5)]. The kidding rates per embryo transferred of these 2 groups were 3.8\% (n = 156) and 1.1\% (n = 90), respectively. The PCR results confirmed that all the clones were transgenic. Phenotype characterization [e.g. gene expression, electrocardiogram (ECG), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)] is underway. We demonstrated successful production of transgenic goat via SCNT. To our knowledge, this is the first transgenic goat model produced for cardiovascular research.

Stochastic Collocation for Optimal Control Problems with Stochastic PDE Constraints
H. Tiesler, R.M. Kirby, D. Xiu, T. Preusser. In SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, Vol. 50, No. 5, pp. 2659--2682. 2012.
DOI: 10.1137/110835438

We discuss the use of stochastic collocation for the solution of optimal control problems which are constrained by stochastic partial differential equations (SPDE). Thereby the constraining, SPDE depends on data which is not deterministic but random. Assuming a deterministic control, randomness within the states of the input data will propagate to the states of the system. For the solution of SPDEs there has recently been an increasing effort in the development of efficient numerical schemes based upon the mathematical concept of generalized polynomial chaos. Modal-based stochastic Galerkin and nodal-based stochastic collocation versions of this methodology exist, both of which rely on a certain level of smoothness of the solution in the random space to yield accelerated convergence rates. In this paper we apply the stochastic collocation method to develop a gradient descent as well as a sequential quadratic program (SQP) for the minimization of objective functions constrained by an SPDE. The stochastic function involves several higher-order moments of the random states of the system as well as classical regularization of the control. In particular we discuss several objective functions of tracking type. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the performance of our new stochastic collocation minimization approach.

Keywords: stochastic collocation, optimal control, stochastic partial differential equations

Lattice Cleaving: Conforming Tetrahedral Meshes of Multimaterial Domains with Bounded Quality
J.R. Bronson, J.A. Levine, R.T. Whitaker. In Proceedings of the 21st International Meshing Roundtable, pp. 191--209. 2012.

We introduce a new algorithm for generating tetrahedral meshes that conform to physical boundaries in volumetric domains consisting of multiple materials. The proposed method allows for an arbitrary number of materials, produces high-quality tetrahedral meshes with upper and lower bounds on dihedral angles, and guarantees geometric delity. Moreover, the method is combinatoric so its implementation enables rapid mesh construction. These meshes are structured in a way that also allows grading, in order to reduce element counts in regions of homogeneity.

Efficient data restructuring and aggregation for I/O acceleration in PIDX
S. Kumar, V. Vishwanath, P. Carns, J.A. Levine, R. Latham, G. Scorzelli, H. Kolla, R. Grout, R. Ross, M.E. Papka, J. Chen, V. Pascucci. In Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 50:1--50:11. 2012.
ISBN: 978-1-4673-0804-5

Hierarchical, multiresolution data representations enable interactive analysis and visualization of large-scale simulations. One promising application of these techniques is to store high performance computing simulation output in a hierarchical Z (HZ) ordering that translates data from a Cartesian coordinate scheme to a one-dimensional array ordered by locality at different resolution levels. However, when the dimensions of the simulation data are not an even power of 2, parallel HZ ordering produces sparse memory and network access patterns that inhibit I/O performance. This work presents a new technique for parallel HZ ordering of simulation datasets that restructures simulation data into large (power of 2) blocks to facilitate efficient I/O aggregation. We perform both weak and strong scaling experiments using the S3D combustion application on both Cray-XE6 (65,536 cores) and IBM Blue Gene/P (131,072 cores) platforms. We demonstrate that data can be written in hierarchical, multiresolution format with performance competitive to that of native data-ordering methods.

Extending the SCIRun Problem Solving Environment to Large-Scale Applications
J. Knezevic, R.-P. Mundani, E. Rank, A. Khan, C.R. Johnson. In Proceedings of Applied Computing 2012, IADIS, pp. 171--178. October, 2012.

