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At least 1,387 records · Page 77

Introducing PRIMRE's MRE Software Knowledge Hub (February 2021)

This paper focuses on the role of the Marine Renewable Energy (MRE) Software Knowledge Hub on the Portal and Repository for Information on Marine Renewable Energy (PRIMRE). The MRE Software Knowledge Hub provides online services for MRE software users and developers, and seeks to develop assessments and recommendations for improving MRE software in the future. Online software discovery platforms, known as the Code Hub and the Code Catalog, are provided. The Code Hub is a collection of open-source MRE software that includes a landing page with search functionality, linked to files hosted on the MRE Code Hub GitHub organization. The Code Catalog is a searchable online platform for discovery of useful (open-source or commercial) software packages, tools, codes, and other software products. To gather information about the existing MRE software landscape, a software survey is being performed, the preliminary results of which are presented herein. Initially, the data collected in the MRE software survey will be used to populate the MRE Software knowledge hub on PRIMRE, and future work will use data from the survey to perform a gap analysis and develop a vision for future software development. Additionally, as one of PRIMRE's roles is to support development of MRE software within project partners, a silo of knowledge relating to best practices has been gathered. An early draft of new guidance developed from this knowledge is presented.

gap analysis↗

Some Interactive Aspects of a Software Design Schema Acquisition Tool

This paper describes a design schema acquisition tool which forms an important component of a hybrid software design system for reuse. The hybrid system incorporates both schema-based approaches in supporting software design reuse activities and is realized by extensions to the IDeA system. The paper also examines some of the interactive aspects that the tool requires with the domain analyst to accomplish its acquisition task.

Lee, Hing-Yan↗

Large Terrain Continuous Level of Detail 3D Visualization Tool

This software solved the problem of displaying terrains that are usually too large to be displayed on standard workstations in real time. The software can visualize terrain data sets composed of billions of vertices, and can display these data sets at greater than 30 frames per second. The Large Terrain Continuous Level of Detail 3D Visualization Tool allows large terrains, which can be composed of billions of vertices, to be visualized in real time. It utilizes a continuous level of detail technique called clipmapping to support this. It offloads much of the work involved in breaking up the terrain into levels of details onto the GPU (graphics processing unit) for faster processing.

Myint, Steven↗

Tool Use Within NASA Software Quality Assurance

As space mission software systems become larger and more complex, it is increasingly important for the software assurance effort to have the ability to effectively assess both the artifacts produced during software system development and the development process itself. Conceptually, assurance is a straightforward idea - it is the result of activities carried out by an organization independent of the software developers to better inform project management of potential technical and programmatic risks, and thus increase management's confidence in the decisions they ultimately make. In practice, effective assurance for large, complex systems often entails assessing large, complex software artifacts (e.g., requirements specifications, architectural descriptions) as well as substantial amounts of unstructured information (e.g., anomaly reports resulting from testing activities during development). In such an environment, assurance engineers can benefit greatly from appropriate tool support. In order to do so, an assurance organization will need accurate and timely information on the tool support available for various types of assurance activities. In this paper, we investigate the current use of tool support for assurance organizations within NASA, and describe on-going work at JPL for providing assurance organizations with the information about tools they need to use them effectively.

software assurance↗

Development and Testing of Control Laws for the Active Aeroelastic Wing Program

The Active Aeroelastic Wing research program was a joint program between the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA established to investigate the characteristics of an aeroelastic wing and the technique of using wing twist for roll control. The flight test program employed the use of an F/A-18 aircraft modified by reducing the wing torsional stiffness and adding a custom research flight control system. The research flight control system was optimized to maximize roll rate using only wing surfaces to twist the wing while simultaneously maintaining design load limits, stability margins, and handling qualities. NASA Dryden Flight Research Center developed control laws using the software design tool called CONDUIT, which employs a multi-objective function optimization to tune selected control system design parameters. Modifications were made to the Active Aeroelastic Wing implementation in this new software design tool to incorporate the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center nonlinear F/A-18 simulation for time history analysis. This paper describes the design process, including how the control law requirements were incorporated into constraints for the optimization of this specific software design tool. Predicted performance is also compared to results from flight.

