[petsc-users] DOE STTR partner opportunity

Fri Feb 14 07:28:07 CST 2025

cc'ing Rich and petsc-users.

* I tried putting "petsc example stiffness matrix" into ChatGPT and it
actually looked fine, 1D Laplacian C code with instructions to build and
run it.

* But we have many tutorials that do this and you can browse them to find
one that looks best for your interests at
https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://petsc.org/release/tutorials/__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!fNXzXlpQ-ukRC2r1EAR0vzOZCP4M_UUNOIfBsJXXEMXS3FrkItd2r4hJKy94MHlF6h7APDqb7-Pfc9V4GdZtUls$ 

Good luck,
Mark

On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 8:05 AM Debiprasad Panda <dpanda68 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Mark,
>
> Can you send me any link for FEA example using PETSC which will generate
> the stiffness matrix so that I can play with you for porting into our FPGA.
> Regards.
>
> Debiprasad Panda, PhD
> President & CTO,
> Universal Real Time Power Conversion LLC
> Greater Milwaukee, WI
> Tel:1-440-840-3393 (cell)
> Web: https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://urtpc.com__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!fNXzXlpQ-ukRC2r1EAR0vzOZCP4M_UUNOIfBsJXXEMXS3FrkItd2r4hJKy94MHlF6h7APDqb7-Pfc9V435nHato$ 
>
> NOTICE OF PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION*:*
> *This e-mail transmission and its attachments are privileged, proprietary
> and confidential and is **for the review of the designated recipient only**.
> If you have received this transmission in error, please immediately
> notify dpanda68 at yahoo.com <r_satpati at yahoo.com>.  Unintended transmission
> shall not constitute waiver of any privilege.*
>
>
> On Wednesday, February 12, 2025 at 03:14:51 PM CST, Debiprasad Panda <
> dpanda68 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Richard,
>
> Thanks for the detailed email. It certainly explains the limitation at
> this time. Your email also very clearly explains about what kind of
> collaboration you extend to the partnering company. I had in my mind that
> neither you or Mark or Todd will write the code for us. I thought there
> might be junior scientists/programmers who works in your team will do the
> bulk of the work under your supervision. Now I understand that you would
> like to participate only in specific issues which is not readily available
> or needs further development in PETSc. As you say some issues may arise
> while using it and if so, you would like to participate in resolving such
> issues either in a future DOE proposal or through a self-generated project
> by PETSc community.  Correct me if my understanding is not right. We did
> work with university and consultants as sub-contractor in the past from
> this organization, but not directly with research labs. Your email
> certainly provides some guideline on the process and timeline.
>
> As you know we did implement a complete FEA analysis in FPGA and the speed
> up is significant. However, that was partly hardcoded. Thats why looking
> for an interface which is already tested and just need to be streamlined
> with our workflow. I thought that having a complete example of our interest
> in PETSC and implementing the same by part/full in FPGA will give us a good
> handle to continue development in that direction. As I mentioned we can do
> that task ourselves - we do have people who used the same workflow as I
> provided in my email, but it was for a different application. The main
> problem for small business like us is lack of funding. An SBIR/STTR funding
> will be very helpful ton accomplish this ground research on FPGA PETSC
> interface.
>
> I know time is short and certainly this transition time is making things
> more complicated.
>
> Let's plan for the next round and I believe the solicitation will be out
> in first week of June and the submission of the final proposal will be in
> October 2025. I will contact you in June.
>
>
> Anyway, we will proceed with our proposal with another partner this time.
>
> In the mean it will be helpful if Adam or any of you can send a link to
> any existing FEA example so that we can play with it.
>
> Thanks again for all your time and email discussion.
>
>
>
> Regards.
>
>
> Debiprasad Panda, PhD
> President & CTO,
> Universal Real Time Power Conversion LLC
> Greater Milwaukee, WI
> Tel:1-440-840-3393 (cell)
> Web: https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://urtpc.com__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!fNXzXlpQ-ukRC2r1EAR0vzOZCP4M_UUNOIfBsJXXEMXS3FrkItd2r4hJKy94MHlF6h7APDqb7-Pfc9V435nHato$ 
>
> NOTICE OF PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION*:*
> *This e-mail transmission and its attachments are privileged, proprietary
> and confidential and is **for the review of the designated recipient only**.
> If you have received this transmission in error, please immediately
> notify dpanda68 at yahoo.com <r_satpati at yahoo.com>.  Unintended transmission
> shall not constitute waiver of any privilege.*
>
>
> On Wednesday, February 12, 2025 at 02:07:03 PM CST, Mills, Richard Tran <
> rtmills at anl.gov> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Debiprasad,
>
> I apologize for being slow to get back to you; I am severely
> over-committed at the moment, and keeping up with email (among other
> things) has been extremely difficult.
