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At least 1,297 records · Page 72

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NASA NTRS1992

Thermal Expert System (TEXSYS): Systems automony demonstration project, volume 1. Overview

The Systems Autonomy Demonstration Project (SADP) produced a knowledge-based real-time control system for control and fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR) of a prototype two-phase Space Station Freedom external active thermal control system (EATCS). The Thermal Expert System (TEXSYS) was demonstrated in recent tests to be capable of reliable fault anticipation and detection, as well as ordinary control of the thermal bus. Performance requirements were addressed by adopting a hierarchical symbolic control approach-layering model-based expert system software on a conventional, numerical data acquisition and control system. The model-based reasoning capabilities of TEXSYS were shown to be advantageous over typical rule-based expert systems, particularly for detection of unforeseen faults and sensor failures. Volume 1 gives a project overview and testing highlights. Volume 2 provides detail on the EATCS test bed, test operations, and online test results. Appendix A is a test archive, while Appendix B is a compendium of design and user manuals for the TEXSYS software.

Glass, B. J.↗

NASA NTRS1992

A program of correlated observations using the EGRET instrument on GRO and the IMB neutrino detector

A reliable, real-time supernova monitoring system was devised using the IMB neutrino detector to serve as an 'early-warning' system for EGRET and other instruments on GRO. New methods and software were developed to allow the IMB monitoring computer in Cleveland to: recognize that a trigger burst had occurred; make a judgement on whether the burst was spurrious or an actual supernova; prepare brief summary files and 'quick-look' data so that a final disposition could be made by a trained scientist; and contact the 'watch' scientist via personal beeper in Baton Rouge. This system ran from Dec. 1990 to Apr. 1991, when the neutrino detector failed for unrelated reasons. In addition to the supernova system, high-energy neutrino data was prepared and formatted for comparison with EGRET gamma-ray data.

Svoboda, Robert C.↗

NASA NTRS1992

Thermal Expert System (TEXSYS): Systems autonomy demonstration project, volume 2. Results

The Systems Autonomy Demonstration Project (SADP) produced a knowledge-based real-time control system for control and fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR) of a prototype two-phase Space Station Freedom external active thermal control system (EATCS). The Thermal Expert System (TEXSYS) was demonstrated in recent tests to be capable of reliable fault anticipation and detection, as well as ordinary control of the thermal bus. Performance requirements were addressed by adopting a hierarchical symbolic control approach-layering model-based expert system software on a conventional, numerical data acquisition and control system. The model-based reasoning capabilities of TEXSYS were shown to be advantageous over typical rule-based expert systems, particularly for detection of unforeseen faults and sensor failures. Volume 1 gives a project overview and testing highlights. Volume 2 provides detail on the EATCS testbed, test operations, and online test results. Appendix A is a test archive, while Appendix B is a compendium of design and user manuals for the TEXSYS software.

Glass, B. J.↗

NASA NTRS2005

Integrated Systems Health Management for Space Exploration

Integrated Systems Health Management (ISHM) is a system engineering discipline that addresses the design, development, operation, and lifecycle management of components, subsystems, vehicles, and other operational systems with the purpose of maintaining nominal system behavior and function and assuring mission safety and effectiveness under off-nominal conditions. NASA missions are often conducted in extreme, unfamiliar environments of space, using unique experimental spacecraft. In these environments, off-nominal conditions can develop with the potential to rapidly escalate into mission- or life-threatening situations. Further, the high visibility of NASA missions means they are always characterized by extraordinary attention to safety. ISHM is a critical element of risk mitigation, mission safety, and mission assurance for exploration. ISHM enables: In-space maintenance and repair; a) Autonomous (and automated) launch abort and crew escape capability; b) Efficient testing and checkout of ground and flight systems; c) Monitoring and trending of ground and flight system operations and performance; d) Enhanced situational awareness and control for ground personnel and crew; e) Vehicle autonomy (self-sufficiency) in responding to off-nominal conditions during long-duration and distant exploration missions; f) In-space maintenance and repair; and g) Efficient ground processing of reusable systems. ISHM concepts and technologies may be applied to any complex engineered system such as transportation systems, orbital or planetary habitats, observatories, command and control systems, life support systems, safety-critical software, and even the health of flight crews. As an overarching design and operational principle implemented at the system-of-systems level, ISHM holds substantial promise in terms of affordability, safety, reliability, and effectiveness of space exploration missions.

