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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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At least 163 records · Page 9
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1991

Analysis of Issues for Project Scheduling by Multiple, Dispersed Schedulers (distributed Scheduling) and Requirements for Manual Protocols and Computer-based Support

Although computerized operations have significant gains realized in many areas, one area, scheduling, has enjoyed few benefits from automation. The traditional methods of industrial engineering and operations research have not proven robust enough to handle the complexities associated with the scheduling of realistic problems. To address this need, NASA has developed the computer-aided scheduling system (COMPASS), a sophisticated, interactive scheduling tool that is in wide-spread use within NASA and the contractor community. Therefore, COMPASS provides no explicit support for the large class of problems in which several people, perhaps at various locations, build separate schedules that share a common pool of resources. This research examines the issue of distributing scheduling, as applied to application domains characterized by the partial ordering of tasks, limited resources, and time restrictions. The focus of this research is on identifying issues related to distributed scheduling, locating applicable problem domains within NASA, and suggesting areas for ongoing research. The issues that this research identifies are goals, rescheduling requirements, database support, the need for communication and coordination among individual schedulers, the potential for expert system support for scheduling, and the possibility of integrating artificially intelligent schedulers into a network of human schedulers.

Richards, Stephen F.↗
NASA NTRS1991

ATAMM analysis tool

Diagnostics software for analyzing Algorithm to Architecture Mapping Model (ATAMM) based concurrent processing systems is presented. ATAMM is capable of modeling the execution of large grain algorithms on distributed data flow architectures. The tool graphically displays algorithm activities and processor activities for evaluation of the behavior and performance of an ATAMM based system. The tool's measurement capabilities indicate computing speed, throughput, concurrency, resource utilization, and overhead. Evaluations are performed on a simulated system using the software tool. The tool is used to estimate theoretical lower bound performance. Analysis results are shown to be comparable to the predictions.

Jones, Robert↗
NASA NTRS2012

Social Networking Adapted for Distributed Scientific Collaboration

Share is a social networking site with novel, specially designed feature sets to enable simultaneous remote collaboration and sharing of large data sets among scientists. The site will include not only the standard features found on popular consumer-oriented social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, but also a number of powerful tools to extend its functionality to a science collaboration site. A Virtual Observatory is a promising technology for making data accessible from various missions and instruments through a Web browser. Sci-Share augments services provided by Virtual Observatories by enabling distributed collaboration and sharing of downloaded and/or processed data among scientists. This will, in turn, increase science returns from NASA missions. Sci-Share also enables better utilization of NASA s high-performance computing resources by providing an easy and central mechanism to access and share large files on users space or those saved on mass storage. The most common means of remote scientific collaboration today remains the trio of e-mail for electronic communication, FTP for file sharing, and personalized Web sites for dissemination of papers and research results. Each of these tools has well-known limitations. Sci-Share transforms the social networking paradigm into a scientific collaboration environment by offering powerful tools for cooperative discourse and digital content sharing. Sci-Share differentiates itself by serving as an online repository for users digital content with the following unique features: a) Sharing of any file type, any size, from anywhere; b) Creation of projects and groups for controlled sharing; c) Module for sharing files on HPC (High Performance Computing) sites; d) Universal accessibility of staged files as embedded links on other sites (e.g. Facebook) and tools (e.g. e-mail); e) Drag-and-drop transfer of large files, replacing awkward e-mail attachments (and file size limitations); f) Enterprise-level data and messaging encryption; and g) Easy-to-use intuitive workflow.

Karimabadi, Homa↗
NASA NTRS2024

Exploring New Frontiers in Space Communications: Enhancing Delay Tolerant Networking through Cloud and Containerization

The High-rate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN) project at NASA Glenn Research Center has developed software that enables more flexible, reliable, and efficient space internetworking by using modern computing techniques such as cloud services, microservices, network function virtualization, software defined networking, and a distributed architecture. HDTN is built upon the Bundle Protocol and related convergence layers which have been developed to mitigate the challenges of the space networking environment including long delays, asymmetric data rates, and intermittent connectivity. The HDTN implementation employs asynchronous message processing tasks which allow for non-blocking operations as well as deployment in both centralized and distributed architectures. This paper investigates deploying HDTN in a containerized approach on the NASA Goddard’s Mission Cloud Platform using Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Commercial cloud computing will lower operating costs, provide flexible resource allocation, and allow for interconnectivity between multiple NASA centers as well as external partners. Containerization using Docker will enable greater portability and scalability for HDTN to be deployed into a variety of environments. We discuss possible NASA missions and use-cases such as the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) where the services provided by HDTN (reliable transport, high-rate message processing, and store-and-forward capabilities) will be enhanced through cloud computing and containerization. In addition, we describe the HDTN architecture and possible microservice-based networking approaches that can be obtained via HDTN’s configuration capabilities. Finally, we detail the EC2 specifications needed to achieve data rates greater than 1 Gbps to support optical communication missions such as LCRD.

