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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2002

Wireless Temperature-Monitoring System

A relatively inexpensive instrumentation system that includes units that are connected to thermocouples and that are parts of a radio-communication network has been developed to enable monitoring of temperatures at multiple locations. Because there is no need to string wires or cables for communication, the system is well suited for monitoring temperatures at remote locations and for applications in which frequent changes of monitored or monitoring locations are needed. The system can also be adapted to monitoring of slowly varying physical quantities, other than temperature, that can be transduced by solid-state electronic sensors. electronic sensors. The system comprises any number of transmitting units and a single receiving unit. Each transmitting unit includes connections for as many as four external thermocouples, a signal-conditioning module, a control module, and a radio-communication module. The signal-conditioning module acts as an interface between the thermocouples and the rest of the transmitting unit and includes a built-in solid ambient temperature sensor that is in addition to the external thermocouples. The control module is a system-on-chip embedded processor that includes analog-to-digital converters, serial and parallel data ports, and an interface for local connection to an analog meter that is used during installation to verify correct operation. The radio-communication module contains a commercial spread-spectrum transceiver that operates in the 900-MHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency band. This transceiver transmits data to the receiving unit at a rate of 19,200 baud. The receiving unit includes a transceiver like that of a transmitting unit, plus a control module that contains a system-on-chip processor that includes serial data port for output to a computer that runs monitoring and/or control software, a parallel data port for output to a printer, and a seven-segment light-emitting-diode display. Each transmitting unit is battery-powered and can operate for at least seven days continuously while reporting temperatures every half hour. The receiving unit is powered by a wall-mounted transformer source. The receiving unit responds to each transmitting unit and reports the readings of each of the four thermocouples and of the ambient-temperature sensor of the transmitting unit. The end-to-end accuracy of the system is plus or minus 0.2 C over the temperature range from 0 to 100 C. The radio-communication range between the receiving and transmitting units is approximately equal to 0.5 mile (approximately equal to 0.8 km).

Solano, Wanda↗
NASA NTRS2003

Wireless Temperature-Monitoring System

A relatively inexpensive instrumentation system that includes units that are connected to thermocouples and that are parts of a radio-communication network has been developed to enable monitoring of temperatures at multiple locations. Because there is no need to string wires or cables for communication, the system is well suited for monitoring temperatures at remote locations and for applications in which frequent changes of monitored or monitoring locations are needed. The system can also be adapted to monitoring of slowly varying physical quantities, other than temperature, that can be transduced by solid-state electronic sensors. The system comprises any number of transmitting units and a single receiving unit (see figure). Each transmitting unit includes connections for as many as four external thermocouples, a signal-conditioning module, a control module, and a radio-communication module. The signal- conditioning module acts as an interface between the thermocouples and the rest of the transmitting unit and includes a built-in solid ambient-temperature sensor that is in addition to the external thermocouples. The control module is a "system-on-chip" embedded processor that includes analog-to-digital converters, serial and parallel data ports, and an interface for local connection to an analog meter that is used during installation to verify correct operation. The radio-communication module contains a commercial spread-spectrum transceiver that operates in the 900-MHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency band. This transceiver transmits data to the receiving unit at a rate of 19,200 baud. The receiving unit includes a transceiver like that of a transmitting unit, plus a control module that contains a system-on-chip processor that includes serial data port for output to a computer that runs monitoring and/or control software, a parallel data port for output to a printer, and a seven-segment light-emitting-diode display.

Solano, Wanda↗
NASA NTRS1994

Open system environments

An open system is defined as a system that implements open specifications for interfaces, services, and supporting formats to enable properly engineered applications software to be ported with minimal changes across a wide range of systems; and to interact with users in a style which facilitates user portability. Based on that definition, a reference model for an open system environment is presented.

