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At least 523 records · Page 29

Communications, Signal Processing, and Telemetering Research Program Review

A Communications, Signal Processing, and Telemetering Research Program Review was held on February 23, 1999. Research conducted under the grant was presented and reviewed, for progress, and for possible technology transfers. The research reviewed was in the following areas: (1) Bandwidth-efficient Modulation and nonlinear equalization; (2) Investigation of an architecture for parallel signal processing applicable to communications problems; (3)Coded partial response over satellites; (4) synchronization at Low SNR; (5) Serial concatenated convolutional codes and some implementation issues on high rate turbo codes; (6) Flight experiments; (7) Real time doppler tracking; (8) Space protocol testing; (9) Lightweight optical communications without carrying a laser in space. The presentations are given by the graduate students who performed the research.

Source record↗

Advanced Weather Awareness and Reporting Enhancements

AWARE (Aviation Weather Awareness and Reporting Enhancements) was a NASA Cooperative Research and Development program conducted jointly by Rockwell Scientific, Rockwell Collins, and NASA. The effort culminated in an enhanced weather briefing and reporting tool prototype designed to integrate graphical and text-based aviation weather data to provide clear situational awareness in the context of a specific pilot, flight and equipment profile. The initial implementation of AWARE was as a web-based preflight planning tool, specifically for general aviation pilots, who do not have access to support such as the dispatchers available for commercial airlines. Initial usability tests showed that for VFR (Visual Flight Rules) pilots, AWARE provided faster and more effective weather evaluation. In a subsequent formal usability test for IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) pilots, all users finished the AWARE tests faster than the parallel DUAT tests, and all subjects graded AWARE higher for effectiveness, efficiency, and usability. The decision analysis basis of AWARE differentiates it from other aviation safety programs, providing analysis of context-sensitive data in a personalized graphical format to aid pilots/dispatchers in their complex flight requirements.

Busquets, Anthony M.↗

Operating CFDP in the Interplanetary Internet

This paper examines the design elements of CCSDS File Delivery Protocol and Interplanetary Internet technologies that will simplify their integration and discusses the resulting new capabilities, such as efficient transmission of large files via multiple relay satellites operating in parallel.

CFDP IPN bundling↗

An Optimized Multicolor Point-Implicit Solver for Unstructured Grid Applications on Graphics Processing Units

In the field of computational fluid dynamics, the Navier-Stokes equations are often solved using an unstructuredgrid approach to accommodate geometric complexity. Implicit solution methodologies for such spatial discretizations generally require frequent solution of large tightly-coupled systems of block-sparse linear equations. The multicolor point-implicit solver used in the current work typically requires a significant fraction of the overall application run time. In this work, an efficient implementation of the solver for graphics processing units is proposed. Several factors present unique challenges to achieving an efficient implementation in this environment. These include the variable amount of parallelism available in different kernel calls, indirect memory access patterns, low arithmetic intensity, and the requirement to support variable block sizes. In this work, the solver is reformulated to use standard sparse and dense Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) functions. However, numerical experiments show that the performance of the BLAS functions available in existing CUDA libraries is suboptimal for matrices representative of those encountered in actual simulations. Instead, optimized versions of these functions are developed. Depending on block size, the new implementations show performance gains of up to 7x over the existing CUDA library functions.

Zubair, Mohammad↗

Optimal Control within the Context of Multidisciplinary Design, Analysis, and Optimization

Multidisciplinary design, analysis and optimization involves modeling the interactions of complex systems across a variety of disciplines. The optimization of such systems can be a computationally expensive exercise with multiple levels of nested nonlinear solvers running under an optimizer.The application of optimal control in project development often involves performing trajectory optimization for fixed vehicle designs or parametric sweeps across some key vehicle properties.This information is then relayed to the subsystem design teams who update their designs and relay some bulk characteristics back to the trajectory optimization procedure.This iteration is then repeated until the design closes.However, with increasing interest in more tightly coupled systems, such as electric and hybrid-electric aircraft propulsion and boundary layer ingestion, this process is prone to ignore subtle coupling between vehicle subsystem designs and vehicle operation on a given mission.Integrating trajectory optimization into a tightly coupled multidisciplinary design procedure can be computationally prohibitive, depending on the complexity of the subsystem analyses and the optimal control technique applied.To address these issues a new optimal control software tool, Dymos, has been developed.Dymos is built upon NASA's OpenMDAO software and can leverage its capabilities to efficiently compute gradients for the optimization and optimize complex models in parallel on distributed memory systems.This report provides some explanation into the numerical methods employed in Dymos and provides several use cases that demonstrate its performance on traditional optimal control problems and improvements ino techniques have been used extensively in recent decades to solve a variety of optimal control problems, typically in the form of aerospace vehicle trajectory optimization.