Blake LaFuente↗
NASA NTRS2005

VERSE - Virtual Equivalent Real-time Simulation

Distributed real-time simulations provide important timing validation and hardware in the- loop results for the spacecraft flight software development cycle. Occasionally, the need for higher fidelity modeling and more comprehensive debugging capabilities - combined with a limited amount of computational resources - calls for a non real-time simulation environment that mimics the real-time environment. By creating a non real-time environment that accommodates simulations and flight software designed for a multi-CPU real-time system, we can save development time, cut mission costs, and reduce the likelihood of errors. This paper presents such a solution: Virtual Equivalent Real-time Simulation Environment (VERSE). VERSE turns the real-time operating system RTAI (Real-time Application Interface) into an event driven simulator that runs in virtual real time. Designed to keep the original RTAI architecture as intact as possible, and therefore inheriting RTAI's many capabilities, VERSE was implemented with remarkably little change to the RTAI source code. This small footprint together with use of the same API allows users to easily run the same application in both real-time and virtual time environments. VERSE has been used to build a workstation testbed for NASA's Space Interferometry Mission (SIM PlanetQuest) instrument flight software. With its flexible simulation controls and inexpensive setup and replication costs, VERSE will become an invaluable tool in future mission development.

virtual real time↗
NASA NTRS1992

Methodologies for building robust schedules

COMPASS is the name of a Computer Aided Scheduling System designed and built for NASA. COMPASS can be used to develop schedule of activities based upon the temporal relationships of the activities and their resource requirements. COMPASS uses this information, and guided by the user, develops precise start and stop times for the activities. In actual practice however, it is impossible to know with complete certainty what the actual durations of the scheduled activities will really be. The best that one can hope for is knowledge of the probability distribution for the durations. This paper investigates methodologies for using a scheduling tool like COMPASS that is based upon definite values for the resource requirements, while building schedules that remain valid in the face of the schedule execution perturbations. Representations for the schedules developed by these methodologies are presented, along with a discussion of the algorithm that could be used by a computer onboard a spacecraft to efficiently monitor and execute these schedules.

Dean, John H.↗
NASA NTRS1980

IPAD products and implications for the future

The betterment of productivity through the improvement of product quality and the reduction of cost is addressed. Productivity improvement is sought through (1) reduction of required resources, (2) improved ask results through the management of such saved resources, (3) reduced downstream costs through manufacturing-oriented engineering, and (4) lowered risks in the making of product design decisions. The IPAD products are both hardware architecture and software distributed over a number of heterogeneous computers in this architecture. These IPAD products are described in terms of capability and engineering usefulness. The future implications of state-of-the-art IPAD hardware and software architectures are discussed in terms of their impact on the functions and on structures of organizations concerned with creating products.

Miller, R. E., Jr.↗
NASA NTRS1987

A synchronized computational architecture for generalized bilateral control of robot arms

This paper describes a computational architecture for an interconnected high speed distributed computing system for generalized bilateral control of robot arms. The key method of the architecture is the use of fully synchronized, interrupt driven software. Since an objective of the development is to utilize the processing resources efficiently, the synchronization is done in the hardware level to reduce system software overhead. The architecture also achieves a balaced load on the communication channel. The paper also describes some architectural relations to trading or sharing manual and automatic control.