Schulz, Fritz↗
NASA NTRS1997

Solar-System Tests of Gravitational Theories

We are engaged in testing gravitational theory by means of observations of objects in the solar system. These tests include an examination of the Principle Of Equivalence (POE), the Shapiro delay, the advances of planetary perihelia, the possibility of a secular variation G in the "gravitational constant" G, and the rate of the de Sitter (geodetic) precession of the Earth-Moon system. These results are consistent with our preliminary results focusing on the contribution of Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR), which were presented at the seventh Marcel Grossmann meeting on general relativity. The largest improvement over previous results comes in the uncertainty for (eta): a factor of five better than our previous value. This improvement reflects the increasing strength of the LLR data. A similar analysis presented at the same meeting by a group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory gave a similar result for (eta). Our value for (beta) represents our first such result determined simultaneously with the solar quadrupole moment from the dynamical data set. These results are being prepared for publication. We have shown how positions determined from different planetary ephemerides can be compared and how the combination of VLBI and pulse timing information can yield a direct tie between planetary and radio frames. We have continued to include new data in our analysis as they became available. Finally, we have made improvement in our analysis software (PEP) and ported it to a network of modern workstations from its former home on a "mainframe" computer.

Shapiro, Irwin↗
NASA NTRS1995

Software Transition Project Retrospectives and the Application of SEL Effort Estimation Model and Boehm's COCOMO to Complex Software Transition Projects

The Multimission Image Processing Subsystem (MIPS) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has managed transitions of application software sets from one operating system and hardware platform to multiple operating systems and hardware platforms. As a part of these transitions, cost estimates were generated from the personal experience of in-house developers and managers to calculate the total effort required for such projects. Productivity measures have been collected for two such transitions, one very large and the other relatively small in terms of source lines of code. These estimates used a cost estimation model similar to the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) Effort Estimation Model. Experience in transitioning software within JPL MIPS have uncovered a high incidence of interface complexity. Interfaces, both internal and external to individual software applications, have contributed to software transition project complexity, and thus to scheduling difficulties and larger than anticipated design work on software to be ported.

SEL Boehm COCOMO↗
NASA NTRS2008

Fault-Tolerant, Multiple-Zone Temperature Control

A computer program has been written as an essential part of an electronic temperature control system for a spaceborne instrument that contains several zones. The system was developed because the temperature and the rate of change of temperature in each zone are required to be maintained to within limits that amount to degrees of precision thought to be unattainable by use of simple bimetallic thermostats. The software collects temperature readings from six platinum resistance thermometers, calculates temperature errors from the readings, and implements a proportional + integral + derivative (PID) control algorithm that adjusts heater power levels. The software accepts, via a serial port, commands to change its operational parameters. The software attempts to detect and mitigate a host of potential faults. It is robust to many kinds of faults in that it can maintain PID control in the presence of those faults.

Granger, James↗
DOE OSTI2025

Using a Large Language Model as a Building Block to Generate Usable Validation and Verification Suite for OpenMP

In the HPC area, both hardware and software move quickly. Often new hardware is developed and deployed, the corresponding software stack, including compilers and other tools, are under active development while leading edge software developers are working to port and tune their applications, all at the same time. While the software ecosystem is in flux, one of the key challenges for users is obtaining insight into the state of implementation of key features in the programming languages and models their applications are using – whether they have been implemented, and whether the implementation conforms to the specification, especially for newly implemented features (less tested by widespread use). OpenMP is one of the most prominent shared memory programming models used for on-node programming in HPC. With the shift towards accelerators (such as GPUs and FPGAs) and heterogeneous programming OpenMP features are getting more complex. It is natural to ask whether generative AI approaches, and large language models (LLMs) in particular, can help in producing validation and verification test suites to allow users better and faster insights into the availability and correctness of OpenMP features of interest. In this work, we explore the use of ChatGPT-4 to generate a suite of tests for OpenMP features. We have chosen a set of directives and clauses, a total of 78 combinations, which first appeared in OpenMP 3.0 (released in May 2008) but are also relevant for accelerators. We prompted ChatGPT to generate tests in the C and Fortran languages, for both host (CPU) and device (accelerator). On the Summit super-computer using the GNU implementation, we found that, of the 78 generated tests 67 C tests and 43 Fortran tests compiled successfully and fewer than those executed to completion. On further analysis we show that not all generated tests are valid. We document the process, results, and provide detailed analysis regarding the quality of tests generated. With the aim of providing input to a production quality validation and verification suite, we manually implement the corrections required to make the tests valid according to the current OpenMP specification. We quantify this effort as small, medium, or large, and record the lines of code changed to correct the invalid tests. With the corrected tests we validate recent implementations from HPE, AMD, and GNU on the Frontier supercomputer. Our experiment and subsequent analysis show that although LLMs are capable of producing HPC specific codes, they are limited by their understanding of the deeper semantics and restrictions of programming models such as OpenMP. Unsurprisingly more commonly used features have better support, while some OpenMP 3.0 directives such as sections and tasking are not universally supported on accelerators. We demonstrate that successful compilation and execution to completion are inadequate metrics for evaluating generated code and that, at this time, commodity LLMs require expert intervention for code verification. This points to gaps in the training data that is currently available for HPC. We demonstrate that with "small" effort 37% of generated invalid C tests and 63% of generated invalid Fortran tests could be corrected. This improves productivity of test generation as we circumvent writing from scratch and the common programming errors associated with it.