To make the most of current advanced computing technologies, experts in particular areas of science and engineering should be supported by sophisticated tools for carrying out computational experiments. The complexity of individual components of such tools should be hidden from them so they may concentrate on solving the specific problem within their field of expertise. One class of such tools are Problem Solving Environments (PSEs). The contribution of this paper refers to the idea of integration of an interactive computing framework applicable to different engineering applications into the SCIRun PSE in order to enable interactive real-time response of the computational model to user interaction even for large-scale problems. While the SCIRun PSE allows for real-time computational steering, we propose extending this functionality to a wider range of applications and larger scale problems. With only minor code modifications the proposed system allows each module scheduled for execution in a dataflow-based simulation to be automatically interrupted and re-scheduled. This rescheduling allows one to keep the relation between the user interaction and its immediate effect transparent independent of the problem size, thus, allowing for the intuitive and interactive exploration of simulation results.

Keywords: scirun

Smoothness-Increasing Accuracy-Conserving (SIAC) Filtering for discontinuous Galerkin Solutions: Improved Errors Versus Higher-Order Accuracy
J. King, H. Mirzaee, J.K. Ryan, R.M. Kirby. In Journal of Scientific Computing, Vol. 53, pp. 129--149. 2012.
DOI: 10.1007/s10915-012-9593-8

Smoothness-increasing accuracy-conserving (SIAC) filtering has demonstrated its effectiveness in raising the convergence rate of discontinuous Galerkin solutions from order k + 1/2 to order 2k + 1 for specific types of translation invariant meshes (Cockburn et al. in Math. Comput. 72:577–606, 2003; Curtis et al. in SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 30(1):272– 289, 2007; Mirzaee et al. in SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 49:1899–1920, 2011). Additionally, it improves the weak continuity in the discontinuous Galerkin method to k - 1 continuity. Typically this improvement has a positive impact on the error quantity in the sense that it also reduces the absolute errors. However, not enough emphasis has been placed on the difference between superconvergent accuracy and improved errors. This distinction is particularly important when it comes to understanding the interplay introduced through meshing, between geometry and filtering. The underlying mesh over which the DG solution is built is important because the tool used in SIAC filtering—convolution—is scaled by the geometric mesh size. This heavily contributes to the effectiveness of the post-processor. In this paper, we present a study of this mesh scaling and how it factors into the theoretical errors. To accomplish the large volume of post-processing necessary for this study, commodity streaming multiprocessors were used; we demonstrate for structured meshes up to a 50× speed up in the computational time over traditional CPU implementations of the SIAC filter.

Multiscale Modeling of High Explosives for Transportation Accidents
J.R. Peterson, J.C. Beckvermit, T. Harman, M. Berzins, C.A. Wight. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment: Bridging from the eXtreme to the campus and beyond, 2012.
DOI: 10.1145/2335755.2335828

The development of a reaction model to simulate the accidental detonation of a large array of seismic boosters in a semi-truck subject to fire is considered. To test this model large scale simulations of explosions and detonations were performed by leveraging the massively parallel capabilities of the Uintah Computational Framework and the XSEDE computational resources. Computed stress profiles in bulk-scale explosive materials were validated using compaction simulations of hundred micron scale particles and found to compare favorably with experimental data. A validation study of reaction models for deflagration and detonation showed that computational grid cell sizes up to 10 mm could be used without loss of fidelity. The Uintah Computational Framework shows linear scaling up to 180K cores which combined with coarse resolution and validated models will now enable simulations of semi-truck scale transportation accidents for the first time.

Radiation Modeling Using the Uintah Heterogeneous CPU/GPU Runtime System
A. Humphrey, Q. Meng, M. Berzins, T. Harman. In Proceedings of the first conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE'12), Association for Computing Machinery, 2012.
DOI: 10.1145/2335755.2335791