>
> I am sorry to have to disappoint you, but I do not think that it will be
> possible for me, Todd, or Mark to partner with you on the STTR call this
> time around. Let me try to explain the two major reasons why.
>
> First: For staff at the DOE National Laboratories, it is very
> time-consuming to get approvals to participate as a subcontractor for
> something like an SBIR or STTR project. I receive a small amount of funding
> from an SBIR project right now, and it literally took weeks to get that
> proposal through all of the required approvals, including an "letter of
> commitment" signed by the the Laboratory's Director of Sponsored Research,
> as well as approval from our Contracting Officer at the DOE Site Office in
> Chicago. There are many steps of the review to ensure that proposed work is
> consistent with the DOE and Argonne missions, that it does not adversely
> impact DOE work at Argonne, and that it is not in direct competition with
> the private sector. The laboratory's guidance on this approval process
> state that we should allow a minimum of 15 business days for this process,
> but, with the current upheaval due to the transition to the new
> Administration, I suspect that more than 15 business days would be
> required. I also note that a reasonably close to complete draft of the
> proposal is required to be submitted at the beginning of the approval
> process, so you need to factor in time to develop the proposal ahead of the
> approval window if you want to respond to a future STTR or SBIR call and
> partner with a DOE Laboratory.
>
> Second: The breakdown of work that you are proposing isn't really aligned
> what with laboratory research scientists like Todd, Mark, and I are
> expected to do. We are primarily researchers, and our output is judged
> similarly to that of a professor at an R1 university, except that we have
> no teaching load and engage in some programmatic work. What you have
> proposed is having us develop a complete finite-element analysis code to
> some specification you provide, which we will then hand to you (before you
> implement part or all of it using FPGAs). For this sort of arrangement, it
> sounds like what you are looking for is scientific programmers who work on
> contract. That is not the role that we play. We do research on
> computational mathematics and its applications, and we develop software to
> aid this research and to enable the broader computing community to benefit
> from our research and perhaps collaborate with us on further developments.
> This has led to a widely-used piece of software, PETSc, which provides
> useful computational building blocks that many teams have used to build
> finite-element analysis applications, but when teams have used PETSc for
> such work and have teamed with us, it has very much been in a collaborative
> research relationship: others are doing much of the development of their
> FEM code, but we help them because, say, they are modeling systems with
> very difficult nonlinearities, discontinuous jumps in material
> coefficients, strangely stretched elements, etc., that cause problems for
> simple algebraic solvers, so we collaborate with them on developing new
> solver techniques that are amenable to their problems.
>
> It may make sense for you to partner with us or other members of the PETSc
> team in the future, but I think you need to take some time to lay more of
> the groundwork before a future funding call. You can experiment with
> porting a PETSc-based FEM code using your FPGA approach without needing
> anything from us right now: There are numerous finite-element example codes
> provided with PETSc (Mark has written a few of them, and might be able to
> recommend some good ones to start with). You could start by playing with
> these examples and then try porting bits of them to FPGAs. As I said in an
> earlier message, based on my limited experience with FPGAs, I suspect that
> you will run into several technical challenges. When you have had a chance
> to identify these challenges, then it might make sense to come back to the
> PETSc team to describe some of them — you can start by emailing petsc-maint
> or petsc-users about this — and perhaps eventually develop a proposal that
> aims to address them in collaboration with the team.
>
> Apologies if I have had to disappoint you, and best of luck. Perhaps later
> there will be good opportunities to partner with us in the future. I
> encourage you to experiment some with PETSc to determine whether it is the
> right software toolkit to use for your FPGA-targeted applications, and to
> not be shy about asking on the PETSc user lists as you uncover issues as
> you experiment.
>
> Best regards,
> Richard
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Debiprasad Panda <dpanda68 at yahoo.com>
> *Sent:* Thursday, February 6, 2025 8:18 PM
> *To:* Mills, Richard Tran <rtmills at anl.gov>
> *Cc:* Mark Adams <mfadams at lbl.gov>; Munson, Todd <tmunson at mcs.anl.gov>
> *Subject:* Re: DOE STTR partner opportunity
>
> This Message Is From an External Sender
> This message came from outside your organization.
>
> Dear All,
>
> Amidst all these organizational and administrative changes, I have good
> news to share that our LOI has been accepted by DOE and the final proposal
> submission is due on 26th February 2025. The proposal is about an FEA
> thermal analysis using PETSc and porting it to FPGA for its real time
> simulation.
