SEARCH · Engineering Papers
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.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
Papers are presented on the following topics: measurement of software technology, recent studies of the Software Engineering Lab, software management tools, expert systems, error seeding as a program validation technique, software quality assurance, software engineering environments (including knowledge-based environments), the Distributed Computing Design System, and various Ada experiments.
This is the configuration management Plan for the AdaNet Repository Based Software Engineering (RBSE) contract. This document establishes the requirements and activities needed to ensure that the products developed for the AdaNet RBSE contract are accurately identified, that proposed changes to the product are systematically evaluated and controlled, that the status of all change activity is known at all times, and that the product achieves its functional performance requirements and is accurately documented.
The recent proliferation of high performance workstations and the increased reliability of parallel systems have illustrated the need for robust job management systems to support parallel applications. To address this issue, NAS compiled a requirements checklist for job queuing/scheduling software. Next, NAS evaluated the leading job management system (JMS) software packages against the checklist. A year has now elapsed since the first comparison was published, and NAS has repeated the evaluation. This report describes this second evaluation, and presents the results of Phase 1: Capabilities versus Requirements. We show that JMS support for running parallel applications on clusters of workstations and parallel systems is still lacking, however, definite progress has been made by the vendors to correct the deficiencies. This report is supplemented by a WWW interface to the data collected, to aid other sites in extracting the evaluation information on specific requirements of interest.
Airborne/spaceborn computer design and techniques for space shuttle data management systems
Abstract not provided.
Data Management for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) project is a comprehensive system addressing the needs of development, test, and operations phases of the mission. During development of flight software, including the science software, the data management system can be simulated using any POSIX file system. During testing, the on-board file system can be bit compared with files on the ground to verify proper behavior and end-to-end data flows. During mission operations, end-to-end accountability of data products is supported, from science observation concept to data products within the permanent ground repository. Automated and human-in-the-loop ground tools allow decisions regarding retransmitting, re-prioritizing, and deleting data products to be made using higher level information than is available to a protocol-stack approach such as the CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP).
The Vehicle System Manager (VSM) is the highest-level software control system in the Gateway hierarchical Autonomous System Management Architecture. The VSM provides four function categories: Mission Management and Timeline Execution, Resource Management, Fault Management, Vehicle Control and Operation. VSM provides various levels of automation ranging from fully autonomous operations with no flight crew and minimal ground monitoring to advisory automation when Gateway is crewed and has full ground monitoring. Trustworthiness is achieved via verified specification, comprehensive development verification, and real-time verification using assume-guarantee contracts. Development verification includes semantic verification of the data model via peer review and testing and assume-guarantee contracts implemented using the PlusCal/TLA+ environment. VSM also uses runtime assume-guarantee contracts, implemented in R2U2 via a runtime monitor that feeds the necessary telemetry data to R2U2 and which receives and responds to the R2U2 verdict stream. The full lifecycle verification approach and use of assume-guarantee contracts provides increased trustworthiness to VSM. Preliminary results provide encouragement that VSM can be both autonomous and trustworthy.
This paper presents a Software Management and Implementation Plan (SIMP) for managing and controlling the development of the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) instrument software, and the Instrument Ground Support Equipment (IGSE) software.
This report outlines the history of the CLFV puzzle, gives an overview of the Mu2e Experiment, and details the results of the DOE (Department of Energy)-funded SULI (Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship) research completed over the summer 2024 on site at Fermilab. The project focused on the otsdaq software responsible for data acquisition. The project included drafting updated documentation for new users, including new procedures relevant for the Alma- Linux 9 operating system update, and the UPS package managing system replacement with Spack (scientific software package manager). A new art module (ReadTriggerCounts) to track trigger rates was created, with compatibility to be displayed via a Grafana server. The author also assisted in calorimeter cable installation in the detector hall.
GENI Project: Sandia National Laboratories is working with several commercial and university partners to develop software for market management systems (MMSs) that enable greater use of renewable energy sources throughout the grid. MMSs are used to securely and optimally determine which energy resources should be used to service energy demand across the country. Contributions of electricity to the grid from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are intermittent, introducing complications for MMSs, which have trouble accommodating the multiple sources of price and supply uncertainties associated with bringing these new types of energy into the grid. Sandia’s software will bring a new, probability-based formulation to account for these uncertainties. By factoring in various probability scenarios for electricity production from renewable energy sources in real time, Sandia’s formula can reduce the risk of inefficient electricity transmission, save ratepayers money, conserve power, and support the future use of renewable energy.
This report outlines the results of the DOE-funded SULI (Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship) research completed over the summer 2024 on site at Fermilab. The project focused on the \textit{otsdaq} software responsible for data acquisition. The project included drafting updated documentation for new users including new procedures relevant for the Alma-Linux 9 operating system update, and the UPS package managing system replacement with spack (scientific software package manager). A new \textit{art} module (ReadTriggerCounts) to track trigger rates was created, with compatibility to be displayed via a Grafana server. The author also assisted in calorimeter cable installation in the detector hall.
