Driven by growing application requirements and accelerated by current trends in microprocessor design, the number of processor cores on modern supercomputers is increasing from generation to generation. However, load or communication imbalance prevents many codes from taking advantage of the available parallelism, as delays of single processes may spread wait states across the entire machine. Moreover, when employing complex point-to-point communication patterns, wait states may propagate along far-reaching cause-effect chains that are hard to track manually and that complicate an assessment of the actual costs of an imbalance. Building on earlier work by Meira Jr. et al., we present a scalable approach that identifies program wait states and attributes their costs in terms of resource waste to their original cause. By replaying event traces in parallel both in forward and backward direction, we can identify the processes and call paths responsible for the most severe imbalances even for runs with tens of thousands of processes.

Driven by growing application requirements and accelerated by current trends in microprocessor design, the number of processor cores on modern supercomputers is increasing from generation to generation. However, load or communication imbalance prevents many codes from taking advantage of the available parallelism, as delays of single processes may spread wait states across the entire machine. Moreover, when employing complex point-to-point communication patterns, wait states may propagate along far-reaching cause-effect chains that are hard to track manually and that complicate an assessment of the actual costs of an imbalance. Building on earlier work by Meira, Jr., et al., we present a scalable approach that identifies program wait states and attributes their costs in terms of resource waste to their original cause. By replaying event traces in parallel both forward and backward, we can identify the processes and call paths responsible for the most severe imbalances, even for runs with hundreds of thousands of processes.

The formation of a thin current sheet in a magnetic quasiseparatrix layer (QSL) is investigated by means of numerical simulation using a simplified ideal, low-$\beta$ , MHD model. The initial configuration and driving boundary conditions are relevant to phenomena observed in the solar corona and were studied earlier by Aulanier et al. [Astron. Astrophys. 444, 961 (2005)]. In extension to that work, we use the technique of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to significantly enhance the local spatial resolution of the current sheet during its formation, which enables us to follow the evolution into a later stage. Our simulations are in good agreement with the results of Aulanier et al. up to the calculated time in that work. In a later phase, we observe a basically unarrested collapse of the sheet to length scales that are more than one order of magnitude smaller than those reported earlier. The current density attains correspondingly larger maximum values within the sheet. During this thinning process, which is finally limited by lack of resolution even in the AMR studies, the current sheet moves upward, following a global expansion of the magnetic structure during the quasistatic evolution. The sheet is locally one-dimensional and the plasma flow in its vicinity, when transformed into a comoving frame, qualitatively resembles a stagnation point flow. In conclusion, our simulations support the idea that extremely high current densities are generated in the vicinities of QSLs as a response to external perturbations, with no sign of saturation.

A general procedure is described to generate material parameter sets to simulate fire propagation in horizontal cable tray installations. Cone Calorimeter test data are processed in an inverse modelling approach. Here, parameter sets are generated procedurally and serve as input for simulations conducted with the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS). The simulation responses are compared with the experimental data and ranked based on their fitness. The best fitness was found for a test condition of 50 kW/m². Low flux conditions 25 kW/m² and less exhibited difficulties to be accurately simulated. As a validation step, the best parameter sets are then utilised to simulate fire propagation within a horizontal cable tray installation and are compared with experimental data. It is important to note, the inverse modelling process is focused on the Cone Calorimeter and not aware of the actual validation step. Despite this handicap, the general features in the fire development can be reproduced, however not exact. The fire in the tray simulation extinguishes earlier and the total energy release is slightly higher when compared to the experiment. The responses of the material parameter sets are briefly compared with a selection of state of the art procedures.