SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Jiajun Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Jiajun Huang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

A Bio-Plausible Visual Neural Network for Locust-Inspired Collision Perception

Locust visual systems have long served as an important biological paradigm for studying looming perception and collision avoidance. Numerous computational models have successfully reproduced the selective responses of Lobula Giant Movement Detector (LGMD) neurons to approaching objects, thereby emulating the fundamental functionality of the biological system. However, existing models remain limited in biological plausibility and robustness when operating in complex and dynamic visual environments. To address these limitations, we propose a biologically plausible neural network for locust-inspired looming detection. The proposed framework incorporates a spatially isotropic sampling strategy that mimics the ommatidial organization of the locust compound eye, a population-voting mechanism inspired by population coding in biological neural systems, and leaky integrate-and-fire neuronal dynamics to replace conventional sigmoid-based membrane activation. Systematic experiments on synthetic stimuli, laboratory sequences, and real-world driving scenarios demonstrate that the proposed model improves robustness under challenging visual conditions while preserving computational efficiency and enhancing biological fidelity. These results highlight the potential of biologically grounded neural computation for robust and efficient collision perception.

cs.NE

FSZ: Breaking the Prediction-Throughput Trade-off in GPU Lossy Compression

Existing fast GPU error-bounded lossy compressors have achieved high throughput through pure-GPU single-kernel designs, but their compression ratios remain limited because they typically apply a fixed first-order predictor on independent blocks. We propose FSZ, a GPU error-bounded lossy compressor that redesigns the prediction stage with three mutually reinforcing algorithmic innovations to achieve both higher compression ratios and higher throughput within a single CUDA kernel: (1) cross-block prediction state carries Lorenzo prediction state across block boundaries within 256-element tiles, eliminating 7 out of 8 boundary residuals that inflate encoding rates; (2) per-tile adaptive multi-order prediction and centering adaptively selects the best compression strategy per tile from first-order, second-order, and centering variants; and (3) a single-pass four-way evaluation exploits a mathematical property of finite differences to evaluate all variants from a single data read, enabling richer prediction within the same bandwidth budget as a fixed predictor. Experiments on NVIDIA GH200 GPU with 8 real-world application datasets show that FSZ outperforms cuSZp-P by up to 10.95x and the state-of-the-art cuSZp-O by up to 2.92x in compression ratio. Notably, these gains come with no throughput penalty: FSZ simultaneously achieves the highest average throughput (676 GB/s compression, 785 GB/s decompression) among all evaluated compressors.

cs.DC

TiInsight: A SQL-based Automated Exploratory Data Analysis System through Large Language Models

The SQL-based exploratory data analysis has garnered significant attention within the data analysis community. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has facilitated the paradigm shift from manual to automated data exploration. However, existing methods generally lack the ability for cross-domain analysis, and the exploration of LLMs capabilities remains insufficient. This paper presents TiInsight, an SQL-based automated cross-domain exploratory data analysis system. First, TiInsight offers a user-friendly GUI enabling users to explore data using natural language queries. Second, TiInsight offers a robust cross-domain exploratory data analysis pipeline: hierarchical data context (i.e., HDC) generation, question clarification and decomposition, text-to-SQL (i.e., TiSQL), and data visualization (i.e., TiChart). Third, we have implemented and deployed TiInsight in the production environment of PingCAP and demonstrated its capabilities using representative datasets. The demo video is available at https://youtu.be/JzYFyYd-emI.

cs.DB

A Giant Peanut-shaped Ultra-High-Energy Gamma-Ray Emitter Off the Galactic Plane

Ultra-high-energy (UHE), exceeding 100 TeV (10^12 electronvolts), {\gamma}-rays manifests extreme particle acceleration in astrophysical sources. Recent observations by {\gamma}-ray telescopes, particularly by the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), have revealed a few tens of UHE sources, indicating numerous Galactic sources capable of accelerating particles to PeV (10^15 electronvolts) energies. However, discerning the dominant acceleration mechanisms (leptonic versus hadronic), the relative contributions of specific source classes, and the role of particle transport in shaping their observed emission are central goals of modern UHE astrophysics. Here we report the discovery of a giant UHE {\gamma}-ray emitter at -17.5{\deg} off the Galactic plane - a region where UHE {\gamma}-ray sources are rarely found. The emitter exhibits a distinctive asymmetric shape, resembling a giant "Peanut" spanning 0.45{\deg} \times 4.6{\deg}, indicative of anisotropic particle distribution over a large area. A highly aged millisecond pulsar (MSP) J0218+4232 is the sole candidate accelerator positionally coincident with the Peanut region. Its association with UHE {\gamma}-rays extending to 0.7 PeV, if confirmed, would provide the first evidence of a millisecond pulsar powering PeV particles. Such a finding challenges prevailing models, which posit that millisecond pulsars cannot sustain acceleration to PeV energies. The detection reveals fundamental gaps in understanding particle acceleration, cosmic-ray transport, and interstellar magnetic field effects, potentially revealing new PeV accelerator (PeVatron) classes.

