skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Foster, Ian"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. Long-running scientific workflows, such as tomographic data analysis pipelines, are prone to a variety of failures, including hardware and network disruptions, as well as software errors. These failures can substantially degrade performance and increase turnaround times, particularly in large-scale, geographically distributed, and time-sensitive environments like synchrotron radiation facilities. In this work, we propose and evaluate resilience strategies aimed at mitigating the impact of failures in tomographic reconstruction workflows. Specifically, we introduce an asynchronous, non-blocking checkpointing mechanism and a dynamic load redistribution technique with lazy recovery, designed to enhance workflow reliability and minimize failure-induced overheads. These approaches facilitate progress preservation, balanced load distribution, and efficient recovery in error-prone environments. To evaluate their effectiveness, we implement a 3D tomographic reconstruction pipeline and deploy it across Argonne's leadership computing infrastructure and synchrotron facilities. Our results demonstrate that the proposed resilience techniques significantly reduce failure impact—by up to 500× —while maintaining negligible overhead (<3%). 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 6, 2026
  2. Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 8, 2026
  3. Free, publicly-accessible full text available February 1, 2026
  4. Abstract One compelling vision of the future of materials discovery and design involves the use of machine learning (ML) models to predict materials properties and then rapidly find materials tailored for specific applications. However, realizing this vision requires both providing detailed uncertainty quantification (model prediction errors and domain of applicability) and making models readily usable. At present, it is common practice in the community to assess ML model performance only in terms of prediction accuracy (e.g. mean absolute error), while neglecting detailed uncertainty quantification and robust model accessibility and usability. Here, we demonstrate a practical method for realizing both uncertainty and accessibility features with a large set of models. We develop random forest ML models for 33 materials properties spanning an array of data sources (computational and experimental) and property types (electrical, mechanical, thermodynamic, etc). All models have calibrated ensemble error bars to quantify prediction uncertainty and domain of applicability guidance enabled by kernel-density-estimate-based feature distance measures. All data and models are publicly hosted on the Garden-AI infrastructure, which provides an easy-to-use, persistent interface for model dissemination that permits models to be invoked with only a few lines of Python code. We demonstrate the power of this approach by using our models to conduct a fully ML-based materials discovery exercise to search for new stable, highly active perovskite oxide catalyst materials. 
    more » « less
  5. Here, we present the outcomes from the second Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry, which engaged participants across global hybrid locations, resulting in 34 team submissions. The submissions spanned seven key application areas and demonstrated the diverse utility of LLMs for applications in (1) molecular and material property prediction; (2) molecular and material design; (3) automation and novel interfaces; (4) scientific communication and education; (5) research data management and automation; (6) hypothesis generation and evaluation; and (7) knowledge extraction and reasoning from scientific literature. Each team submission is presented in a summary table with links to the code and as brief papers in the appendix. Beyond team results, we discuss the hackathon event and its hybrid format, which included physical hubs in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin, Lausanne, and Tokyo, alongside a global online hub to enable local and virtual collaboration. Overall, the event highlighted significant improvements in LLM capabilities since the previous year's hackathon, suggesting continued expansion of LLMs for applications in materials science and chemistry research. These outcomes demonstrate the dual utility of LLMs as both multipurpose models for diverse machine learning tasks and platforms for rapid prototyping custom applications in scientific research. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 20, 2025
  6. Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 17, 2025