Bejczy, Antal K.↗
NASA NTRS2000

Performance Monitoring of Distributed Data Processing Systems

Test and checkout systems are essential components in ensuring safety and reliability of aircraft and related systems for space missions. A variety of systems, developed over several years, are in use at the NASA/KSC. Many of these systems are configured as distributed data processing systems with the functionality spread over several multiprocessor nodes interconnected through networks. To be cost-effective, a system should take the least amount of resource and perform a given testing task in the least amount of time. There are two aspects of performance evaluation: monitoring and benchmarking. While monitoring is valuable to system administrators in operating and maintaining, benchmarking is important in designing and upgrading computer-based systems. These two aspects of performance evaluation are the foci of this project. This paper first discusses various issues related to software, hardware, and hybrid performance monitoring as applicable to distributed systems, and specifically to the TCMS (Test Control and Monitoring System). Next, a comparison of several probing instructions are made to show that the hybrid monitoring technique developed by the NIST (National Institutes for Standards and Technology) is the least intrusive and takes only one-fourth of the time taken by software monitoring probes. In the rest of the paper, issues related to benchmarking a distributed system have been discussed and finally a prescription for developing a micro-benchmark for the TCMS has been provided.

Ojha, Anand K.↗
NASA NTRS1975

Applications of remote sensing in resource management in Nebraska

A computer-generated graphic display of land use data was developed. The level II inventory data for Sarpy County, Nebraska, was placed on magnetic tape. This data could then be displayed in a map format for comparative analysis of amount and distribution of the various categories of land use. The presentation scale can be varied and thus utilized as a direct guide for cartographic purposes during preparation for publication. In addition, the inventory and classification system was further refined.

Drew, J. V.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Experimenting with an Evolving Ground/Space-based Software Architecture to Enable Sensor Webs

A series of ongoing experiments are being conducted at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to explore integrated ground and space-based software architectures enabling sensor webs. A sensor web, as defined by Steve Talabac at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center(GSFC), is a coherent set of distributed nodes interconnected by a communications fabric, that collectively behave as a single, dynamically adaptive, observing system. The nodes can be comprised of satellites, ground instruments, computing nodes etc. Sensor web capability requires autonomous management of constellation resources. This becomes progressively more important as more and more satellites share resource, such as communication channels and ground station,s while automatically coordinating their activities. There have been five ongoing activities which include an effort to standardize a set of middleware. This paper will describe one set of activities using the Earth Observing 1 satellite, which used a variety of ground and flight software along with other satellites and ground sensors to prototype a sensor web. This activity allowed us to explore where the difficulties that occur in the assembly of sensor webs given today s technology. We will present an overview of the software system architecture, some key experiments and lessons learned to facilitate better sensor webs in the future.

mandl, Daniel↗
NASA NTRS2011

Detecting Abnormal Machine Characteristics in Cloud Infrastructures

In the cloud computing environment resources are accessed as services rather than as a product. Monitoring this system for performance is crucial because of typical pay-peruse packages bought by the users for their jobs. With the huge number of machines currently in the cloud system, it is often extremely difficult for system administrators to keep track of all machines using distributed monitoring programs such as Ganglia1 which lacks system health assessment and summarization capabilities. To overcome this problem, we propose a technique for automated anomaly detection using machine performance data in the cloud. Our algorithm is entirely distributed and runs locally on each computing machine on the cloud in order to rank the machines in order of their anomalous behavior for given jobs. There is no need to centralize any of the performance data for the analysis and at the end of the analysis, our algorithm generates error reports, thereby allowing the system administrators to take corrective actions. Experiments performed on real data sets collected for different jobs validate the fact that our algorithm has a low overhead for tracking anomalous machines in a cloud infrastructure.

Bhaduri, Kanishka↗
NASA NTRS1981

The Control Point Library Building System

The Earth Resources Observation System (EROS) Data Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota distributes precision corrected Landsat MSS and RBV data. These data are derived from master data tapes produced by the Master Data Processor (MDP), NASA's system for computing and applying corrections to the data. Included in the MDP is the Control Point Library Building System (CPLBS), an interactive, menu-driven system which permits a user to build and maintain libraries of control points. The control points are required to achieve the high geometric accuracy desired in the output MSS and RBV data. This paper describes the processing performed by CPLBS, the accuracy of the system, and the host computer and special image viewing equipment employed.