The presentation will describe the architecture, current capabilities and some future enhancements of the testbed that is being developed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to enable benefit, impact, safety and cost assessments for accelerating the deployment of air traffic management concept and technologies in the national airspace system. The testbed will support analysis of operational feasibility of urban air mobility operations, a part of NASA's Air Traffic Management eXploration project, and provide the data needed by regulatory agencies charged with public safety. Introduction of concepts and technologies, especially new concepts and technologies, is difficult and often takes decades because of the inability to assess the operational impact of the interaction between the proposed concept and technology and operationally deployed systems in terms of system-wide safety, traffic flow efficiency, roles and workload of controllers and traffic managers, and impact on airlines and other operators. To overcome these limitations, the testbed is developing infrastructure to enable mathematical modeling, human-in-the-loop evaluations and testing with operational systems in a simulated environment. In addition to the difficulty of establishing communications between geographically distributed systems, downloading/installing software, and management of startup, error-handling and shutdown, a major impediment for conducting simulations and human-in-the-loop testing with operational systems is the tedious manual scenario generation process. Several of these difficulties have been addressed in the current state of the testbed. The testbed can be described in terms of the following elements (1) web-based frontend and backend, (2) Testbed Builder, (3) Data Distribution Service, (4) Component Library, (5) Simulation Management, and (6) Scenario Generation. The web-based frontend and backend enable the user to interact with the testbed for tasks such as composing a simulation, running a simulation and retrieving output data. The Testbed Builder application launched from the web frontend is a graphical user interface for the user to drag-and-drop and connect predefined blocks for composing a simulation/scenario generation task. The Builder writes a set of instructions for Simulation Management based on the links between the blocks and the block properties such as the component (executable) associated with a particular block. Management of the distributed simulation is accomplished by Execution and Component Managers. Execution Manager interprets the instructions provided by the Builder to instruct the Component Managers to download components from the Component Library to specified computers and to start them up. Once started, the components communicate with each other by publishing messages and subscribing to messages that are delivered by the Data Distribution Service. The Scenario Generation capability can be used for creating traffic scenarios for Multi-Aircraft Control System, which has been used extensively at NASA for human-in-the-loop-based concept evaluations. The presentation will provide a testbed enabled example scenario of Multi-Aircraft Control System based simulation in which the urban air mobility pilot using the conflict detection and resolution system would interact with the air traffic controllers for resolving conflicts with other aircraft during terminal area operations.
The presentation will describe the architecture, current capabilities and some future enhancements of the testbed that is being developed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to enable benefit, impact, safety and cost assessments for accelerating the deployment of air traffic management concept and technologies in the national airspace system. The testbed will support analysis of operational feasibility of urban air mobility operations, a part of NASA's Air Traffic Management eXploration project, and provide the data needed by regulatory agencies charged with public safety. Introduction of concepts and technologies, especially new concepts and technologies, is difficult and often takes decades because of the inability to assess the operational impact of the interaction between the proposed concept and technology and operationally deployed systems in terms of system-wide safety, traffic flow efficiency, roles and workload of controllers and traffic managers, and impact on airlines and other operators. To overcome these limitations, the testbed is developing infrastructure to enable mathematical modeling, human-in-the-loop evaluations and testing with operational systems in a simulated environment. In addition to the difficulty of establishing communications between geographically distributed systems, downloading/installing software, and management of startup, error-handling and shutdown, a major impediment for conducting simulations and human-in-the-loop testing with operational systems is the tedious manual scenario generation process. Several of these difficulties have been addressed in the current state of the testbed. The testbed can be described in terms of the following elements- (1) web-based frontend and backend, (2) Testbed Builder, (3) Data Distribution Service, (4) Component Library, (5) Simulation Management, and (6) Scenario Generation. The web-based frontend and backend enable the user to interact with the testbed for tasks such as composing a simulation, running a simulation and retrieving output data. The Testbed Builder application launched from the web frontend is a graphical user interface for the user to drag-and-drop and connect predefined blocks for composing a simulation/scenario generation task. The Builder writes a set of instructions for Simulation Management based on the links between the blocks and the block properties such as the component (executable) associated with a particular block. Management of the distributed simulation is accomplished by Execution and Component Managers. Execution Manager interprets the instructions provided by the Builder to instruct the Component Managers to download components from the Component Library to specified computers and to start them up. Once started, the components communicate with each other by publishing messages and subscribing to messages that are delivered by the Data Distribution Service. The Scenario Generation capability can be used for creating traffic scenarios for Multi-Aircraft Control System, which has been used extensively at NASA for human-in-the-loop-based concept evaluations. The presentation will provide a testbed enabled example scenario of Multi-Aircraft Control System based simulation in which the urban air mobility pilot using the conflict detection and resolution system would interact with the air traffic controllers for resolving conflicts with other aircraft during terminal area operations.
Software is a workflow management system designed to capture documents and route for compliance and peer reviews. Software does not in itself contain any technical information but is used as a business system to manage and release information from a research organization.