Dibley, Ryan P.↗

Error-Free Software

001 is an integrated tool suited for automatically developing ultra reliable models, simulations and software systems. Developed and marketed by Hamilton Technologies, Inc. (HTI), it has been applied in engineering, manufacturing, banking and software tools development. The software provides the ability to simplify the complex. A system developed with 001 can be a prototype or fully developed with production quality code. It is free of interface errors, consistent, logically complete and has no data or control flow errors. Systems can be designed, developed and maintained with maximum productivity. Margaret Hamilton, President of Hamilton Technologies, also directed the research and development of USE.IT, an earlier product which was the first computer aided software engineering product in the industry to concentrate on automatically supporting the development of an ultrareliable system throughout its life cycle. Both products originated in NASA technology developed under a Johnson Space Center contract.

Source record↗

Cybersecurity-Tools/V2W-BERT

Software Vulnerabilities to Weakness Mapping. V2W-BERT optimizes the learnable parameters θ of Fθ in two steps. In the first step, the pre-trained BERT language model is further fine-tuned with CVE/CWE descriptions specific to cyber security. In the second step, the trained BERT model is employed in a Siamese network architecture to establish links between CVEs and CWEs. The architecture takes a specific CVE-CWE pair as input and predicts whether the CVE belongs to the CWE or not, with a confidence value. V2W-BERT includes a Mask Language Model (LM) based Reconstruction Decoder to ensure that the descriptions’ contexts are not changed too much during the training process.

Halappanavar,, Mahantesh↗

BGen: A UML Behavior Network Generator Tool

BGen software was designed for autogeneration of code based on a graphical representation of a behavior network used for controlling automatic vehicles. A common format used for describing a behavior network, such as that used in the JPL-developed behavior-based control system, CARACaS ["Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing" (NPO-43635), NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 32, No. 10 (October 2008), page 40] includes a graph with sensory inputs flowing through the behaviors in order to generate the signals for the actuators that drive and steer the vehicle. A computer program to translate Unified Modeling Language (UML) Freeform Implementation Diagrams into a legacy C implementation of Behavior Network has been developed in order to simplify the development of C-code for behavior-based control systems. UML is a popular standard developed by the Object Management Group (OMG) to model software architectures graphically. The C implementation of a Behavior Network is functioning as a decision tree.

Huntsberger, Terry↗

Hybridized Agile Software Development of Flight Control Team Tools for International Space Station's Payload Operations Integration Center

Ground systems operations at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Payload Operations and Integration Function (POIF) is increasing, via the High Operations Tempo (HOT) initiative, its ability to support more science activities with a fourth crew member on the International Space Station (ISS). The Flight Control Team's need to support this increased crew presence mandated the need for a series of software tools to better handle the increasing pace of payload science operations. The overall need was clear from the outset, but the full scope and user experience for each tool, were not as well understood, so establishing a fixed set of initial requirements was not feasible. An Agile Software Development (ASD) paradigm takes advantage of uncertainty, and plans for it, so it was deemed the most appropriate approach to create room for exploring novel concepts, and to mount a rapid and flexible response to inevitiably changing requirements. It facilitated the need for unprecedented collaboration between the Product Team (i.e. users from the Flight Control Team) and the Development Team (i.e. POIC systems engineers, developers, testers). This is a process shift in the development, test, and release of software from one that is prescriptive to one that is adaptive, which is necessary for these tools to have longevity. The application of ASD to the product development lifecycle permitted the timely incorporation of customer feedback, and, allowed for continuous quality improvements. This resulted in a suite of tools that are efficient, user-friendly, and enable POIF ground systems to support the increasing pace of payload science operations. ASD is not as much a set of prescriptive processes as it is a shift in mindset; one that moves from planning against change, to planning for change, thereby iteratively growing software towards user-defined value.

Albers, Cerese M.↗

Collaborative Software Development in Support of Fast Adaptive AeroSpace Tools (FAAST)

A collaborative software development approach is described. The software product is an adaptation of proven computational capabilities combined with new capabilities to form the Agency's next generation aerothermodynamic and aerodynamic analysis and design tools. To efficiently produce a cohesive, robust, and extensible software suite, the approach uses agile software development techniques; specifically, project retrospectives, the Scrum status meeting format, and a subset of Extreme Programming's coding practices are employed. Examples are provided which demonstrate the substantial benefits derived from employing these practices. Also included is a discussion of issues encountered when porting legacy Fortran 77 code to Fortran 95 and a Fortran 95 coding standard.