astro-ph.HE

A borehole muon detector with SiPM-on-tile technology

We developed a compact and rugged muon detector designed for deployment in boreholes. The detector uses a SiPM-on-tile approach in which silicon photomultipliers are directly coupled to scintillator tiles, thereby eliminating the need for wavelength-shifting fibers and long scintillator bars. The modular design is based on a 64-channel unit, 140~cm in length and 80~mm in diameter, composed of $5 \times 5$~cm$^{2}$ scintillator tiles coupled to SiPMs, powered and read out using off-the-shelf electronics. The detector has an average muon detection efficiency above 95\% and acceptance over 5$^\circ$--60$^\circ$ in zenith and 0$^\circ$--360$^\circ$ in azimuth. Simulations indicate that reconstruction combining hit positions and energy deposits achieves a zenith resolution of 1.5--4.0$^\circ$ across most of the zenith range. This work demonstrates a compact, rugged, and cost-effective borehole muon detector based on the SiPM-on-tile approach, offering a new alternative for muon tomography.

physics.ins-det

GPZ: GPU-Accelerated Lossy Compressor for Particle Data

Particle-based simulations and point-cloud applications generate massive, irregular datasets that challenge storage, I/O, and real-time analytics. Traditional compression techniques struggle with irregular particle distributions and GPU architectural constraints, often resulting in limited throughput and suboptimal compression ratios. In this paper, we present GPZ, a high-performance, error-bounded lossy compressor designed specifically for large-scale particle data on modern GPUs. GPZ employs a novel four-stage parallel pipeline that synergistically balances high compression efficiency with the architectural demands of massively parallel hardware. We introduce a suite of targeted optimizations for computation, memory access, and GPU occupancy that enables GPZ to achieve near-hardware-limit throughput. We conduct an extensive evaluation on three distinct GPU architectures (workstation, data center, and edge) using six large-scale, real-world scientific datasets from five distinct domains. The results demonstrate that GPZ consistently and significantly outperforms five state-of-the-art GPU compressors, delivering up to 8x higher end-to-end throughput while simultaneously achieving superior compression ratios and data quality.

cs.DC

Boosting Scientific Error-Bounded Lossy Compression through Optimized Synergistic Lossy-Lossless Orchestration

As high-performance computing architectures evolve, more scientific computing workflows are being deployed on advanced computing platforms such as GPUs. These workflows can produce raw data at extremely high throughputs, requiring urgent high-ratio and low-latency error-bounded data compression solutions. In this paper, we propose cuSZ-Hi, an optimized high-ratio GPU-based scientific error-bounded lossy compressor with a flexible, domain-irrelevant, and fully open-source framework design. Our novel contributions are: 1) We maximally optimize the parallelized interpolation-based data prediction scheme on GPUs, enabling the full functionalities of interpolation-based scientific data prediction that are adaptive to diverse data characteristics; 2) We thoroughly explore and investigate lossless data encoding techniques, then craft and incorporate the best-fit lossless encoding pipelines for maximizing the compression ratio of cuSZ-Hi; 3) We systematically evaluate cuSZ-Hi on benchmarking datasets together with representative baselines. Compared to existing state-of-the-art scientific lossy compressors, with comparative or better throughput than existing high-ratio scientific error-bounded lossy compressors on GPUs, cuSZ-Hi can achieve up to 249% compression ratio improvement under the same error bound, and up to 215% compression ratio improvement under the same decompression data PSNR.

cs.DC

FT-Transformer: Resilient and Reliable Transformer with End-to-End Fault Tolerant Attention