pseudospectral↗

Application of the NASA Multiscale Analysis Tool: Multiscale Integration and Interoperability

The NASA Multiscale Analysis Tool (NASMAT) was developed recently to allow a wide variety of multiscale analysis problems to be effectively and efficiently solved. The architecture of NASMAT was established specifically to enable parallelized, “plug-and-play” functionality to reduce the complexity associated with adding new features to the code in the future and to allow end users to rapidly implement and evaluate user-defined capabilities. Additionally, the tool utilizes recursive data structures and subroutines to allow for an arbitrary number of length scales when performing multiscale analyses of heterogeneous materials. These features permit the rapid integration of user-defined capabilities (e.g., a material model, micromechanics approach, or failure theory) at all stages within a NASMAT calculation while leveraging built-in techniques where needed. Additionally, these features allow NASMAT to both be called from an external program as well as call an external program. This paper specifically focuses on the multiscale integration and interoperability of NASMAT with other analysis techniques through an illustrative, multiscale analysis of a 3D woven polymer matrix composite (PMC).

NASMAT↗

Performance Optimization Methods for a Memory-Bound, Unstructured-Grid CFD Application on Massively Parallel GPU Platforms

Computational performance of the FUN3D unstructured-grid computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application on massively parallel GPU environments is memory-bound and highly dependent upon efficient reads from and atomic updates to the irregular cell-, edge-, and node-based data structures. In this talk, we present recent efforts into optimizing select performance-critical kernels on NVIDIA Tesla V100 and A100 GPUs and AMD CDNA MI100 GPUs. A novel use of L2 cache residency controls and asynchronous loads into on-chip shared memory are explored on the A100 GPU for the sparse iterative solver, which is dominated by mixed-precision, sparse matrix vector multiplication. Demonstrations show that these methods improve global memory bandwidth utilization by 13.5% on the A100 GPU. Several techniques are also presented that use registers and/or shared memory to facilitate array transposition and aggregation which combine to reduce the frequency and increase the cache efficiency of floating-point atomic updates to the irregular data structures. These methods are demonstrated to improve the kernel throughput by nearly 500% on select kernels on the AMD MI100 over atomic updates directly to global memory. Overall, both V100 and A100 GPUs outperformed the MI100 GPU on kernels dominated by double-precision atomic updates; however, the techniques demonstrated here reduced the performance gap and improved the MI100 performance.

GPU CPU unstructured CFD memory↗

Intelligent flight control systems

The capabilities of flight control systems can be enhanced by designing them to emulate functions of natural intelligence. Intelligent control functions fall in three categories. Declarative actions involve decision-making, providing models for system monitoring, goal planning, and system/scenario identification. Procedural actions concern skilled behavior and have parallels in guidance, navigation, and adaptation. Reflexive actions are spontaneous, inner-loop responses for control and estimation. Intelligent flight control systems learn knowledge of the aircraft and its mission and adapt to changes in the flight environment. Cognitive models form an efficient basis for integrating 'outer-loop/inner-loop' control functions and for developing robust parallel-processing algorithms.

Stengel, Robert F.↗

Code Parallelization with CAPO: A User Manual

A software tool has been developed to assist the parallelization of scientific codes. This tool, CAPO, extends an existing parallelization toolkit, CAPTools developed at the University of Greenwich, to generate OpenMP parallel codes for shared memory architectures. This is an interactive toolkit to transform a serial Fortran application code to an equivalent parallel version of the software - in a small fraction of the time normally required for a manual parallelization. We first discuss the way in which loop types are categorized and how efficient OpenMP directives can be defined and inserted into the existing code using the in-depth interprocedural analysis. The use of the toolkit on a number of application codes ranging from benchmark to real-world application codes is presented. This will demonstrate the great potential of using the toolkit to quickly parallelize serial programs as well as the good performance achievable on a large number of toolkit to quickly parallelize serial programs as well as the good performance achievable on a large number of processors. The second part of the document gives references to the parameters and the graphic user interface implemented in the toolkit. Finally a set of tutorials is included for hands-on experiences with this toolkit.