>
> Given a mechanical drawing of an object, in PETSC a mesh will be generated
> and then a thermal problem will be formulated using FEA theory and boundary
> condition to generate a global stiffness matrix in the form of Ax =B, which
> will be eventually solved using linear or non-linear solver. In Phase I, we
> will concentrate only on linear system and only the solver part will be
> implemented in FPGA to demonstrate the real time operation in part. In
> Phase II, the entire FEA problem formulation with non-linearity as well as
> solver will be implemented in FPGA to have a complete real time solution.
>
> We went through PETSc libraries and one of our team members has used it
> extensively during his PhD. The steps we would like to follow to formulate
> a FEA problem, and its solution is described in the attached document.
>
> We would like you to partnering with us in this DOE project and your
> responsibility will be to create this FEA thermal model in PETSc following
> the steps in the given document and then run it in a PC/server and
> collect the result. We will take the responsibility of implementing the
> same in our FPGA solver.
>
> I was thinking to write this email for some time but kept on hold till the
> formal acceptance of LOI in order to justify your time.
>
> Please go through the attached document and then let's follow up with a
> zoom call sometime early next week per your convenience for discussing it
> for any question you may have.
>
> Please acknowledge receiving this email so that I know our communication
> is going through.
>
> I will look forward to collaborating with you.
>
> Regards.
>
>
> Debiprasad Panda, PhD
> President & CTO,
> Universal Real Time Power Conversion LLC
> Greater Milwaukee, WI
> Tel:1-440-840-3393 (cell)
> Web: https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://urtpc.com__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!fNXzXlpQ-ukRC2r1EAR0vzOZCP4M_UUNOIfBsJXXEMXS3FrkItd2r4hJKy94MHlF6h7APDqb7-Pfc9V435nHato$ 
> <https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://urtpc.com__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!YKeheulpEvP02Jraqr7SiUTNGtRfqaaLJ7-ibIrQ3HGvPKHIqKfkL8mQ6rfHuR-j4Fra6KhYon67LEc$>
>
> NOTICE OF PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION*:*
> *This e-mail transmission and its attachments are privileged, proprietary
> and confidential and is **for the review of the designated recipient only**.
> If you have received this transmission in error, please immediately notify **dpanda68 at yahoo.com
> <r_satpati at yahoo.com>**.  Unintended transmission shall not constitute
> waiver of any privilege.*
>
>
> On Tuesday, January 14, 2025 at 03:20:07 PM CST, Debiprasad Panda <
> dpanda68 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Richard,  Mark, Todd
>
> I am submitting the LOI without ANL at this time. It seems we can include
> ANL as STTR partner while submitting the full proposal if things look good
> from both sides. So, we may have about six weeks from now to understand the
> project. Let's discuss it over a zoom call sometime this week.
>
> Regards.
>
> Debiprasad Panda, PhD
> President & CTO,
> Universal Real Time Power Conversion LLC
> Greater Milwaukee, WI
> Tel:1-440-840-3393 (cell)
> Web: https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://urtpc.com__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!fNXzXlpQ-ukRC2r1EAR0vzOZCP4M_UUNOIfBsJXXEMXS3FrkItd2r4hJKy94MHlF6h7APDqb7-Pfc9V435nHato$ 
> <https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://urtpc.com__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!YKeheulpEvP02Jraqr7SiUTNGtRfqaaLJ7-ibIrQ3HGvPKHIqKfkL8mQ6rfHuR-j4Fra6KhYon67LEc$>
>
> NOTICE OF PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION*:*
> *This e-mail transmission and its attachments are privileged, proprietary
> and confidential and is **for the review of the designated recipient only**.
> If you have received this transmission in error, please immediately notify **dpanda68 at yahoo.com
> <r_satpati at yahoo.com>**.  Unintended transmission shall not constitute
> waiver of any privilege.*
>
>
> On Tuesday, January 14, 2025 at 12:50:53 PM CST, Mills, Richard Tran <
> rtmills at anl.gov> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Debiprasad,
>
> Apologies for the delay in my reply; the past few days have been
> especially busy ones due to some internal proposal deadlines I had to rush
> to meet, on top of several other things.
>
> Your project sounds interesting, but, unfortunately, I don't think that
> there is time before your LOI is due for me to understand your application,
> discuss whether PETSc is appropriate for it, or how you would map any
> implementation using PETSc to FPGA hardware. PETSc is an extremely
> complicated piece of software and a lot of effort is required from
> algorithm selection and parallel problem decomposition on down to details
> of individual microkernels when bringing it to and optimizing it for new
> kinds of computing architectures. (I spent roughly six years working with
> several others on getting solid GPU support in PETSc, for instance.) I have
> a little bit of familiarity with FPGAs from my time at ORNL and Intel, and
> I think that enabling PETSc to make efficient use of FPGAs is going to be a
> highly non-trivial (though interesting!) project. Are you familiar at all
> with PETSc, and do you have a particular reason that you think it would be
> helpful to your work? You might be better served by using a different piece
> of software as a starting point, if you do not need things like the
> distributed memory-parallel implementations or the advanced, composable
> solvers and preconditioners. If you do have a particular need for things
> that PETSc provides, perhaps I or others from the PETSc team could discuss
> this with you with future opportunities in mind. Best of luck to you if you
> do submit an STTR proposal this time.