Kleb, William L.↗

A digital flight control system verification laboratory

A NASA/FAA program has been established for the verification and validation of digital flight control systems (DFCS), with the primary objective being the development and analysis of automated verification tools. In order to enhance the capabilities, effectiveness, and ease of using the test environment, software verification tools can be applied. Tool design includes a static analyzer, an assertion generator, a symbolic executor, a dynamic analysis instrument, and an automated documentation generator. Static and dynamic tools are integrated with error detection capabilities, resulting in a facility which analyzes a representative testbed of DFCS software. Future investigations will ensue particularly in the areas of increase in the number of software test tools, and a cost effectiveness assessment.

De Feo, P.↗

Validation of a Low-Thrust Mission Design Tool Using Operational Navigation Software

Design of flight trajectories for missions employing solar electric propulsion requires a suitably high-fidelity design tool. In this work, the Evolutionary Mission Trajectory Generator (EMTG) is presented as a medium-high fidelity design tool that is suitable for mission proposals. EMTG is validated against the high-heritage deep-space navigation tool MIRAGE, demonstrating both the accuracy of EMTG's model and an operational mission design and navigation procedure using both tools. The validation is performed using a benchmark mission to the Jupiter Trojans.

Englander, Jacob A.↗

Validation of a Low-Thrust Mission Design Tool Using Operational Navigation Software

Design of flight trajectories for missions employing solar electric propulsion requires a suitably high-fidelity design tool. In this work, the Evolutionary Mission Trajectory Generator (EMTG) is presented as a medium-high fidelity design tool that is suitable for mission proposals. EMTG is validated against the high-heritage deep-space navigation tool MIRAGE, demonstrating both the accuracy of EMTG's model and an operational mission design and navigation procedure using both tools. The validation is performed using a benchmark mission to the Jupiter Trojans.

Englander, Jacob A.↗

Deploying and Tracking Software with NCCS Software Provisioning

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has a long history of deploying ground-breaking leadership-class supercomputers for the U.S. Department of Energy. The latest in this line of supercomputers is Frontier, the first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier (1018 floating-point operations per second) on the TOP500 list. Frontier serves a wide array of scientific domains, from traditional simulation-based workloads to newer AI and Machine Learning workloads. To best serve the NCCS user community, NCCS uses Spack to deploy a comprehensive software stack of scientific software packages, providing straightforward access to these packages through Lmod Environment Modules. Maintaining a large software stack while also including multiple new compiler releases each year is a very time-consuming task. Additionally, it is not straightforward to provide a software stack alongside existing vendor-provided software such as the HPE/Cray Programming Environment (CPE), and existing CPE, Spack, and Lmod integration does not allow for multiple versions of GPU libraries such as AMD’s ROCm to be used. To address these challenges and shortcomings, NCCS has developed the NCCS Software Provisioning tool (NSP)1, a tool for deploying and monitoring software stacks on HPC systems. NSP allows NCCS to quickly and effectively provision software stacks from the ground up using template-driven recipes and configuration files. NSP is successfully deployed on Frontier and several other NCCS clusters, enabling the NCCS software team to quickly deploy software stacks for newly-released compilers, expand current software offerings, better support GPU-based software, and monitor Lmod module usage to identify unused software packages that can be removed from the software stack. In this work, we discuss the shortcomings of the previous CPE, Spack, and Lmod usage at NCCS, provide further details on the implementation and structure of NSP, then discuss the benefits that NSP provides.

Rentschler, Asa [ORNL] (ORCID:0009000597694743)↗

Operating System For Numerically Controlled Milling Machine

OPMILL program is operating system for Kearney and Trecker milling machine providing fast easy way to program manufacture of machine parts with IBM-compatible personal computer. Gives machinist "equation plotter" feature, which plots equations that define movements and converts equations to milling-machine-controlling program moving cutter along defined path. System includes tool-manager software handling up to 25 tools and automatically adjusts to account for each tool. Developed on IBM PS/2 computer running DOS 3.3 with 1 MB of random-access memory.

Ray, R. B.↗

A NASA-wide approach toward cost-effective, high-quality software through reuse

NASA Langley Research Center sponsored the second Workshop on NASA Research in Software Reuse on May 5-6, 1992 at the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The workshop was hosted by the Research Triangle Institute. Participants came from the three NASA centers, four NASA contractor companies, two research institutes and the Air Force's Rome Laboratory. The purpose of the workshop was to exchange information on software reuse tool development, particularly with respect to tool needs, requirements, and effectiveness. The participants presented the software reuse activities and tools being developed and used by their individual centers and programs. These programs address a wide range of reuse issues. The group also developed a mission and goals for software reuse within NASA. This publication summarizes the presentations and the issues discussed during the workshop.

Scheper, Charlotte O.↗