The Uintah Computational Framework was developed to provide an environment for solving fluid-structure interaction problems on structured adaptive grids on large-scale, long-running, data-intensive problems. Uintah uses a combination of fluid-flow solvers and particle-based methods for solids, together with a novel asynchronous task-based approach with fully automated load balancing. Uintah demonstrates excellent weak and strong scalability at full machine capacity on XSEDE resources such as Ranger and Kraken, and through the use of a hybrid memory approach based on a combination of MPI and Pthreads, Uintah now runs on up to 262k cores on the DOE Jaguar system. In order to extend Uintah to heterogeneous systems, with ever-increasing CPU core counts and additional onnode GPUs, a new dynamic CPU-GPU task scheduler is designed and evaluated in this study. This new scheduler enables Uintah to fully exploit these architectures with support for asynchronous, outof- order scheduling of both CPU and GPU computational tasks. A new runtime system has also been implemented with an added multi-stage queuing architecture for efficient scheduling of CPU and GPU tasks. This new runtime system automatically handles the details of asynchronous memory copies to and from the GPU and introduces a novel method of pre-fetching and preparing GPU memory prior to GPU task execution. In this study this new design is examined in the context of a developing, hierarchical GPUbased ray tracing radiation transport model that provides Uintah with additional capabilities for heat transfer and electromagnetic wave propagation. The capabilities of this new scheduler design are tested by running at large scale on the modern heterogeneous systems, Keeneland and TitanDev, with up to 360 and 960 GPUs respectively. On these systems, we demonstrate significant speedups per GPU against a standard CPU core for our radiation problem.

Keywords: Uintah, hybrid parallelism, scalability, parallel, adaptive, GPU, heterogeneous systems, Keeneland, TitanDev

Radiation Modeling Using the Uintah Heterogeneous CPU/GPU Runtime System
SCI Technical Report, A. Humphrey, Q. Meng, M. Berzins, T. Harman. No. UUSCI-2012-003, SCI Institute, University of Utah, 2012.

Keywords: csafe, uintah

Scalable Large-scale Fluid-structure Interaction Solvers in the Uintah Framework via Hybrid Task-based Parallelism Algorithms
SCI Technical Report, Q. Meng, M. Berzins. No. UUSCI-2012-004, SCI Institute, University of Utah, 2012.

Uintah is a software framework that provides an environment for solving fluid-structure interaction problems on structured adaptive grids on large-scale science and engineering problems involving the solution of partial differential equations. Uintah uses a combination of fluid-flow solvers and particle-based methods for solids, together with adaptive meshing and a novel asynchronous task-based approach with fully automated load balancing. When applying Uintah to fluid-structure interaction problems with mesh refinement, the combination of adaptive meshing and the movement of structures through space present a formidable challenge in terms of achieving scalability on large-scale parallel computers. With core counts per socket continuing to grow along with the prospect of less memory per core, adopting a model that uses MPI to communicate between nodes and a shared memory model on-node is one approach to achieve scalability at full machine capacity on current and emerging large-scale systems. For this approach to be successful, it is necessary to design data-structures that large numbers of cores can simultaneously access without contention. These data structures and algorithms must also be designed to avoid the overhead involved with locks and other synchronization primitives when running on large number of cores per node, as contention for acquiring locks quickly becomes untenable. This scalability challenge is addressed here for Uintah, by the development of new hybrid runtime and scheduling algorithms combined with novel lockfree data structures, making it possible for Uintah to achieve excellent scalability for a challenging fluid-structure problem with mesh refinement on as many as 260K cores.

Keywords: uintah, csafe

Large Scale Parallel Solution of Incompressible Flow Problems using Uintah and hypre
SCI Technical Report, J. Schmidt, M. Berzins, J. Thornock, T. Saad, J. Sutherland. No. UUSCI-2012-002, SCI Institute, University of Utah, 2012.

The Uintah Software framework was developed to provide an environment for solving fluid-structure interaction problems on structured adaptive grids on large-scale, long-running, data-intensive problems. Uintah uses a combination of fluid-flow solvers and particle-based methods for solids together with a novel asynchronous task-based approach with fully automated load balancing. As Uintah is often used to solve compressible, low-Mach combustion applications, it is important to have a scalable linear solver. While there are many such solvers available, the scalability of those codes varies greatly. The hypre software offers a range of solvers and pre-conditioners for different types of grids. The weak scalability of Uintah and hypre is addressed for particular examples when applied to an incompressible flow problem relevant to combustion applications. After careful software engineering to reduce start-up costs, much better than expected weak scalability is seen for up to 100K cores on NSFs Kraken architecture and up to 200K+ cores, on DOEs new Titan machine.