Uckun, Serdar↗

NASA NTRS2004

The EO-1 Autonomous Science Agent Architecture

An Autonomous Science Agent is currently flying onboard the Earth Observing One Spacecraft. This software enables the spacecraft to autonomously detect and respond to science events occurring on the Earth. The package includes software systems that perform science data analysis, deliberative planning, and run-time robust execution. Because of the deployment to a remote spacecraft, this Autonomous Science Agent has stringent constraints of autonomy, reliability, and limited computing resources. We describe these constraints and how they are reflected in our agent architecture.

Earth Observing One (EO-1)↗

NASA NTRS2004

Safe Agents in Space: Lessons from the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment

Eatth Observing One Spacecraft↗

NASA NTRS2019

Adaptations of Guidance, Navigation and Control Verification and Validation Philosophies for Small Spacecraft

Decades of experience developing increasingly capable and more complex space-craft have resulted in a set of accepted practices and philosophies to verify and validate (V&V) guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) subsystems. Until recently, small, low-cost spacecraft have had very simple or non-existent GN&C subsystems requiring minimal or no subsystem testing. As the next generation of small spacecraft take on more challenging GN&C requirements, the GN&C community is struggling with how to scale the subsystem V&V effort to produce spacecraft approaching the reliability of flagship-class missions while staying within the reduced resources of a small satellite project. For this paper, we will examine five aspects of GN&C V&V (requirements definition, software testing and analysis, hardware component testing, integrated vehicle testing, and in-flight V&V) and compare the V&V campaign of a flagship-class mission (Mars 2020) to that of two recent, successful CubeSat missions: ASTERIA and MarCO. Experiences from the development of these CubeSats yield valuable lessons learned and guidelines for future small spacecraft designers.

Pong, Christopher M.↗

NASA NTRS2020

On Development of Three-Dimensional Visualization Capabilities in Glenn Research Center Communication Analysis Suite

With NASA’s upcoming mission to return to the Moon sustainably by 2024 and using that success as a means to step onto the barren world of Mars, it remains more important than ever to conduct research and planning as thoroughly and efficiently as possible. In a mission as complex as landing humans onto another celestial body, a network of orbiting satellites and ground stations must accurately and reliably communicate with each other, enabling crucial data communications throughout the mission. Visualizing this important data communication increases the understanding of the data and can accelerate analyses efforts. The purpose of this software development is to create an interactive visualization with data taken MATLAB® scripts in the GRC Communication Analysis Suite that is easy to understand, can show all necessary data, and display the data accurately. The main types of data to visualize are from the State Propagation, Line of Sight and Dynamic Link Margin scripts. These all show positions and orbits of satellites and ground stations, while the Line of Sight data shows when they have the ability to communicate with each other based on their respective antenna positions and fields of view. Additionally, the Dynamic Link Margin mode color-codes the communication link performance onto the Line of Sight access lines. Visualization requires a graphics language that is easily accessible, has the needed features, and able to easily read data produced by the GRC Communication Analysis Suite MATLAB® scripts. ThreeJS, a graphics library for Web Graphics Library, coded in JavaScript was selected for the visualization. The next part of the software development was to move the data from MATLAB® to the JavaScript. The best way to accomplish this was to implement a MATLAB® function converting the output data of the scripts to a JavaScript Object Notation file. A key part of the development was creating the visualization within JavaScript and ThreeJS to visualize any combination of planets, moons, orbits, satellites, ground stations, line of sight links, and handle future features without changing major parts of the code. The current visualization capability runs directly from MATLAB®, and can dynamically create any scene. This software development currently supports the lunar communications analysis underway by NASA, and can be easily expanded upon in the future to aid any analysis requirements to help plan current and future space missions.

Visualization↗

DOE OSTI2015

Automated Installation Verification of COMSOL via LiveLink for MATLAB

Verifying that a local software installation performs as the developer intends is a potentially time-consuming but necessary step for nuclear safety-related codes. Automating this process not only saves time, but can increase reliability and scope of verification compared to ‘hand’ comparisons. While COMSOL does not include automatic installation verification as many commercial codes do, it does provide tools such as LiveLink™ for MATLAB® and the COMSOL API for use with Java® through which the user can automate the process. Here we present a successful automated verification example of a local COMSOL 5.0 installation for nuclear safety-related calculations at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR).

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

DOE OSTI2022

Fault Graph (fg)

This software package offers a novel fault graph modeling language and a simulation tool for executing models specified in the language. The modeling language has three primary features that distinguish it from similar reliability analysis tools. These are (1) a random variable modeling several distinct outcomes of a single fault; (2) chains of faults in which one fault triggers another; and (3) time to fail sampled from probability distributions including positive normal, exponential, Weibull with a minimum, or immediate.

