Wei-keng Liao

Bio: Wei-keng Liao is an academic researcher from Northwestern University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Input/output & Parallel I/O. The author has an hindex of 35, co-authored 190 publications receiving 5924 citations. Previous affiliations of Wei-keng Liao include Syracuse University.

A two-phase algorithm for fast discovery of high utility itemsets

Abstract: Traditional association rules mining cannot meet the demands arising from some real applications. By considering the different values of individual items as utilities, utility mining focuses on identifying the itemsets with high utilities. In this paper, we present a Two-Phase algorithm to efficiently prune down the number of candidates and precisely obtain the complete set of high utility itemsets. It performs very efficiently in terms of speed and memory cost both on synthetic and real databases, even on large databases that are difficult for existing algorithms to handle.

Terascale direct numerical simulations of turbulent combustion using S3D

Abstract: Computational science is paramount to the understanding of underlying processes in internal combustion engines of the future that will utilize non-petroleum-based alternative fuels, including carbon-neutral biofuels, and burn in new combustion regimes that will attain high efficiency while minimizing emissions of particulates and nitrogen oxides. Next-generation engines will likely operate at higher pressures, with greater amounts of dilution and utilize alternative fuels that exhibit a wide range of chemical and physical properties. Therefore, there is a significant role for high-fidelity simulations, direct numerical simulations (DNS), specifically designed to capture key turbulence-chemistry interactions in these relatively uncharted combustion regimes, and in particular, that can discriminate the effects of differences in fuel properties. In DNS, all of the relevant turbulence and flame scales are resolved numerically using high-order accurate numerical algorithms. As a consequence terascale DNS are computationally intensive, require massive amounts of computing power and generate tens of terabytes of data. Recent results from terascale DNS of turbulent flames are presented here, illustrating its role in elucidating flame stabilization mechanisms in a lifted turbulent hydrogen/air jet flame in a hot air coflow, and the flame structure of a fuel-lean turbulent premixed jet flame. Computing at this scale requires close collaborations between computer and combustion scientists to provide optimized scaleable algorithms and software for terascale simulations, efficient collective parallel I/O, tools for volume visualization of multiscale, multivariate data and automating the combustion workflow. The enabling computer science, applied to combustion science, is also required in many other terascale physics and engineering simulations. In particular, performance monitoring is used to identify the performance of key kernels in the DNS code, S3D and especially memory intensive loops in the code. Through the careful application of loop transformations, data reuse in cache is exploited thereby reducing memory bandwidth needs, and hence, improving S3D's nodal performance. To enhance collective parallel I/O in S3D, an MPI-I/O caching design is used to construct a two-stage write-behind method for improving the performance of write-only operations. The simulations generate tens of terabytes of data requiring analysis. Interactive exploration of the simulation data is enabled by multivariate time-varying volume visualization. The visualization highlights spatial and temporal correlations between multiple reactive scalar fields using an intuitive user interface based on parallel coordinates and time histogram. Finally, an automated combustion workflow is designed using Kepler to manage large-scale data movement, data morphing, and archival and to provide a graphical display of run-time diagnostics.

Terascale direct numerical simulations of turbulent combustion using S3D.

Abstract: Computational science is paramount to the understanding of underlying processes in internal combustion engines of the future that will utilize non-petroleum-based alternative fuels, including carbon-neutral biofuels, and burn in new combustion regimes that will attain high efficiency while minimizing emissions of particulates and nitrogen oxides. Next-generation engines will likely operate at higher pressures, with greater amounts of dilution and utilize alternative fuels that exhibit a wide range of chemical and physical properties. Therefore, there is a significant role for high-fidelity simulations, direct numerical simulations (DNS), specifically designed to capture key turbulence-chemistry interactions in these relatively uncharted combustion regimes, and in particular, that can discriminate the effects of differences in fuel properties. In DNS, all of the relevant turbulence and flame scales are resolved numerically using high-order accurate numerical algorithms. As a consequence terascale DNS are computationally intensive, require massive amounts of computing power and generate tens of terabytes of data. Recent results from terascale DNS of turbulent flames are presented here, illustrating its role in elucidating flame stabilization mechanisms in a lifted turbulent hydrogen/air jet flame in a hot air co-flow, and the flame structure of a fuel-lean turbulent premixed jet flame. Computing at this scale requires close collaborations betweenmore » computer and combustion scientists to provide optimized scaleable algorithms and software for terascale simulations, efficient collective parallel I/O, tools for volume visualization of multiscale, multivariate data and automating the combustion workflow. The enabling computer science, applied to combustion science, is also required in many other terascale physics and engineering simulations. In particular, performance monitoring is used to identify the performance of key kernels in the DNS code, S3D and especially memory intensive loops in the code. Through the careful application of loop transformations, data reuse in cache is exploited thereby reducing memory bandwidth needs, and hence, improving S3D's nodal performance. To enhance collective parallel I/O in S3D, an MPI-I/O caching design is used to construct a two-stage write-behind method for improving the performance of write-only operations. The simulations generate tens of terabytes of data requiring analysis. Interactive exploration of the simulation data is enabled by multivariate time-varying volume visualization. The visualization highlights spatial and temporal correlations between multiple reactive scalar fields using an intuitive user interface based on parallel coordinates and time histogram. Finally, an automated combustion workflow is designed using Kepler to manage large-scale data movement, data morphing, and archival and to provide a graphical display of run-time diagnostics.« less

Parallel netCDF: A High-Performance Scientific I/O Interface

Abstract: Dataset storage, exchange, and access play a critical role in scientific applications. For such purposes netCDF serves as a portable, efficient file format and programming interface, which is popular in numerous scientific application domains. However, the original interface does not provide an efficient mechanism for parallel data storage and access. In this work, we present a new parallel interface for writing and reading netCDF datasets. This interface is derived with minimal changes from the serial netCDF interface but defines semantics for parallel access and is tailored for high performance. The underlying parallel I/O is achieved through MPI-IO, allowing for substantial performance gains through the use of collective I/O optimizations. We compare the implementation strategies and performance with HDF5. Our tests indicate programming convenience and significant I/O performance improvement with this parallel netCDF (PnetCDF) interface.

A fast high utility itemsets mining algorithm

Abstract: Association rule mining (ARM) identifies frequent itemsets from databases and generates association rules by considering each item in equal value. However, items are actually different in many aspects in a number of real applications, such as retail marketing, network log, etc. The difference between items makes a strong impact on the decision making in these applications. Therefore, traditional ARM cannot meet the demands arising from these applications. By considering the different values of individual items as utilities, utility mining focuses on identifying the itemsets with high utilities. As "downward closure property" doesn't apply to utility mining, the generation of candidate itemsets is the most costly in terms of time and memory space. In this paper, we present a Two-Phase algorithm to efficiently prune down the number of candidates and can precisely obtain the complete set of high utility itemsets. In the first phase, we propose a model that applies the "transaction-weighted downward closure property" on the search space to expedite the identification of candidates. In the second phase, one extra database scan is performed to identify the high utility itemsets. We also parallelize our algorithm on shared memory multi-process architecture using Common Count Partitioned Database (CCPD) strategy. We verify our algorithm by applying it to both synthetic and real databases. It performs very efficiently in terms of speed and memory cost, and shows good scalability on multiple processors, even on large databases that are difficult for existing algorithms to handle.