Jin, Hao-Qiang↗

Experimental and Computational Sonic Boom Assessment of Lockheed-Martin N+2 Low Boom Models

Flight at speeds greater than the speed of sound is not permitted over land, primarily because of the noise and structural damage caused by sonic boom pressure waves of supersonic aircraft. Mitigation of sonic boom is a key focus area of the High Speed Project under NASA's Fundamental Aeronautics Program. The project is focusing on technologies to enable future civilian aircraft to fly efficiently with reduced sonic boom, engine and aircraft noise, and emissions. A major objective of the project is to improve both computational and experimental capabilities for design of low-boom, high-efficiency aircraft. NASA and industry partners are developing improved wind tunnel testing techniques and new pressure instrumentation to measure the weak sonic boom pressure signatures of modern vehicle concepts. In parallel, computational methods are being developed to provide rapid design and analysis of supersonic aircraft with improved meshing techniques that provide efficient, robust, and accurate on- and off-body pressures at several body lengths from vehicles with very low sonic boom overpressures. The maturity of these critical parallel efforts is necessary before low-boom flight can be demonstrated and commercial supersonic flight can be realized.

Cliff, Susan E.↗

Parallel conjugate gradient algorithms for manipulator dynamic simulation

Parallel conjugate gradient algorithms for the computation of multibody dynamics are developed for the specialized case of a robot manipulator. For an n-dimensional positive-definite linear system, the Classical Conjugate Gradient (CCG) algorithms are guaranteed to converge in n iterations, each with a computation cost of O(n); this leads to a total computational cost of O(n sq) on a serial processor. A conjugate gradient algorithms is presented that provide greater efficiency using a preconditioner, which reduces the number of iterations required, and by exploiting parallelism, which reduces the cost of each iteration. Two Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) algorithms are proposed which respectively use a diagonal and a tridiagonal matrix, composed of the diagonal and tridiagonal elements of the mass matrix, as preconditioners. Parallel algorithms are developed to compute the preconditioners and their inversions in O(log sub 2 n) steps using n processors. A parallel algorithm is also presented which, on the same architecture, achieves the computational time of O(log sub 2 n) for each iteration. Simulation results for a seven degree-of-freedom manipulator are presented. Variants of the proposed algorithms are also developed which can be efficiently implemented on the Robot Mathematics Processor (RMP).

Fijany, Amir↗

Concurrent processing adaptation of aeroplastic analysis of propfans

Discussed here is a study involving the adaptation of an advanced aeroelastic analysis program to run concurrently on a shared memory multiple processor computer. The program uses a three-dimensional compressible unsteady aerodynamic model and blade normal modes to calculate aeroelastic stability and response of propfan blades. The identification of the computational parallelism within the sequential code and the scheduling of the concurrent subtasks to minimize processor idle time are discussed. Processor idle time in the calculation of the unsteady aerodynamic coefficients was reduced by the simple strategy of appropriately ordering the computations. Speedup and efficiency results are presented for the calculation of the matched flutter point of an experimental propfan model. The results show that efficiencies above 70 percent can be obtained using the present implementation with 7 processors. The parallel computational strategy described here is also applicable to other aeroelastic analysis procedures based on panel methods.

Janetzke, David C.↗

Concurrent processing adaptation of aeroelastic analysis of propfans

This paper reports on a study involving the adaptation of an advanced aeroelastic analysis program to run concurrently on a shared memory multiple processor computer. The program uses a three-dimensional compressible unsteady aerodynamic model and blade normal modes to calculate aeroelastic stability and response of propfan blades. The identification of the computational parallelism within the sequential code and the scheduling of the concurrent subtasks to minimize processor idle time are discussed. Processor idle time in the calculation of the unsteady aerodynamic coefficients was reduced by the simple strategy of appropriately ordering the computations. Speedup and efficiency results are presented for the calculation of the matched flutter point of an experimental propfan model. The results show that efficiencies above 70 percent can be obtained using the present implementation with 7 processors. The parallel computational strategy described here is also applicable to other aeroelastic analysis procedures based on parallel methods.

Murthy, Durbha V.↗

Concurrent processing adaptation of aeroelastic analysis of propfans

Discussed here is a study involving the adaptation of an advanced aeroelastic analysis program to run concurrently on a shared memory multiple processor computer. The program uses a three-dimensional compressible unsteady aerodynamic model and blade normal modes to calculate aeroelastic stability and response of propfan blades. The identification of the computational parallelism within the sequential code and the scheduling of the concurrent subtasks to minimize processor idle time are discussed. Processor idle time in the calculation of the unsteady aerodynamic coefficients was reduced by the simple strategy of appropriately ordering the computations. Speedup and efficiency results are presented for the calculation of the matched flutter point of an experimental propfan model. The results show that efficiencies above 70 percent can be obtained using the present implementation with 7 processors. The parallel computational strategy described here is also applicable to other aeroelastic analysis procedures based on panel methods.