>
> Sincerely,
> Richard
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Debiprasad Panda <dpanda68 at yahoo.com>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, January 14, 2025 6:09 AM
> *To:* Mills, Richard Tran <rtmills at anl.gov>
> *Subject:* Re: DOE STTR partner opportunity
>
> This Message Is From an External Sender
> This message came from outside your organization.
>
> Richard,
> Hope you received my previous email. I will appreciate if you let me know
> if you would like to participate in this STTR project or not. I know its a
> short notice and I will understand if that is not sufficient to make it a
> "GO".
>
> I will still have good amount time to create and upload an LOI.
>
> Regards.
>
> Debiprasad Panda, PhD
> President & CTO,
> Universal Real Time Power Conversion LLC
> Greater Milwaukee, WI
> Tel:1-440-840-3393 (cell)
> Web: https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://urtpc.com__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!fNXzXlpQ-ukRC2r1EAR0vzOZCP4M_UUNOIfBsJXXEMXS3FrkItd2r4hJKy94MHlF6h7APDqb7-Pfc9V435nHato$ 
> <https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://urtpc.com__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!Y1KB89LXCkt6T8Z7n9PMvin_XYuQGUOsbWYpr4EbU3SJkMiBRE8VUOVlOIxbu8ETP36hdk0DEvJZnRc$>
>
> NOTICE OF PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION*:*
> *This e-mail transmission and its attachments are privileged, proprietary
> and confidential and is **for the review of the designated recipient only**.
> If you have received this transmission in error, please immediately notify **dpanda68 at yahoo.com
> <r_satpati at yahoo.com>**.  Unintended transmission shall not constitute
> waiver of any privilege.*
>
>
> On Monday, January 13, 2025 at 01:44:59 PM CST, Debiprasad Panda <
> dpanda68 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Richard,
> I got your contact from Todd Munson. We are a small business located in
> greater Milwaukee and working on a one-stop real time simulator where we
> can simulate a large grid along with IBR in real time. In addition, we can
> conduct a thermal and structural FEA analysis in real time for up to 1-5
> Million grid points.
> A new DOE solicitation is out where we can propose a one stop solution for
> solar power IBR where we can model an IBR with very low step size (20-40ns)
> for its real time simulation and also, we can calculate thermal loss
> through semiconductor switches and then provide a thermal footprint of the
> IBR in real time employing a FEA analysis. We have implemented a thermal
> analysis of a heat sink using our proprietary FPGA implementation in real
> time with 52000 nodes and can extend it upto 1-5M. I am wondering if you
> would like to take part as RI for our STTR application where you can
> formulate the FEA problem using PETSC or any other software and then we can
> implement the same in FPGA for its real time implementation. If so, let me
> know by COB today. We do not have much time - the LOI is due tomorrow 4:00
> PM central time, and the full proposal is due on 26th February. If you
> would like we can have a quick call to discuss. At this time an email
> consent will be fine and then we can discuss the detailed scopes and
> deliverable in next couple of weeks.  The STTR
>
> Let me know if you will be interested.
>
>
> Regards.
>
> Debiprasad Panda, PhD
> President & CTO,
> Universal Real Time Power Conversion LLC
> Greater Milwaukee, WI
> Tel:1-440-840-3393 (cell)
> Web: https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://urtpc.com__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!fNXzXlpQ-ukRC2r1EAR0vzOZCP4M_UUNOIfBsJXXEMXS3FrkItd2r4hJKy94MHlF6h7APDqb7-Pfc9V435nHato$ 
> <https://urldefense.us/v3/__https://urtpc.com__;!!G_uCfscf7eWS!Y1KB89LXCkt6T8Z7n9PMvin_XYuQGUOsbWYpr4EbU3SJkMiBRE8VUOVlOIxbu8ETP36hdk0DEvJZnRc$>
>
> NOTICE OF PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION*:*
> *This e-mail transmission and its attachments are privileged, proprietary
> and confidential and is **for the review of the designated recipient only**.
> If you have received this transmission in error, please immediately notify **dpanda68 at yahoo.com
> <r_satpati at yahoo.com>*
> *.  Unintended transmission shall not constitute waiver of any privilege. *
>
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