Transformer models rely on High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources for inference, where soft errors are inevitable in large-scale systems, making the reliability of the model particularly critical. Existing fault tolerance frameworks for Transformers are designed at the operation level without architectural optimization, leading to significant computational and memory overhead, which in turn reduces protection efficiency and limits scalability to larger models. In this paper, we implement module-level protection for Transformers by treating the operations within the attention module as a single kernel and applying end-to-end fault tolerance. This method provides unified protection across multi-step computations, while achieving comprehensive coverage of potential errors in the nonlinear computations. For linear modules, we design a strided algorithm-based fault tolerance (ABFT) that avoids inter-thread communication. Experimental results show that our end-to-end fault tolerance achieves up to 7.56x speedup over traditional methods with an average fault tolerance overhead of 13.9%.

cs.DC

Measurement of SiPM Dark Currents and Annealing Recovery for Fluences Expected in ePIC Calorimeters at the Electron-Ion Collider

Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) will be used to read out all calorimeters in the ePIC experiment at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). A thorough characterization of the radiation damage expected for SiPMs under anticipated EIC fluences is essential for accurate simulations, detector design, and effective operational strategies. In this study, we evaluate radiation damage for the specific SiPM models chosen for ePIC across the complete fluence range anticipated at the EIC, $10^8$ to $10^{12}$ 1-MeV $n_{\mathrm{eq}}$/cm$^2$ per year, depending on the calorimeter location. The SiPMs were irradiated using a 64 MeV proton beam provided by the University of California, Davis 76" Cyclotron. We measured the SiPM dark-current as a function of fluence and bias voltage and investigated the effectiveness of high-temperature annealing to recover radiation damage. These results provide a comprehensive reference for the design, simulation, and operational planning of all ePIC calorimeter systems.

physics.ins-det

The CONDOR Observatory: A Gamma-Ray Observatory with a 100 GeV Threshold at 5300 Meters Above Sea Level

We present the design of the Compact Network of Detectors with Orbital Range (CONDOR), a proposed high-altitude gamma-ray and cosmic-ray (CR) observatory set to become the highest of its kind. Planned for installation at Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert, Chile, at 5300 meters above sea level (m.a.s.l.), CONDOR is optimized to operate in the 100 GeV to 1 TeV range using the extensive air-shower technique. The design prioritizes simplicity, modularity, and robustness to ensure reliable performance in a harsh environment. The CONDOR array has a full coverage factor of 90 and consists of 6000 plastic scintillator panels, each approximately 1 m^2, read by wavelength-shifting fibers and SiPMs. The readout electronics are based on fast ADCs, with White Rabbit technology ensuring time synchronization. We present an analysis of angular resolution and effective area by variation of the CORSIKA design to meet the developing GeV threshold, complementing other ground-based observatories in gamma-ray and proton CR measurements. CONDOR has the potential to support an extensive research program in astroparticle physics and multimessenger astronomy from the Southern Hemisphere, operating in all-sky mode 24 hours per day, year-round, with satellite data ranges.

astro-ph.IM

ZCCL: Significantly Improving Collective Communication With Error-Bounded Lossy Compression

With the ever-increasing computing power of supercomputers and the growing scale of scientific applications, the efficiency of MPI collective communication turns out to be a critical bottleneck in large-scale distributed and parallel processing. The large message size in MPI collectives is particularly concerning because it can significantly degrade overall parallel performance. To address this issue, prior research simply applies off-the-shelf fixed-rate lossy compressors in the MPI collectives, leading to suboptimal performance, limited generalizability, and unbounded errors. In this paper, we propose a novel solution, called ZCCL, which leverages error-bounded lossy compression to significantly reduce the message size, resulting in a substantial reduction in communication costs. The key contributions are three-fold. (1) We develop two general, optimized lossy-compression-based frameworks for both types of MPI collectives (collective data movement as well as collective computation), based on their particular characteristics. Our framework not only reduces communication costs but also preserves data accuracy. (2) We customize fZ-light, an ultra-fast error-bounded lossy compressor, to meet the specific needs of collective communication. (3) We integrate ZCCL into multiple collectives, such as Allgather, Allreduce, Scatter, and Broadcast, and perform a comprehensive evaluation based on real-world scientific application datasets. Experiments show that our solution outperforms the original MPI collectives as well as multiple baselines by 1.9--8.9X.

cs.DC

Can Tensor Cores Benefit Memory-Bound Kernels? (No!)

