PSC’s Bridges, Other XSEDE Systems Develop Public Online Supply Chain Tool

December 3, 2020

Dec. 3, 2020 — Supply chains of goods like food, fuel, and water have created wealth and greatly reduced human hunger. But they also bring with them vulnerabilities, when supplies are disrupted by natural disasters, human conflicts, or sudden demand. Using the XSEDE-allocated Bridges supercomputing platform at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), scientists at Northern Arizona University (NAU) are expanding their online tool for studying supply chains and are rolling out a program for sharing it with other researchers, governments, and members of the public.

Why It’s Important

When it comes to getting what you need, the modern, connected world cuts both ways. It gives us tropical fruit in the dead of winter. It means crop failures in the U.S. no longer lead to widespread starvation. But it also means that, in the beginning of a pandemic, you may not be able to get medications or medical equipment from the opposite side of the world any more.

When it comes to supply chains of critical goods—which can be anything from water to food to fuel to medicines to computer chips—it isn’t always easy to see in a timely way how a sudden bottleneck can affect our ability to bring what we need to where we are.

“[Supply chains] are the flows that underlie the economy, and they connect us to people all over the world…Those connections create efficiencies; they are a foundation of our wealth and prosperity and resilience. But those connections also carry risks and [environmental] impact.”—Benjamin Ruddell, Northern Arizona University.

That’s why Benjamin Ruddell and Richard Rushforth of NAU developed a set of National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded online tools called FEWSION. The first of its kind to integrate data for many national supply chains in one package, this freely available collection of software and databases can help authorities decide whether an impending trade war with a foreign country will produce a critical shortage in the U.S. It can help governors tell whether a storm barreling down on Houston could disrupt gasoline supplies in their states. It can help a rural county determine how well its water supplies would hold up in a drought—and identify alternative sources.

A screenshot from FEW-View, FEWSION’s mapping interface, showing sources of energy flowing into the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

But the first version of FEWSION had limitations. For one thing, it couldn’t trace supply chains over time. It also consumed all the time the team was able to get on computing resources at NAU. To take FEWSION to the next level, the collaborators needed vastly more computing power.

How XSEDE Helped

Adding features such as time tracking created a vast increase in the amount of data FEWSION would have to handle. The data approached the petascale, involving quadrillions (1 followed by 15 zeros) of data elements. Handling that volume of information smoothly, for users without heavy technical training, was going to be a computational challenge. With help from the XSEDE Extended Collaborative Support Service and the flexibility of accessing a number of systems—including Bridges at PSC and Wrangler, Ranch and Stampede2 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center—through an XSEDE allocation, they were able to select Bridges as the best fit to handle the massive datasets that they needed.

“Version one of our dataset is just a snapshot of the year 2012. It’s more limited and not as full featured, and that version of the dataset consumed our university cluster at Northern Arizona University…Then we started engineering the second version of the dataset, which is a time history and adds more details to the calculations. That is a geometrically larger computational problem. We couldn’t do it with a university cluster…So we tapped [the] NSF XSEDE network and have been working with supercomputing experts on that…It has led us through a couple of different possible architectures and platforms to end up with Pittsburgh.”—Benjamin Ruddell.

The Bridges-powered expansion of FEWSION has enabled the NAU team to begin deploying FEWSION for Community Resilience Network (F4R), a citizen-led effort to collect supply chain data for critical supplies and make it available for public use. This unique tool will allow individual citizens, nonprofit organizations, companies, and governments to study and understand the local “last-mile” supply chains of specific interest to them. Another important tool is the team’s mesoscale FEW-View tool, a mapping interface for FEWSION that displays supply chain analysis for entire cities and communities.

Using map-based tools, FEWSION showed the NAU collaborators how, for example, the city of Flagstaff, where NAU is based, depends on food from outside its region. Cattle ranges nearby produce beef, and the area has regional factories that produce lots of dog food and, of all things, ice cream cones. For about one month, and in a good year, local producers supply a bumper crop of apples. Of course, these products alone can’t feed the area, and getting other food products depends in part on exporting those goods. Importantly, the analysis shows where the weak links are and how the region can guard its food supplies by identifying alternative sources.

“The FEWSION for Community Resilience Network offers a participatory process that lets students or community members, or emergency managers, or whoever…to map their community supply chains out in detail and look at who runs their supply chains, how they work, where their connections are…and hold data-driven conversations…to find solutions that make the community more sustainable and more resilient.”—Benjamin Ruddell.

The NAU scientists are preparing a series of papers on their Flagstaff analysis. They’ve used FEWSION for papers on the fresh-water supply throughout the U.S., analyzing the cost of both direct water use and costs through agricultural and industrial uses, including methods for improving water use, which you can read here, here, and here. They’ve also contributed to a paper on how beef-production water use affects wild fish populations, here.

Through F4R, they’re also recruiting new communities, adding new research collaborators and offering consultation to communities and local and regional governments on how to use FEWSION. You can find more information about F4R here.

More info: https://www.xsede.org/-/online-supply-chain-tool-available-to-authorities-public-thanks-to-xsede-resources


Source: XSEDE

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from its predecessors, including the red-hot H100 and A100 GPUs. Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. While Nvidia may not spring to mind when thinking of the quant Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: Meet the HPE Mentors

March 18, 2024

The latest installment of the 2024 Winter Classic Studio Update Show features our interview with the HPE mentor team who introduced our student teams to the joys (and potential sorrows) of the HPL (LINPACK) and accompany Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the field was normalized for boys in 1969 when the Apollo 11 missi Read more…

Apple Buys DarwinAI Deepening its AI Push According to Report

March 14, 2024

Apple has purchased Canadian AI startup DarwinAI according to a Bloomberg report today. Apparently the deal was done early this year but still hasn’t been publicly announced according to the report. Apple is preparing Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimization algorithms to iteratively refine their parameters until Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimizat Read more…

PASQAL Issues Roadmap to 10,000 Qubits in 2026 and Fault Tolerance in 2028

March 13, 2024

Paris-based PASQAL, a developer of neutral atom-based quantum computers, yesterday issued a roadmap for delivering systems with 10,000 physical qubits in 2026 a Read more…

India Is an AI Powerhouse Waiting to Happen, but Challenges Await

March 12, 2024

The Indian government is pushing full speed ahead to make the country an attractive technology base, especially in the hot fields of AI and semiconductors, but Read more…

Charles Tahan Exits National Quantum Coordination Office

March 12, 2024

(March 1, 2024) My first official day at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was June 15, 2020, during the depths of the COVID-19 loc Read more…

AI Bias In the Spotlight On International Women’s Day

March 11, 2024

What impact does AI bias have on women and girls? What can people do to increase female participation in the AI field? These are some of the questions the tech Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Analyst Panel Says Take the Quantum Computing Plunge Now…

November 27, 2023

Should you start exploring quantum computing? Yes, said a panel of analysts convened at Tabor Communications HPC and AI on Wall Street conference earlier this y Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Training of 1-Trillion Parameter Scientific AI Begins

November 13, 2023

A US national lab has started training a massive AI brain that could ultimately become the must-have computing resource for scientific researchers. Argonne N Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire