No Arabic abstract
Simulations of systems with quenched disorder are extremely demanding, suffering from the combined effect of slow relaxation and the need of performing the disorder average. As a consequence, new algorithms, improved implementations, and alternative and even purpose-built hardware are often instrumental for conducting meaningful studies of such systems. The ensuing demands regarding hardware availability and code complexity are substantial and sometimes prohibitive. We demonstrate how with a moderate coding effort leaving the overall structure of the simulation code unaltered as compared to a CPU implementation, very significant speed-ups can be achieved from a parallel code on GPU by mainly exploiting the trivial parallelism of the disorder samples and the near-trivial parallelism of the parallel tempering replicas. A combination of this massively parallel implementation with a careful choice of the temperature protocol for parallel tempering as well as efficient cluster updates allows us to equilibrate comparatively large systems with moderate computational resources.
We implement several symplectic integrators, which are based on two part splitting, for studying the chaotic behavior of one- and two-dimensional disordered Klein-Gordon lattices with many degrees of freedom and investigate their numerical performance. For this purpose, we perform extensive numerical simulations by considering many different initial energy excitations and following the evolution of the created wave packets in the various dynamical regimes exhibited by these models. We compare the efficiency of the considered integrators by checking their ability to correctly reproduce several features of the wave packets propagation, like the characteristics of the created energy distribution and the time evolution of the systems maximum Lyapunov exponent estimator. Among the tested integrators the fourth order $ABA864$ scheme cite{BCFLMM13} showed the best performance as it needed the least CPU time for capturing the correct dynamical behavior of all considered cases when a moderate accuracy in conserving the systems total energy value was required. Among the higher order schemes used to achieve a better accuracy in the energy conservation, the sixth order scheme $s11ABA82_6$ exhibited the best performance.
We demonstrate neural-network runtime prediction for complex, many-parameter, massively parallel, heterogeneous-physics simulations running on cloud-based MPI clusters. Because individual simulations are so expensive, it is crucial to train the network on a limited dataset despite the potentially large input space of the physics at each point in the spatial domain. We achieve this using a two-part strategy. First, we perform data-driven static load balancing using regression coefficients extracted from small simulations, which both improves parallel performance and reduces the dependency of the runtime on the precise spatial layout of the heterogeneous physics. Second, we divide the execution time of these load-balanced simulations into computation and communication, factoring crude asymptotic scalings out of each term, and training neural nets for the remaining factor coefficients. This strategy is implemented for Meep, a popular and complex open-source electrodynamics simulation package, and are validated for heterogeneous simulations drawn from published engineering models.
We elaborate on a linear time implementation of the Collective Influence (CI) algorithm introduced by Morone, Makse, Nature 524, 65 (2015) to find the minimal set of influencers in a network via optimal percolation. We show that the computational complexity of CI is O(N log N) when removing nodes one-by-one, with N the number of nodes. This is made possible by using an appropriate data structure to process the CI values, and by the finite radius l of the CI sphere. Furthermore, we introduce a simple extension of CI when l is infinite, the CI propagation (CI_P) algorithm, that considers the global optimization of influence via message passing in the whole network and identifies a slightly smaller fraction of influencers than CI. Remarkably, CI_P is able to reproduce the exact analytical optimal percolation threshold obtained by Bau, Wormald, Random Struct. Alg. 21, 397 (2002) for cubic random regular graphs, leaving little improvement left for random graphs. We also introduce the Collective Immunization Belief Propagation algorithm (CI_BP), a belief-propagation (BP) variant of CI based on optimal immunization, which has the same performance as CI_P. However, this small augmented performance of the order of 1-2 % in the low influencers tail comes at the expense of increasing the computational complexity from O(N log N) to O(N^2 log N), rendering both, CI_P and CI_BP, prohibitive for finding influencers in modern-day big-data. The same nonlinear running time drawback pertains to a recently introduced BP-decimation (BPD) algorithm by Mugisha, Zhou, arXiv:1603.05781. For instance, we show that for big-data social networks of typically 200 million users (eg, active Twitter users sending 500 million tweets per day), CI finds the influencers in less than 3 hours running on a single CPU, while the BP algorithms (CI_P, CI_BP and BDP) would take more than 3,000 years to accomplish the same task.
Machine learning promises to deliver powerful new approaches to neutron scattering from magnetic materials. Large scale simulations provide the means to realise this with approaches including spin-wave, Landau Lifshitz, and Monte Carlo methods. These approaches are shown to be effective at simulating magnetic structures and dynamics in a wide range of materials. Using large numbers of simulations the effectiveness of machine learning approaches are assessed. Principal component analysis and nonlinear autoencoders are considered with the latter found to provide a high degree of compression and to be highly suited to neutron scattering problems. Agglomerative heirarchical clustering in the latent space is shown to be effective at extracting phase diagrams of behavior and features in an automated way that aid understanding and interpretation. The autoencoders are also well suited to optimizing model parameters and were found to be highly advantageous over conventional fitting approaches including being tolerant of artifacts in untreated data. The potential of machine learning to automate complex data analysis tasks including the inversion of neutron scattering data into models and the processing of large volumes of multidimensional data is assessed. Directions for future developments are considered and machine learning argued to have high potential for impact on neutron science generally.
We explore a small quantum refrigerator in which the working substance is made of paradigmatic nearest neighbor quantum spin models, the XYZ and the XY model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions, consisting of two and three spins, each of which is in contact with a bosonic bath. We identify a specific range of interaction strengths which can be tuned appropriately to ensure a cooling of the selected spin in terms of its local temperature in the weak coupling limit. Moreover, we report that in this domain, when one of the interaction strengths is disordered, the performance of the thermal machine operating as a refrigerator remains almost unchanged instead of degradation, thereby establishing the flexibility of this device. However, to obtain a significant amount of cooling via ordered as well as disordered spin models, we observe that one has to go beyond weak coupling limit and compute the figures of merits by using global master equations.