Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Tokamak 3d Heat Load Investigations Using An Integrated Simulation Framework, Thomas Looby

Doctoral Dissertations

Reactor class nuclear fusion tokamaks will be inherently complex. Thousands of interconnected systems that span orders of magnitude in physical scale must operate cohesively for the machine to function. Because these reactor class tokamaks are all in an early design stage, it is difficult to quantify exactly how each subsystem will act within the context of the greater systems. Therefore, to predict the engineering parameters necessary to design the machine, simulation frameworks that can model individual systems as well as the interfaced systems are necessary. This dissertation outlines a novel framework developed to couple otherwise disparate computational domains together into …

Performance Analysis And Modeling Of Task-Based Runtimes, Blake Andrew Haugen

Doctoral Dissertations

The shift toward multicore processors has transformed the software and hardware landscape in the last decade. As a result, software developers must adopt parallelism in order to efficiently make use of multicore CPUs. Task-based scheduling has emerged as one method to reduce the complexity of parallel computing. Although task-based scheduling has been around for many years, the inclusion of task dependencies in OpenMP 4.0 suggests the paradigm will be around for the foreseeable future.

While task-based schedulers simplify the process of parallel software development, they can obfuscate the performance characteristics of the execution of an algorithm. Additionally, they can create …

Computational Framework For Small Animal Spect Imaging: Simulation And Reconstruction, Sang Hyeb Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

Small animal Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) has been an invaluable asset in biomedical science since this non-invasive imaging technique allows the longitudinal studies of animal models of human diseases. However, the image degradation caused by non-stationary collimator-detector response and single photon emitting nature of SPECT makes it difficult to provide a quantitative measure of 3D radio-pharmaceutical distribution inside the patient. Moreover, this problem exacerbates when an intra-peritoneal X-ray contrast agent is injected into a mouse for low-energy radiotracers.

In this dissertation, we design and develop a complete computational framework for the entire SPECT scan procedure from the radio-pharmaceutical …