Nutaro, James↗

NASA NTRS1987

Fault-tolerant clock synchronization validation methodology

A validation method for the synchronization subsystem of a fault-tolerant computer system is presented. The high reliability requirement of flight-crucial systems precludes the use of most traditional validation methods. The method presented utilizes formal design proof to uncover design and coding errors and experimentation to validate the assumptions of the design proof. The experimental method is described and illustrated by validating the clock synchronization system of the Software Implemented Fault Tolerance computer. The design proof of the algorithm includes a theorem that defines the maximum skew between any two nonfaulty clocks in the system in terms of specific system parameters. Most of these parameters are deterministic. One crucial parameter is the upper bound on the clock read error, which is stochastic. The probability that this upper bound is exceeded is calculated from data obtained by the measurement of system parameters. This probability is then included in a detailed reliability analysis of the system.

Computer systems↗

DOE OSTI2016

acdc – Automated Contamination Detection and Confidence estimation for single-cell genome data

Abstract Background A major obstacle in single-cell sequencing is sample contamination with foreign DNA. To guarantee clean genome assemblies and to prevent the introduction of contamination into public databases, considerable quality control efforts are put into post-sequencing analysis. Contamination screening generally relies on reference-based methods such as database alignment or marker gene search, which limits the set of detectable contaminants to organisms with closely related reference species. As genomic coverage in the tree of life is highly fragmented, there is an urgent need for a reference-free methodology for contaminant identification in sequence data. Results We present acdc, a tool specifically developed to aid the quality control process of genomic sequence data. By combining supervised and unsupervised methods, it reliably detects both known and de novo contaminants. First, 16S rRNA gene prediction and the inclusion of ultrafast exact alignment techniques allow sequence classification using existing knowledge from databases. Second, reference-free inspection is enabled by the use of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques that include fast, non-linear dimensionality reduction of oligonucleotide signatures and subsequent clustering algorithms that automatically estimate the number of clusters. The latter also enables the removal of any contaminant, yielding a clean sample. Furthermore, given the data complexity and the ill-posedness of clustering, acdc employs bootstrapping techniques to provide statistically profound confidence values. Tested on a large number of samples from diverse sequencing projects, our software is able to quickly and accurately identify contamination. Results are displayed in an interactive user interface. Acdc can be run from the web as well as a dedicated command line application, which allows easy integration into large sequencing project analysis workflows. Conclusions Acdc can reliably detect contamination in single-cell genome data. In addition to database-driven detection, it complements existing tools by its unsupervised techniques, which allow for the detection of de novo contaminants. Our contribution has the potential to drastically reduce the amount of resources put into these processes, particularly in the context of limited availability of reference species. As single-cell genome data continues to grow rapidly, acdc adds to the toolkit of crucial quality assurance tools.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2025

ChatHPC: Building the Foundations for a Productive and Trustworthy AI-Assisted HPC Ecosystem

ChatHPC democratizes large language models for the high-performance computing (HPC) community by providing the infrastructure, ecosystem, and knowledge needed to apply modern generative AI technologies to rapidly create specific capabilities for critical HPC components while using relatively modest computational resources. Our divide-and-conquer approach focuses on creating a collection of reliable, highly specialized, and optimized AI assistants for HPC based on the cost-effective and fast Code Llama fine-tuning processes and expert supervision. We target major components of the HPC software stack, including programming models, runtimes, I/O, tooling, and math libraries. Thanks to AI, ChatHPC provides a more productive HPC ecosystem by boosting important tasks related to portability, parallelization, optimization, scalability, and instrumentation, among others. With relatively small datasets (on the order of KB), the AI assistants, which are created in a few minutes by using one node with two NVIDIA H100 GPUs and the ChatHPC library, can create new capabilities with Meta’s 7-billion parameter Code Llama base model to produce high-quality software with a level of trustworthiness of up to 90% higher than the 1.8-trillion parameter OpenAI ChatGPT-4o model for critical programming tasks in the HPC software stack.