Just imagine a mass storage system that consists of a machine with 2 CPUs, 1 Gigabyte (GB) of memory, 400 GB of disk space, 16800 cartridge tapes in the automated tape silos, 88,000 tapes located in the vault, and the software to manage the system. This system is designed to be a data repository; it will always have disk space to store all the incoming data. Currently 9.14 GB of new data per day enters the system with this rate doubling each year. To assure there is always disk space available for new data, the system. has to move data reside from the expensive disk to a much less expensive medium such as the 3480 cartridge tapes. Once the data is archived to tape, it should be able to move back to disk when someone wants to access it and the data movement should be transparent to the user. Now imagine all the tasks that a system administrator must perform to keep this system running 24 hour a day, 7 days a week. Since the filesystem maintains the illusion of unlimited disk space, data that comes to the system must get moved to tapes in an efficient manner. This paper will describe the mass storage system running at the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation (NAS) at NASA Ames Research Center in both software and hardware aspects, then it will describe all of the tasks the system administrator has to perform on this system.
In this paper, we summarize the deployment of the Air Force Weather (AFW) HPC11 system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) including the process followed to successfully complete acceptance testing of the system. HPC11 is the first HPE/Cray EX 3000 system that has been successfully released to its user community in a federal facility. HPC11 consists of two identical 800-node supercomputers, Fawbush and Miller, with access to two independent and identical Lustre parallel file systems. HPC11 is equipped with Slingshot 10 interconnect technology and relies on the HPE Performance Cluster Manager (HPCM) software for system configuration. ORNL has a clearly defined acceptance testing process used to ensure that every new system deployed can provide the necessary capabilities to support user workloads. We worked closely with HPE and AFW to develop a set of tests that used the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office’s Unified Model (UM) and 4DVAR. We also included benchmarks and applications from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) portfolio to fully exercise the HPE/Cray programming environment and evaluate the functionality and performance of the system. Acceptance testing of HPC11 required parallel execution of each element on Fawbush and Miller. In addition, careful coordination was needed to ensure successful acceptance of the newly deployed Lustre file systems alongside the compute resources. In this work, we present test results from specific system components and provide an overview of the issues identified, challenges encountered, and the lessons learned along the way.
Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) consist of software and hardware systems that provide communication, control, and management among different electronic devices, such as heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. HEMS are a growing market sector in the era of smart grids and smart homes. HEMS can help both homeowners and utilities save money and energy by monitoring and controlling smart devices in a house. Based on the Department of Energy (DOE) Building Energy Data Book, 41% of the energy consumed in the United States is used by buildings (see Figure 1). This shows the importance of saving energy in the building sector. This report introduces two approaches that existing HEMS vendors can use to leverage VOLTTRON as their control and interoperability engine. The goal of this project is to make open-source, user-friendly HEMS available to the market so that everyone can benefit from them. The HEMS introduced as a result of this study should satisfy HEMS specifications such as device monitoring and control, seamless communication between devices, DR, intelligence, data management, and security.
This paper focuses on data production and management practices dating back to 1999 that continue to evolve to support the project today. In 2000, the FUSRAP Maywood Project began using a software environmental data management system and laboratory information management system, developed by a single database administrator (DA) and authored in Microsoft Access{sup TM} (MS Access). The original databases included basic functionality including sample number assignment and label generation, tracking of LIMS gamma spec QC and assignment of basic qualifiers and basic database queries. The DA continued over the next fifteen years to refine the EDMS/LIMS by integrating project-specific data evaluation guidance document processes and Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) charting and excursion warning tools. With the retirement of the original DA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)-Cabrera Team procured and implemented a commercial-leaning solution using modern database tools and an established EDMS vendor. For the database transition process, the project team established and configured the new EDMS/LIMS with basic architecture and accessibility; evaluated existing workflows; established/revised LIMS and EDMS-related documentation (manuals and procedures); and conducted dry runs and validation testing. The overall team coordinated closely to facilitate a seamless transition from initial assessment and authoring, to data migration, and finally to resumption of normal ongoing operations. Key features of the new EDMS Subcontractor's software included lookup tables, an import wizard, data checking options and unique indexes. Since the database systems became operational, the technical staff gathered useful feedback from end users (e.g., lab staff, field engineers, task managers, and the third-party data validator) to refine the EDMS/LIMS operation. This feedback triggered improvements in the performance of onsite laboratory qualification forms, promoted consistency in sample ID numbers between the database sample planning screens and field chain-of-custodies, corrected bugs in the LIMS Duplicate Evaluation Report, eliminated data import issues such as blank, inconsistent or missing data from key fields. One of the advantages of the commercial database solution was that it allowed the project to cut cost over time due to the lower cost of database maintenance provided by the commercial database vendor versus the cost of an on-staff DA. Cost savings are estimated at $40,000 per year. There were also indirect cost savings resulting from implementation of the new database since it allowed better integration of the LIMS and EDMS. While there will always be challenges associated with long term records/data management for any old remediation site, the Maywood Team's approach to an upgraded EDMS/LIMS implementation serves as one element of the overall effort to enhance the integrity and reproducibility of critical data that supports the remediation program while at the same time, more effectively using available resources. These lessons-learned will enhance implementation of cost-effective solutions for similar environmental remediation sites. (authors)