Pophale, Swaroop [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000185446367)↗
NASA NTRS1991

Interface Circuit For Printer Port

Electronic circuit, called printer-port interface circuit (PPI) developed to overcome certain disadvantages of previous methods for connecting IBM PC or PC-compatible computer to other equipment. Has both reading and writing modes of operation. Very simple, requiring only six integrated circuits. Provides for moderately fast rates of transfer of data and uses existing unmodified circuit card in IBM PC. When used with appropriate software, circuit converts printer port on IBM PC, XT, AT, or compatible personal computer to general purpose, 8-bit-data, 16-bit address bus that connects to multitude of devices.

Tucker, Jerry H.↗
NASA NTRS2014

Empirical and Face Validity of Software Maintenance Defect Models Used at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

At the Mission Design and Navigation Software Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory we make use of finite exponential based defect models to aid in maintenance planning and management for our widely used critical systems. However a number of pragmatic issues arise when applying defect models for a post-release system in continuous use. These include: how to utilize information from problem reports rather than testing to drive defect discovery and removal effort, practical model calibration, and alignment of model assumptions with our environment.

software reliability↗
NASA NTRS2012

Plug-in Plan Tool v3.0.3.1

The role of PLUTO (Plug-in Port UTilization Officer) and the growth of the International Space Station (ISS) have exceeded the capabilities of the current tool PiP (Plug-in Plan). Its users (crew and flight controllers) have expressed an interest in a new, easy-to-use tool with a higher level of interactivity and functionality that is not bound by the limitations of Excel. The PiP Tool assists crewmembers and ground controllers in making real-time decisions concerning the safety and compatibility of hardware plugged into the UOPs (Utility Outlet Panels) onboard the ISS. The PiP Tool also provides a reference to the current configuration of the hardware plugged in to the UOPs, and enables the PLUTO and crew to test Plug-in locations for constraint violations (such as cable connector mismatches or amp limit violations), to see the amps and volts for an end item, to see whether or not the end item uses 1553 data, and the cable length between the outlet and the end item. As new equipment is flown or returned, the database can be updated appropriately as needed. The current tool is a macroheavy Excel spreadsheet with its own database and reporting functionality. The new tool captures the capabilities of the original tool, ports them to new software, defines a new dataset, and compensates for ever-growing unique constraints associated with the Plug-in Plan. New constraints were designed into the tool, and updates to existing constraints were added to provide more flexibility and customizability. In addition, there is an option to associate a "Flag" with each device that will let the user know there is a unique constraint associated with it when they use it. This helps improve the safety and efficiency of real-time calls by limiting the amount of "corporate knowledge" overhead that has to be trained and learned through use. The tool helps save time by automating previous manual processes, such as calculating connector types and deciding which cables are required and in what order.

Andrea-Liner, Kathleen E.↗
NASA NTRS1990

A study of the portability of an Ada system in the software engineering laboratory (SEL)

A particular porting effort is discussed, and various statistics on analyzing the portability of Ada and the total staff months (overall and by phase) required to accomplish the rehost, are given. This effort is compared to past experiments on the rehosting of FORTRAN systems. The discussion includes an analysis of the types of errors encountered during the rehosting, the changes required to rehost the system, experiences with the Alsys IBM Ada compiler, the impediments encountered, and the lessons learned during this study.