Murthy, D. V.↗

Towards real-time simulation of large space structures: Stabilization of fluid/thermal/structure interactions and implementation on high performance supercomputers

Within the Center for Space Construction, the SIMSTRUC project's objectives center around the development of simulation tools for the realistic analysis of large space structures. The word 'tools' is the broad sense; it designates mathematical models, finite element/finite difference formulations, computational algorithms, implementations on advanced computer architectures, and visualization capabilities. The results of our activities during the first year within the SIMSTRUC project are reported. On the modeling side, an alternative approach to fluid/thermal/structure interaction analysis that is a departure from the 'loosely coupled' and 'unified' approaches that are being currently practiced are described. The advantages of our approach both in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency were demonstrated. On the computational side, a software architecture for parallel/vector and massively parallel supercomputers that speeds up finite element and finite difference computations by several orders of magnitude is presented. As an example, the simulation of the deployment of a space structure that used to require over six hours of a workstation using a conventional finite element software, now runs on a multiprocessor using a parallel computation strategy in less than three seconds. In order to promote the physical understanding of the simulation behavior, a real-time visualization capability on the Connection Machine, which allows the analyst to watch the graphical animation of the results at the same time these are generated, was also developed. It is believed that by combining efficient analytical formulations with the state-of-the-art high performance computer implementations and superfast visualization capabilities, SIMSTRUC is moving fast towards the real-time simulation of large space structures. The designers as well as the researchers will certainly benefit from this technology.

Farhat, C.↗

An efficient formulation of the coupled finite element-integral equation technique for solving large 3D scattering problems

It is often desirable to calculate the electromagnetic fields inside and about a complicated system of scattering bodies, as well as in their far-field region. The finite element method (FE) is well suited to solving the interior problem, but the domain has to be limited to a manageable size. At the truncation of the FE mesh one can either impose approximate (absorbing) boundary conditions or set up an integral equation (IE) for the fields scattered from the bodies. The latter approach is preferable since it results in higher accuracy. Hence, the two techniques can be successfully combined by introducing a surface that encloses the scatterers, applying a FE model to the inner volume and setting up an IE for the tangential fields components on the surface. Here the continuity of the tangential fields is used bo obtain a consistent solution. A few coupled FE-IE methods have recently appeared in the literature. The approach presented here has the advantage of using edge-based finite elements, a type of finite elements with degrees of freedom associated with edges of the mesh. Because of their properties, they are better suited than the conventional node based elements to represent electromagnetic fields, particularly when inhomogeneous regions are modeled, since the node based elements impose an unnatural continuity of all field components across boundaries of mesh elements. Additionally, our approach is well suited to handle large size problems and lends itself to code parallelization. We will discuss the salient features that make our approach very efficient from the standpoint of numerical computation, and the fields and RCS of a few objects are illustrated as examples.

Cwik, T.↗

Comparisons of elastic and rigid blade-element rotor models using parallel processing technology for piloted simulations

A piloted comparison of rigid and aeroelastic blade-element rotor models was conducted at the Crew Station Research and Development Facility (CSRDF) at Ames Research Center. A simulation development and analysis tool, FLIGHTLAB, was used to implement these models in real time using parallel processing technology. Pilot comments and quantitative analysis performed both on-line and off-line confirmed that elastic degrees of freedom significantly affect perceived handling qualities. Trim comparisons show improved correlation with flight test data when elastic modes are modeled. The results demonstrate the efficiency with which the mathematical modeling sophistication of existing simulation facilities can be upgraded using parallel processing, and the importance of these upgrades to simulation fidelity.

Hill, Gary↗

A piloted comparison of elastic and rigid blade-element rotor models using parallel processing technology

A piloted comparison of rigid and aeroelastic blade-element rotor models was conducted at the Crew Station Research and Development Facility (CSRDF) at Ames Research Center. FLIGHTLAB, a new simulation development and analysis tool, was used to implement these models in real time using parallel processing technology. Pilot comments and quantitative analysis performed both on-line and off-line confirmed that elastic degrees of freedom significantly affect perceived handling qualities. Trim comparisons show improved correlation with flight test data when elastic modes are modeled. The results demonstrate the efficiency with which the mathematical modeling sophistication of existing simulation facilities can be upgraded using parallel processing, and the importance of these upgrades to simulation fidelity.

Hill, Gary↗