Young, Aaron [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000254484667)↗

DOE OSTI2013

Materials Inventory Database for the Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program

Scientific research involves the purchasing, processing, characterization, and fabrication of many sample materials. The history of such materials can become complicated over their lifetime – materials might be cut into pieces or moved to various storage locations, for example. A database with built-in functions to track these kinds of processes facilitates well-organized research. The Material Inventory Database Accounting System (MIDAS) is an easy-to-use tracking and reference system for such items. The Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program (LWRS), which seeks to advance the long-term reliability and productivity of existing nuclear reactors in the United States through multiple research pathways, proposed MIDAS as an efficient way to organize and track all items used in its research. The database software ensures traceability of all items used in research using built-in functions which can emulate actions on tracked items – fabrication, processing, splitting, and more – by performing operations on the data. MIDAS can recover and display the complete history of any item as a simple report. To ensure the database functions suitably for the organization of research, it was developed alongside a specific experiment to test accident tolerant nuclear fuel cladding under the LWRS Advanced Light Water Reactor Nuclear Fuels Pathway. MIDAS kept track of materials used in this experiment from receipt at the laboratory through all processes, test conduct and, ultimately, post-test analysis. By the end of this process, the database proved to be right tool for this program. The database software will help LWRS more efficiently conduct research experiments, from simple characterization tests to in-reactor experiments. Furthermore, MIDAS is a universal tool that any other research team could use to organize their material inventory.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2023

Investigating Various Failure Models on Commercial Silicon Carbide

Structures and components made from ceramic materials are often brittle and can fail by the unstable growth of existing flaws such as voids and cracks. There have been several failure criteria developed for ceramics, in the past and they are broadly categorized based on their dependency on crack geometry. The present work implements eight failure criteria using an open-source software package – srlife, which predicts the lifetime or failure probability of concentrated solar power (CSP) structural components. The present work also checks the viability of building a ceramic CSP receiver, by analyzing the reliability predictions from srlife for a SiC ceramic. The reliability predictions for a biaxial loading problem indicated the Shetty Mixed-Mode criterion gives the most conservative predictions. Whereas, in case of the CSP receiver, the predictions show that the co-planar strain energy criterion gives the most conservative predictions as it is agnostic towards the type of stress, and therefore, is not recommended to be used designing ceramic receivers.

Chaugule, Pawan (ORCID:0000000275706572)↗

NASA NTRS1983

Synchronization and fault-masking in redundant real-time systems

A real time computer may fail because of massive component failures or not responding quickly enough to satisfy real time requirements. An increase in redundancy - a conventional means of improving reliability - can improve the former but can - in some cases - degrade the latter considerably due to the overhead associated with redundancy management, namely the time delay resulting from synchronization and voting/interactive consistency techniques. The implications of synchronization and voting/interactive consistency algorithms in N-modular clusters on reliability are considered. All these studies were carried out in the context of real time applications. As a demonstrative example, we have analyzed results from experiments conducted at the NASA Airlab on the Software Implemented Fault Tolerance (SIFT) computer. This analysis has indeed indicated that in most real time applications, it is better to employ hardware synchronization instead of software synchronization and not allow reconfiguration.

Krishna, C. M.↗

NASA NTRS1994

Program Finds Minimal Cut Sets

CUTSETS computer program identifies all minimal cut sets for given node. Software package contains subprograms that solve for minimal cut sets of fault trees and digraphs by use of object-oriented programming techniques. Cut-set codes used to solve graph models for reliability analysis and identify potential single-point failures in modeled system. Includes utility subprogram that converts popular COD-format diagraph-model-description files into text input files suitable for use with other CUT-SETS subprograms. FEAT (MSC-21873) and FIRM (MSC-21860). Written in C language.

Iverson, D. L.↗

NASA NTRS1997

Calibration of Direct Velocimetry Using Hot Wire Anemometry

We studied the functionality of the IFA300 Hot Wire Anemometry system and its feasibility for the calibration of Direct Estimator Velocimetry (DEV) using Laser Induced Florescence (LIF). The experimental setup consisted of a single-wire hot wire probe measuring one component of velocity, the anemometry computational hardware and software, an HP oscilloscope, and a table fan to produce a simple flow with fluctuations. Measurements were taken at several points in the stream wise and transverse directions in the flow and various parameters recorded such as mean velocities temperature, turbulence intensities, skewness coefficients and flatness coefficients. The IFA300 software also allowed us to perform statistical manipulations such as spectrum analysis on velocities samples and correlation. Utilization of data files, also produced by the anemometry software, and post analysis were performed to produce graphical representations of turbulent intensity versus probe position and a flow field velocity profile. We concluded that the IFA300 Hot Wire Anemometry system is a reliable and functional method for calibration of DEV using LIF. Our future intentions are to set up a test chamber such that both velocity measurement techniques can be applied simultaneously, thus the calibration.

Holland, Michael L.↗