Niblack, W.↗
NASA NTRS2019

An Integrated Data Analytics Platform

An Integrated Science Data Analytics Platform is an environment that enables the confluence of resources for scientific investigation. It harmonizes data, tools and computational resources which subsequently enable the research community to focus on the investigation rather than spending time on security, data preparation, management, etc. OceanWorks is a NASA technology integration project to establish a cloud-based Integrated Ocean Science Data Analytics Platform at NASA’s Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) for big ocean science. It focuses on advancement and maturity by bringing together several NASA open-source, big data projects for parallel analytics, anomaly detection, in-situ to satellite data matchup, quality-screened data subsetting, search relevancy, and data discovery. Our communities are relying on data distributed through data centers such as the PO.DAAC, COAPS, NCAR, and many others to conduct their research. In typical investigations, scientists would engage in: search for data, evaluate the relevance of that data, download it, and then apply algorithms to identify trends. Such workflow cannot scale if the research involves a massive amount of data or multi-variate measurements. NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is expected to produce massive amount of observational data during its 3-year nominal mission. Collections like SWOT challenges all existing Earth Science data archival, distribution and analysis paradigms. In this paper, we will discuss how OceanWorks enhances the analysis of physical ocean data where the computation is done on an elastic cloud platform next to the archive to deliver fast, web-accessible services for working with oceanographic measurements.

Yang, Chaowei↗
NASA NTRS2002

A System for Monitoring and Management of Computational Grids

As organizations begin to deploy large computational grids, it has become apparent that systems for observation and control of the resources, services, and applications that make up such grids are needed. Administrators must observe the operation of resources and services to ensure that they are operating correctly and they must control the resources and services to ensure that their operation meets the needs of users. Users are also interested in the operation of resources and services so that they can choose the most appropriate ones to use. In this paper we describe a prototype system to monitor and manage computational grids and describe the general software framework for control and observation in distributed environments that it is based on.

Smith, Warren↗
NASA NTRS1992

Description of the SSF PMAD DC testbed control system data acquisition function

The NASA LeRC in Cleveland, Ohio has completed the development and integration of a Power Management and Distribution (PMAD) DC Testbed. This testbed is a reduced scale representation of the end to end, sources to loads, Space Station Freedom Electrical Power System (SSF EPS). This unique facility is being used to demonstrate DC power generation and distribution, power management and control, and system operation techniques considered to be prime candidates for the Space Station Freedom. A key capability of the testbed is its ability to be configured to address system level issues in support of critical SSF program design milestones. Electrical power system control and operation issues like source control, source regulation, system fault protection, end-to-end system stability, health monitoring, resource allocation, and resource management are being evaluated in the testbed. The SSF EPS control functional allocation between on-board computers and ground based systems is evolving. Initially, ground based systems will perform the bulk of power system control and operation. The EPS control system is required to continuously monitor and determine the current state of the power system. The DC Testbed Control System consists of standard controllers arranged in a hierarchical and distributed architecture. These controllers provide all the monitoring and control functions for the DC Testbed Electrical Power System. Higher level controllers include the Power Management Controller, Load Management Controller, Operator Interface System, and a network of computer systems that perform some of the SSF Ground based Control Center Operation. The lower level controllers include Main Bus Switch Controllers and Photovoltaic Controllers. Power system status information is periodically provided to the higher level controllers to perform system control and operation. The data acquisition function of the control system is distributed among the various levels of the hierarchy. Data requirements are dictated by the control system algorithms being implemented at each level. A functional description of the various levels of the testbed control system architecture, the data acquisition function, and the status of its implementationis presented.

Baez, Anastacio N.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Adaptive Resource Management Technology for Satellite Constellations

This manuscript describes the Sensor Web Adaptive Resource Manager (SWARM) project. The primary focus of the project is on the design and prototyping of middleware for managing computing and network resources in a way that enables the information systems of satellite constellations to provide realtime performance within dynamic environments. The middleware has been prototyped, and it has been evaluated by employing it to manage a pool of distributed resources for the ITOS (Integrated Test and Operations System) satellite command and control software system. The design of the middleware is discussed and a summary of the evaluation effort is provided.

Welch, Lonnie↗
NASA NTRS1993

Predicting scheduling success

This paper provides an analytical formulation to predict scheduling success for a class of problems frequently referred to as activity scheduling. Space Network communications scheduling is an example of activity scheduling. The principal assumption is that the activity start times are randomly distributed over the available time in the time line. The formulation makes it possible to estimate how much of the demand can be scheduled as a function of the demand, number of resources, activity duration, and activity flexibility. The paper includes computed results for a variety of resource and demand conditions. The results demonstrate that even with highly flexible activities, it is difficult to schedule demand greater than 60 percent of resources without the use of optimization and conflict resolution capabilities in the scheduling system.

Messing, Fredric↗