Jun, Linda O.↗
NASA NTRS2006

CCSDS Time-Critical Onboard Networking Service

The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) is developing recommendations for communication services onboard spacecraft. Today many different communication buses are used on spacecraft requiring software with the same basic functionality to be rewritten for each type of bus. This impacts on the application software resulting in custom software for almost every new mission. The Spacecraft Onboard Interface Services (SOIS) working group aims to provide a consistent interface to various onboard buses and sub-networks, enabling a common interface to the application software. The eventual goal is reusable software that can be easily ported to new missions and run on a range of onboard buses without substantial modification. The system engineer will then be able to select a bus based on its performance, power, etc and be confident that a particular choice of bus will not place excessive demands on software development. This paper describes the SOIS Intra-Networking Service which is designed to enable data transfer and multiplexing of a variety of internetworking protocols with a range of quality of service support, over underlying heterogeneous data links. The Intra-network service interface provides users with a common Quality of Service interface when transporting data across a variety of underlying data links. Supported Quality of Service (QoS) elements include: Priority, Resource Reservation and Retry/Redundancy. These three QoS elements combine and map into four TCONS services for onboard data communications: Best Effort, Assured, Reserved, and Guaranteed. Data to be transported is passed to the Intra-network service with a requested QoS. The requested QoS includes the type of service, priority and where appropriate, a channel identifier. The data is de-multiplexed, prioritized, and the required resources for transport are allocated. The data is then passed to the appropriate data link for transfer across the bus. The SOIS supported data links may inherently provide the quality of service support requested by the intra-network layer. In the case where the data link does not have the required level of support, the missing functionality is added by SOIS. As a result of this architecture, re-usable software applications can be designed and used across missions thereby promoting common mission operations. In addition, the protocol multiplexing function enables the blending of multiple onboard networks. This paper starts by giving an overview of the SOIS architecture in section 11, illustrating where the TCONS services fit into the overall architecture. It then describes the quality of service approach adopted, in section III. The prototyping efforts that have been going on are introduced in section JY. Finally, in section V the current status of the CCSDS recommendations is summarized.

Parkes, Steve↗
NASA NTRS2013

Towards Efficient Scientific Data Management Using Cloud Storage

A software prototype allows users to backup and restore data to/from both public and private cloud storage such as Amazon's S3 and NASA's Nebula. Unlike other off-the-shelf tools, this software ensures user data security in the cloud (through encryption), and minimizes users operating costs by using space- and bandwidth-efficient compression and incremental backup. Parallel data processing utilities have also been developed by using massively scalable cloud computing in conjunction with cloud storage. One of the innovations in this software is using modified open source components to work with a private cloud like NASA Nebula. Another innovation is porting the complex backup to- cloud software to embedded Linux, running on the home networking devices, in order to benefit more users.

He, Qiming↗
NASA NTRS1993

Liquid rocket propulsion dynamic flow modeling using the ROCETS engineering modules in the EASY5x environment

A report on the progress of porting the ROCETS (ROCket Engine Transient Simulator) into the EASY5x simulation environment is presented. Brief descriptions of each of the software systems, information regarding the actual port process, and examples comparing the results of the two systems are given. It is shown that EASY5x is a suitable environment for utilization of the ROCETS engineering modules, and that, for the example systems shown, EASY5x actually seems to give more accurate solutions than the straight ROCETS code.