Tensor cores are specialized processing units within GPUs that have demonstrated significant efficiency gains in compute-bound applications such as Deep Learning Training by accelerating dense matrix operations. Given their success, researchers have attempted to extend tensor core capabilities beyond dense matrix computations to other computational patterns, including memory-bound kernels. Recent studies have reported that tensor cores can outperform traditional CUDA cores even on memory-bound kernels, where the primary performance bottleneck is not computation. In this research, we challenge these findings through both theoretical and empirical analysis. Our theoretical analysis reveals that tensor cores can achieve a maximum speedup of only 1.33x over CUDA cores for memory-bound kernels in double precision (for V100, A100, and H100 GPUs). We validate this theoretical limit through empirical analysis of three representative memory-bound kernels-STREAM Scale, SpMV, and stencil. We demonstrate that optimizing memory-bound kernels using tensor cores does not yield sound performance improvements over CUDA cores.

cs.DC

IPComp: Interpolation Based Progressive Lossy Compression for Scientific Applications

Compression is a crucial solution for data reduction in modern scientific applications due to the exponential growth of data from simulations, experiments, and observations. Compression with progressive retrieval capability allows users to access coarse approximations of data quickly and then incrementally refine these approximations to higher fidelity. Existing progressive compression solutions suffer from low reduction ratios or high operation costs, effectively undermining the approach's benefits. In this paper, we propose the first-ever interpolation-based progressive lossy compression solution that has both high reduction ratios and low operation costs. The interpolation-based algorithm has been verified as one of the best for scientific data reduction, but previously no effort exists to make it support progressive retrieval. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) We thoroughly analyze the error characteristics of the interpolation algorithm and propose our solution IPComp with multi-level bitplane and predictive coding. (2) We derive optimized strategies toward minimum data retrieval under different fidelity levels indicated by users through error bounds and bitrates. (3) We evaluate the proposed solution using six real-world datasets from four diverse domains. Experimental results demonstrate our solution archives up to $487\%$ higher compression ratios and $698\%$ faster speed than other state-of-the-art progressive compressors, and reduces the data volume for retrieval by up to $83\%$ compared to baselines under the same error bound, and reduces the error by up to $99\%$ under the same bitrate.

cs.DC

First-Ever Deployment of a SiPM-on-Tile Calorimeter in a Collider: A Parasitic Test with 200 GeV $pp$ Collisions at RHIC

We describe the testing of a prototype SiPM-on-tile iron-scintillator calorimeter at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) during its 200 GeV $pp$ run in 2024. The prototype, measuring $20 \times 20 \, \text{cm}^{2}$ and 24 radiation lengths in depth, was positioned in the STAR experimental hall, approximately 8 m from the interaction point and 65 cm from the beam line, covering a pseudorapidity range of about $3.1<\eta<3.4$. By using the dark current of a reference SiPM as a radiation monitor, we estimate that the prototype was exposed to a fluence of about $10^{10}$ 1-MeV $n_{\mathrm{eq}}$/cm$^2$. Channel-by-channel calibration was performed in a data-driven way with the signature from minimum-ionizing particles during beam-on conditions. A Geant4 detector simulation, with inputs from the Pythia8 event generator, describes measurements of energy spectra and hit multiplicities reasonably well. These results mark the first deployment, commissioning, calibration, and long-term operation of a SiPM-on-tile calorimeter in a collider environment. This experimental campaign will guide detector designs and operational strategies for the ePIC detector at the future EIC, as well as other applications.

physics.ins-det

Towards Automated Cross-domain Exploratory Data Analysis through Large Language Models

Exploratory data analysis (EDA), coupled with SQL, is essential for data analysts involved in data exploration and analysis. However, data analysts often encounter two primary challenges: (1) the need to craft SQL queries skillfully, and (2) the requirement to generate suitable visualization types that enhance the interpretation of query results. Due to its significance, substantial research efforts have been made to explore different approaches to address these challenges, including leveraging large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods fail to meet real-world data exploration requirements primarily due to (1) complex database schema; (2) unclear user intent; (3) limited cross-domain generalization capability; and (4) insufficient end-to-end text-to-visualization capability. This paper presents TiInsight, an automated SQL-based cross-domain exploratory data analysis system. First, we propose hierarchical data context (i.e., HDC), which leverages LLMs to summarize the contexts related to the database schema, which is crucial for open-world EDA systems to generalize across data domains. Second, the EDA system is divided into four components (i.e., stages): HDC generation, question clarification and decomposition, text-to-SQL generation (i.e., TiSQL), and data visualization (i.e., TiChart). Finally, we implemented an end-to-end EDA system with a user-friendly GUI interface in the production environment at PingCAP. We have also open-sourced all APIs of TiInsight to facilitate research within the EDA community. Through extensive evaluations by a real-world user study, we demonstrate that TiInsight offers remarkable performance compared to human experts. Specifically, TiSQL achieves an execution accuracy of 86.3% on the Spider dataset using GPT-4. It also demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on the Bird dataset.