Keywords: uintah, csafe

Biomedical Visual Computing: Case Studies and Challenges
C.R. Johnson. In IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 12--21. 2012.
PubMed ID: 22545005
PubMed Central ID: PMC3336198

Computer simulation and visualization are having a substantial impact on biomedicine and other areas of science and engineering. Advanced simulation and data acquisition techniques allow biomedical researchers to investigate increasingly sophisticated biological function and structure. A continuing trend in all computational science and engineering applications is the increasing size of resulting datasets. This trend is also evident in data acquisition, especially in image acquisition in biology and medical image databases.

For example, in a collaboration between neuroscientist Robert Marc and our research team at the University of Utah's Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute (www.sci.utah.edu), we're creating datasets of brain electron microscopy (EM) mosaics that are 16 terabytes in size. However, while there's no foreseeable end to the increase in our ability to produce simulation data or record observational data, our ability to use this data in meaningful ways is inhibited by current data analysis capabilities, which already lag far behind. Indeed, as the NIH-NSF Visualization Research Challenges report notes, to effectively understand and make use of the vast amounts of data researchers are producing is one of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st century.

Visual data analysis involves creating images that convey salient information about underlying data and processes, enabling the detection and validation of expected results while leading to unexpected discoveries in science. This allows for the validation of new theoretical models, provides comparison between models and datasets, enables quantitative and qualitative querying, improves interpretation of data, and facilitates decision making. Scientists can use visual data analysis systems to explore \"what if\" scenarios, define hypotheses, and examine data under multiple perspectives and assumptions. In addition, they can identify connections between numerous attributes and quantitatively assess the reliability of hypotheses. In essence, visual data analysis is an integral part of scientific problem solving and discovery.

As applied to biomedical systems, visualization plays a crucial role in our ability to comprehend large and complex data-data that, in two, three, or more dimensions, convey insight into many diverse biomedical applications, including understanding neural connectivity within the brain, interpreting bioelectric currents within the heart, characterizing white-matter tracts by diffusion tensor imaging, and understanding morphology differences among different genetic mice phenotypes.

Keywords: kaust

Status of Release of the Uintah Computational Framework
SCI Technical Report, M. Berzins. No. UUSCI-2012-001, SCI Institute, University of Utah, 2012.

This report provides a summary of the status of the Uintah Computation Framework (UCF) software. Uintah is uniquely equipped to tackle large-scale multi-physics science and engineering problems on disparate length and time scales. The Uintah framework makes it possible to run adaptive computations on modern HPC architectures with tens and now hundreds of thousands of cores with complex communication/memory hierarchies. Uintah was orignally developed in the University of Utah Center for Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions (C-SAFE), a DOE-funded academic alliance project and then extended to the broader NSF snd DOE science and engineering communities. As Uintah is applicable to a wide range of engineering problems that involve fl uid-structure interactions with highly deformable structures it is used for a number of NSF-funded and DOE engineering projects. In this report the Uintah framework software is outlined and typical applications are illustrated. Uintah is open-source software that is available through the MIT open-source license at http://www.uintah.utah.edu/.

Fast, Effective BVH Updates for Animated Scenes
D. Kopta, T. Ize, J. Spjut, E. Brunvand, A. Davis, A. Kensler. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D '12), pp. 197--204. 2012.
DOI: 10.1145/2159616.2159649

Bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) are a popular acceleration structure choice for animated scenes rendered with ray tracing. This is due to the relative simplicity of refitting bounding volumes around moving geometry. However, the quality of such a refitted tree can degrade rapidly if objects in the scene deform or rearrange significantly as the animation progresses, resulting in dramatic increases in rendering times and a commensurate reduction in the frame rate. The BVH could be rebuilt on every frame, but this could take significant time. We present a method to efficiently extend refitting for animated scenes with tree rotations, a technique previously proposed for off-line improvement of BVH quality for static scenes. Tree rotations are local restructuring operations which can mitigate the effects that moving primitives have on BVH quality by rearranging nodes in the tree during each refit rather than triggering a full rebuild. The result is a fast, lightweight, incremental update algorithm that requires negligible memory, has minor update times, parallelizes easily, avoids significant degradation in tree quality or the need for rebuilding, and maintains fast rendering times. We show that our method approaches or exceeds the frame rates of other techniques and is consistently among the best options regardless of the animated scene.

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