Follett, Randolph F.↗
NASA NTRS1995

The Linux operating system: An introduction

Linux is a Unix-like operating system for Intel 386/486/Pentium based IBM-PCs and compatibles. The kernel of this operating system was written from scratch by Linus Torvalds and, although copyrighted by the author, may be freely distributed. A world-wide group has collaborated in developing Linux on the Internet. Linux can run the powerful set of compilers and programming tools of the Free Software Foundation, and XFree86, a port of the X Window System from MIT. Most capabilities associated with high performance workstations, such as networking, shared file systems, electronic mail, TeX, LaTeX, etc. are freely available for Linux. It can thus transform cheap IBM-PC compatible machines into Unix workstations with considerable capabilities. The author explains how Linux may be obtained, installed and networked. He also describes some interesting applications for Linux that are freely available. The enormous consumer market for IBM-PC compatible machines continually drives down prices of CPU chips, memory, hard disks, CDROMs, etc. Linux can convert such machines into powerful workstations that can be used for teaching, research and software development. For professionals who use Unix based workstations at work, Linux permits virtually identical working environments on their personal home machines. For cost conscious educational institutions Linux can create world-class computing environments from cheap, easily maintained, PC clones. Finally, for university students, it provides an essentially cost-free path away from DOS into the world of Unix and X Windows.

Bokhari, Shahid H.↗
NASA NTRS2001

The New Cloud Absorption Radiometer (CAR) Software: One Model for NASA Remote Sensing Virtual Instruments

The Cloud Absorption Radiometer (CAR) instrument has been the most frequently used airborne instrument built in-house at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, having flown scientific research missions on-board various aircraft to many locations in the United States, Azores, Brazil, and Kuwait since 1983. The CAR instrument is capable of measuring scattered light by clouds in fourteen spectral bands in UV, visible and near-infrared region. This document describes the control, data acquisition, display, and file storage software for the new version of CAR. This software completely replaces the prior CAR Data System and Control Panel with a compact and robust virtual instrument computer interface. Additionally, the instrument is now usable for the first time for taking data in an off-aircraft mode. The new instrument is controlled via a LabVIEW v5. 1.1-developed software interface that utilizes, (1) serial port writes to write commands to the controller module of the instrument, and (2) serial port reads to acquire data from the controller module of the instrument. Step-by-step operational procedures are provided in this document. A suite of other software programs has been developed to complement the actual CAR virtual instrument. These programs include: (1) a simulator mode that allows pretesting of new features that might be added in the future, as well as demonstrations to CAR customers, and development at times when the instrument/hardware is off-location, and (2) a post-experiment data viewer that can be used to view all segments of individual data cycles and to locate positions where 'start' and stop' byte sequences were incorrectly formulated by the instrument controller. The CAR software described here is expected to be the basis for CAR operation for many missions and many years to come.

Roth, Don J.↗
DOE OSTI2025

Using the ATLAS experiment software on heterogeneous resources

With the large dataset expected from 2030 onwards by the HL-LHC at CERN, the ATLAS experiment is reaching the limits of the current data processing model in terms of traditional CPU resources based on x86_64 architectures and an extensive program for software upgrades towards the HL-LHC has been set up. The ARM CPU architecture is becoming a competitive and energy efficient alternative. Accelerators like GPUs are available in any recent HPC. In the past years ATLAS has successfully ported its full data processing and simulation software framework Athena to ARM and has invested significant effort in porting parts of the reconstruction and simulation algorithms to GPUs. We report on the successful usage of the ATLAS experiment offline and online software framework Athena on ARM and GPUs through the PanDA workflow management system at various WLCG sites. Furthermore we report on performance optimizations of the builds for ARM CPUs and the GPU integration efforts. We will discuss performance comparisons of different ARM and x86_64 architectures on WLCG resources and Cloud compute providers like GCP and AWS using ATLAS productions workflows as used in the Hep-Score23 benchmark suite.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
NASA NTRS2003

Team Software Development for Aerothermodynamic and Aerodynamic Analysis and Design

A collaborative approach to software development is described. The approach employs the agile development techniques: project retrospectives, Scrum status meetings, and elements of Extreme Programming to efficiently develop a cohesive and extensible software suite. The software product under development is a fluid dynamics simulator for performing aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic analysis and design. The functionality of the software product is achieved both through the merging, with substantial rewrite, of separate legacy codes and the authorship of new routines. Examples of rapid implementation of new functionality demonstrate the benefits obtained with this agile software development process. The appendix contains a discussion of coding issues encountered while porting legacy Fortran 77 code to Fortran 95, software design principles, and a Fortran 95 coding standard.

Alexandrov, N.↗