cs.DB

TurboFFT: Co-Designed High-Performance and Fault-Tolerant Fast Fourier Transform on GPUs

GPU-based fast Fourier transform (FFT) is extremely important for scientific computing and signal processing. However, we find the inefficiency of existing FFT libraries and the absence of fault tolerance against soft error. To address these issues, we introduce TurboFFT, a new FFT prototype co-designed for high performance and online fault tolerance. For FFT, we propose an architecture-aware, padding-free, and template-based prototype to maximize hardware resource utilization, achieving a competitive or superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art closed-source library, cuFFT. For fault tolerance, we 1) explore algorithm-based fault tolerance (ABFT) at the thread and threadblock levels to reduce additional memory footprint, 2) address the error propagation by introducing a two-side ABFT with location encoding, and 3) further modify the threadblock-level FFT from 1-transaction to multi-transaction in order to bring more parallelism for ABFT. Our two-side strategy enables online correction without additional global memory while our multi-transaction design averages the expensive threadblock-level reduction in ABFT with zero additional operations. Experimental results on an NVIDIA A100 server GPU and a Tesla Turing T4 GPU demonstrate that TurboFFT without fault tolerance is comparable to or up to 300\% faster than cuFFT and outperforms VkFFT. TurboFFT with fault tolerance maintains an overhead of 7\% to 15\%, even under tens of error injections per minute for both FP32 and FP64.

cs.DC

Scaling Large-scale GNN Training to Thousands of Processors on CPU-based Supercomputers

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), particularly for large-scale graphs, are crucial across numerous domains. However, training distributed full-batch GCNs on large-scale graphs suffers from inefficient memory access patterns and high communication overhead. To address these challenges, we introduce \method{}, an efficient and scalable distributed GCN training framework tailored for CPU-powered supercomputers. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we develop general and efficient aggregation operators designed for irregular memory access, (2) we propose a hierarchical aggregation scheme that reduces communication costs without altering the graph structure, and (3) we present a communication-aware quantization scheme to enhance performance. Experimental results demonstrate that \method{} achieves a speedup of up to 6$\times$ compared with the SoTA implementations, and scales to 1000s of HPC-grade CPUs on the largest publicly available datasets, without sacrificing model convergence and accuracy. Moreover, due to the effective strong scaling of \method{}, we outperform SoTA GPU-based and CPU-based distributed full-batch GCN training frameworks, in absolute performance, for large-scale graphs.

cs.DC

LCP: Enhancing Scientific Data Management with Lossy Compression for Particles

Many scientific applications opt for particles instead of meshes as their basic primitives to model complex systems composed of billions of discrete entities. Such applications span a diverse array of scientific domains, including molecular dynamics, cosmology, computational fluid dynamics, and geology. The scale of the particles in those scientific applications increases substantially thanks to the ever-increasing computational power in high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. However, the actual gains from such increases are often undercut by obstacles in data management systems related to data storage, transfer, and processing. Lossy compression has been widely recognized as a promising solution to enhance scientific data management systems regarding such challenges, although most existing compression solutions are tailored for Cartesian grids and thus have sub-optimal results on discrete particle data. In this paper, we introduce LCP, an innovative lossy compressor designed for particle datasets, offering superior compression quality and higher speed than existing compression solutions. Specifically, our contribution is threefold. (1) We propose LCP-S, an error-bound aware block-wise spatial compressor to efficiently reduce particle data size. This approach is universally applicable to particle data across various domains. (2) We develop LCP, a hybrid compression solution for multi-frame particle data, featuring dynamic method selection and parameter optimization. (3) We evaluate our solution alongside eight state-of-the-art alternatives on eight real-world particle datasets from seven distinct domains. The results demonstrate that our solution achieves up to 104% improvement in compression ratios and up to 593% increase in speed compared to the second-best option, under the same error criteria.

cs.DC