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Reed, Daniel

Publications and source records attributed to Reed, Daniel.

XaaS: Acceleration as a Service to Enable Productive High-Performance Cloud Computing

High-performance computing (HPC) and the cloud have evolved independently, specializing their innovations into performance or productivity. Acceleration as a Service (XaaS) is a recipe to empower both fields with a shared execution platform that provides transparent access to computing resources, regardless of the underlying cloud or HPC service provider. Bridging HPC and cloud advancements, XaaS presents a unified architecture built on performance-portable containers. Here, our converged model concentrates on low-overhead, high-performance communication and computing, targeting resource-intensive workloads from climate simulations to machine learning. XaaS lifts the restricted allocation model of Function as a Service (FaaS), allowing users to benefit from the flexibility and efficient resource utilization of serverless computing while supporting long-running and performance-sensitive workloads from HPC.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

First Assessments of Predicted ICESat-2 Performance Using Aircraft Data

The Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) is a next-generation laser altimeter designed to continue key observations of ice sheet elevation change, sea ice freeboard, vegetation canopy height, earth surface elevation, and sea surface height. Scheduled for launch in mid-2016, ICESat-2 will use a high repetition rate (10 kHz), small footprint (10 m nominal ground diameter) laser, and a single-photon-sensitive detection strategy (photon counting) to measure precise range to the earth's surface. Using green light (532 nm), the six beams of ICESat-2 will provide improved spatial coverage compared with the single beam of ICESat, while the differences in transmit energy among the beams provide a large dynamic range. The six beams are arranged into three pairs of beams which allow slopes to measured on an orbit-by-orbit basis. In order to evaluate models of predicted ICESat-2 performance and provide ICESat-2-like data for algorithm development, an airborne ICESat-2 simulator was developed and first flown in 2010. This simulator, the Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar (MABEL) was most recently deployed to Iceland in April 2012 and collected approx 85 hours of science data over land ice, sea ice, and calibration targets. MABEL uses a similar photon-counting measurement strategy to what will be used on ICESat-2. MABEL collects data in 16 green channels and an additional 8 channels in the infrared aligned across the direction of flight. By using NASA's ER-2 aircraft flying at 20km altitude, MABEL flies as close to space as is practical, and collects data through approx 95% of the atmosphere. We present background on the MABEL instrument, and data from the April 2012 deployment to Iceland. Among the 13 MABEL flights, we collected data over the Greenland ice sheet interior and outlet glaciers in the southwest and western Greenland, sea ice data over the Nares Strait and Greenland Sea, and a number of small glaciers and ice caps in Iceland and Svalbard. Several of the flights were coincident in time and space with NASA's Operation IceBridge, which provides an independent data set for validation. MABEL also collected data along CryoSat track 10482 in north central Greenland approximately one month after CryoSat passed overhead.

Neumann, Thomas↗

Flight Testing of the TWiLiTE Airborne Molecular Doppler Lidar

In September, 2009 the TWiLiTE (Tropospheric Wind Lidar Technology Experiment) direct detection Doppler lidar was integrated for engineering flight testing on the NASA ER-2 high altitude aircraft. The TWiI,iTE Doppler lidar measures vertical profiles of wind by transmitting a short ultraviolet (355 nm) laser pulse into the atmosphere, collecting the laser light scattered back to the lidar by air molecules and measuring the Doppler shifted frequency of that light. The magnitude of the Doppler shift is proportional to the wind speed of the air in the parcel scattering the laser light. TWiLiTE was developed with funding from the NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) Instrument Incubator Program (11P). The primary objectives of the TWiLiTE program are twofold: 1) to advance the development of key technologies and subsystems critical for a future space based Global 3-1) Wind Mission, as recommended by the National Research Council in the recent Decadal Survey for Earth Science [1] and 2) to develop, for the first time, a fully autonomous airborne Doppler lidar and to demonstrate tropospheric wind profile measurements from a high altitude downward looking, moving platform to simulate spaceborne measurements. In this paper we will briefly describe the instrument followed by a discussion of the results from the 2009 engineering test flights

Gentry, Bruce↗