Qing Wang

Qing Wang

Authored Publications
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    Preview abstract Background. Wildfire research uses ensemble methods to analyze fire behaviors and assess uncertainties. Nonetheless, current research methods are either confined to simple models or complex simulations with limits. Modern computing tools could allow for efficient, high- fidelity ensemble simulations. Aims. This study proposes a high-fidelity ensemble wildfire simulation framework for studying wildfire behavior, ML tasks, fire-risk assessment, and uncertainty analysis. Methods. In this research, we present a simulation framework that integrates the Swirl-Fire large-eddy simulation tool for wildfire predictions with the Vizier optimization platform for automated run-time management of ensemble simulations and large-scale batch processing. All simulations are executed on tensor-processing units to enhance computational efficiency. Key results. A dataset of 117 simulations is created, each with 1.35 billion mesh points. The simulations are compared to existing experimental data and show good agreement in terms of fire rate of spread. Computations are done for fire acceleration, mean rate of spread, and fireline intensity. Conclusions. Strong coupling between these 2 parameters are observed for the fire spread and intermittency. A critical Froude number that delineates fires from plume-driven to convection-driven is identified and confirmed with literature observations. Implications. The ensemble simulation framework is efficient in facilitating parametric wildfire studies. View details
    Neural Ideal Large Eddy Simulation: Modeling Turbulence with Neural Stochastic Differential Equations
    Anudhyan Boral
    James Lottes
    Yi-fan Chen
    John Anderson
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 36 (2023)
    Preview abstract We introduce a data-driven learning framework that assimilates two powerful ideas: ideal large-eddy-simulation (LES) from turbulence closure modeling and neural stochastic differential equations (SDE) for modeling stochastic dynamical systems. ideal LES identifies the optimal reduced-order flow fields of the large-scale features by marginalizing out the effect of small-scales in stochastic turbulent trajectories. However, ideal LES is analytically intractable. In our work, we use a latent neural SDE to model the evolution of the stochastic process and a pair of encoder and decoder for transforming between the latent space and the desired optimal flow field. This stands in sharp contrast to other types of neural parameterization of the closure models where each trajectory is treated as a deterministic realization of the dynamics. We show the effectiveness of our approach (niLES – neural ideal LES) on a challenging chaotic dynamical systems: Kolmogorov flow at a Reynolds number of 20,000. Compared to prior works, our method is also able to handle non-uniform geometries and unstructured meshes. In particular, niLES leads to more accurate long term statistics, and is stable even when rolling out to long horizons. View details
    Preview abstract This work presents a high-fidelity simulation framework for modeling large-scale wildfire scenarios that take into consideration realistic topographies, atmospheric conditions, turbulence/fire interaction, and flow dynamics. With the overall goal of enabling large-scale ensemble simulations and the integration of the simulation results into machine-learning applications, this modeling framework has been implemented into the TensorFlow programming environment. To demonstrate the capability of this simulation framework in predicting large-scale fires, we performed high-resolution simulations of a realistic wildfire scenario that is representative of the 2017 Tubbs fire. View details
    A TensorFlow Simulation Framework for Scientific Computing of Fluid Flows on Tensor Processing Units
    John Roberts Anderson
    Matthias Ihme
    Yi-fan Chen
    Computer Physics Communications (2022)
    Preview abstract A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation framework for predicting complex flows is developed on the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) platform. The TPU architecture is featured with accelerated performance of dense matrix multiplication, large high bandwidth memory, and a fast inter-chip interconnect, which makes it appealing for scientific high performance computing (HPC). This CFD framework is implemented with the finite difference method on a collocated structured mesh, and it uses the graph-based TensorFlow as the programming library. The accuracy and speed of this framework is studied both numerically and analytically. In particular, the impact of machine precision on the mesh convergence is discussed in detail, which provides a guideline for the simulation framework to achieve the desired rate of convergence. Additionally, a linear weak scaling and a super-linear strong scaling is observed up to a full TPU v3 pod with 2048 cores. The algorithm and implementation are validated with canonical 2D and 3D Taylor Green vortex simulations. To demonstrate the capability for simulating turbulent flows, verification simulations are conducted for two configurations, namely the decaying homogeneous isotropic turbulence and a turbulent planar jet. Both simulations show good statistical agreement with reference solutions. View details
    Distributed Data Processing for Large-Scale Simulations on Cloud
    Lily Hu
    TJ Lu
    Yi-fan Chen
    2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ELECTROMAGNETIC COMPATIBILITY, SIGNAL & POWER INTEGRITY (2021) (to appear)
    Preview abstract In this work, we proposed a distributed data pipeline for large-scale simulations by using libraries and frameworks available on Cloud services. The data pipeline is designed with careful considerations for the characteristics of the simulation data. The implementation of the data pipeline is with Apache Beam and Zarr. Beam is a unified, open-source programming model for building both batch- and streaming-data parallel-processing pipelines. By using Beam, one can simply focus on the logical composition of the data processing task and bypass the low-level details of distributed computing. The orchestration of distributed processing is fully managed by the runner, in this work, Dataflow on Google Cloud. Beam separates the programming layer from the runtime layer such that the proposed pipeline can be executed across various runners. The storage format of the output tensor of the data pipeline is Zarr. Zarr allows concurrent reading and writing, storage on a file system, and data compression before the storage. The performance of the data pipeline is analyzed with an example, of which the simulation data is obtained with an in-house developed computational fluid dynamic solver running in parallel on Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) clusters. The performance analysis demonstrates good storage and computational efficiency of the proposed data pipeline. View details
    Machine learning accelerated computational fluid dynamics
    Ayya Alieva
    Dmitrii Kochkov
    Jamie Alexander Smith
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (2021)
    Preview abstract Numerical simulation of fluids plays an essential role in modeling many physical phenomena, such as in weather, climate, aerodynamics and plasma physics. Fluids are well described by the Navier-Stokes equations, but solving these equations at scale remains daunting, limited by the computational cost of resolving the smallest spatiotemporal features. This leads to unfavorable trade-offs between accuracy and tractability. Here we use end-to-end deep learning to improve approximations inside computational fluid dynamics for modeling two dimensional turbulent flows. For both direct numerical simulation of turbulence and large eddy simulation, our results are as accurate as baseline solvers with 8-16x finer resolution in each spatial dimension, resulting in a 40-400x fold computational speedups. Our method remains stable during long simulations, and generalizes to forcing functions and Reynolds numbers outside of the flows where it is trained, in contrast to black box machine learning approaches. Our approach exemplifies how scientific computing can leverage machine learning and hardware accelerators to improve simulations without sacrificing accuracy or generalization. View details
    Deep Learning Models for Predicting Wildfires from Historical Remote-Sensing Data
    Fantine Huot
    R. Lily Hu
    Matthias Ihme
    John Burge
    TJ Lu
    Jason J. Hickey
    Yi-fan Chen
    John Roberts Anderson
    NeurIPS Artificial Intelligence for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response Workshop (2020)
    Preview abstract Identifying regions that have high likelihood for wildfires is a key component of land and forestry management and disaster preparedness. We create a data set by aggregating nearly a decade of remote-sensing data and historical fire records to predict wildfires. This prediction problem is framed as three machine learning tasks. Results are compared and analyzed for four different deep learning models to estimate wildfire likelihood. The results demonstrate that deep learning models can successfully identify areas of high fire likelihood using aggregated data about vegetation, weather, and topography with an AUC of 83%. View details