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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 235 records · Page 13

Internet Voice Distribution System (IVoDS) Utilization in Remote Payload Operations

Due to limited crew availability to support science and the large number of experiments to be operated simultaneously, telescience is key to a successful International Space Station (ISS) science program. Crew, operations personnel at NASA centers, and researchers at universities and companies around the world must work closely together to perform scientific experiments on-board ISS. NASA has initiated use of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to supplement the existing HVoDS mission voice communications system used by researchers. The Internet Voice Distribution System (IVoDS) connects researchers to mission support "loops" or conferences via Internet Protocol networks such as the high-speed Internet 2. Researchers use IVoDS software on personal computers to talk with operations personnel at NASA centers. IVoDS also has the capability, if authorized, to allow researchers to communicate with the ISS crew during experiment operations. NODS was developed by Marshall Space Flight Center with contractors A2 Technology, Inc. FVC, Lockheed- Martin, and VoIP Group. IVoDS is currently undergoing field-testing with full deployment for up to 50 simultaneous users expected in 2002. Research is currently being performed to take full advantage of the digital world - the Personal Computer and Internet Protocol networks - to qualitatively enhance communications among ISS operations personnel. In addition to the current voice capability, video and data-sharing capabilities are being investigated. Major obstacles being addressed include network bandwidth capacity and strict security requirements. Techniques being investigated to reduce and overcome these obstacles include emerging audio-video protocols and network technology including multicast and quality-of-service.

Best, Susan↗

Quantum Technologies for UAS (QTech)

Harness the power of quantum technologies to assure the availability of UAS communications against disruptions. Make use of quantum computing (e.g. quantum optimization) and quantum communication (e.g. quantum key distribution) to address the availability cybersecurity challenge. Our approach is three-fold: (1) Utilize quantum optimization algorithms to design robust network with routing redundancy that can respond adaptively to dynamically changing real-time environment and disruptions, (2) Utilize quantum optimization algorithms resource allocation for detection, localization, and tracking of mobile communication disruption agents, (3) Utilize quantum key distribution (QKD) to execute secure key sharing in high data rate optical communication and/or anti-jamming protocols for secure RF communication.

Quantum Computing↗

Performance analysis and acceleration of explicit integration for large kinetic networks using batched GPU computations

Abstract—We demonstrate the systematic implementation of recently-developed fast explicit kinetic integration algorithms that solve efficiently N coupled ordinary differential equations (subject to initial conditions) on modern GPUs. We take representative test cases (Type Ia supernova explosions) and demonstrate two or more orders of magnitude increase in efficiency for solving such systems (of realistic thermonuclear networks coupled to fluid dynamics). This implies that important coupled, multiphysics problems in various scientific and technical disciplines that were intractable, or could be simulated only with highly schematic kinetic networks, are now computationally feasible. As examples of such applications we present the computational techniques developed for our ongoing deployment of these new methods on modern GPU accelerators. We show that similarly to many other scientific applications, ranging from national security to medical advances, the computation can be split into many independent computational tasks, each of relatively small-size. As the size of each individual task does not provide sufficient parallelism for the underlying hardware, especially for accelerators, these tasks must be computed concurrently as a single routine, that we call batched routine, in order to saturate the hardware with enough work.

Haidar Ahmad, Azzam↗

HPC and Cloud Convergence Beyond Technical Boundaries: Strategies for Economic Sustainability, Standardization, and Data Accessibility

At the IEEE/ACM International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC23), held in Denver, experts discussed the convergence of high-performance computing and cloud computing. Experts explored how this integration could address current scientific computing limitations, enhance computational capabilities, and foster global collaboration while focusing on economic, security, technical, and community challenges and opportunities.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Scalable, Physical Effects Measurable Microgrid for Cyber Resilience Analysis (SPEMMCRA)

The ability to advance state of the art automated protections for industrial control systems (ICS) has as a precursor in the ability to understand the tradeoff space. That is, to enable a cyber feedback loop in a control system environment you must first consider both the security mitigation available, the benefits and the impacts to the control system functionality when the mitigation is used. More damaging impacts could be precipitated that the mitigation was intended to rectify. This paper details networked ICS that controls a simulation of the frequency response represented with the swing equation. The microgrid loads and base generation can be balanced through the control of an emulated battery and power inverter. The simulated plant, which is implemented in Raspberry Pi computers, provides an inexpensive platform to realize the physical effects of cyber attacks to show the tradeoffs of available mitigatoins. This network design can include a commercial ICS controller to introduce real world implementation of feedback controls, and provides a scalable, physical effects measurable Microgrid for cyber resilience analysis (SPEMMCRA).

42 ENGINEERING↗

EV SALaD 2023 Demonstration: Best Practices and Mitigations for Protecting EVSE Infrastructure

The Electric Vehicle Secure Architecture Laboratory Demonstration (EV SALaD) program is a demonstration of cybersecurity best practices for high-power electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure led by Idaho National Laboratory (INL), in collaboration with other DOE National Laboratories participating in the EVs at Scale Consortium.a Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) participated in the first 2-year (FY22-23) demonstration cycle for EV SALaD. This report documents the FY23 demonstration, the second in a series of demonstrations and collaborations in deploying and operating cybersecure EV charging infrastructure. It includes a summary of improvements from the FY22 demonstration, technical analysis of the FY23 demonstration, how the research demonstrates cyber-physical and cybersecurity best practices for high-power EV charging infrastructure, and related impacts to national and energy security. For EV SALaD, the FY22 demonstration focused on the detection, ranking, and prioritization of anomalous events for high-power EV charging. The FY23 demonstration additionally included the demonstration of cybersecurity best practices, which included protection and mitigation solutions to prevent, respond, and recover from anomalous events. During the demonstrations, the multi-lab EV SALaD team conducted a Test Effect Payload (TEP)b evaluation on extreme fast charger (XFC) hardware equipped with Cerberus, a detection and response solution, to demonstrate anomaly detection and mitigation cybersecurity best practices against cyber-enabled events.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Recognition of partially occluded threat objects using the annealed Hopefield network

Recognition of partially occluded objects has been an important issue to airport security because occlusion causes significant problems in identifying and locating objects during baggage inspection. The neural network approach is suitable for the problems in the sense that the inherent parallelism of neural networks pursues many hypotheses in parallel resulting in high computation rates. Moreover, they provide a greater degree of robustness or fault tolerance than conventional computers. The annealed Hopfield network which is derived from the mean field annealing (MFA) has been developed to find global solutions of a nonlinear system. In the study, it has been proven that the system temperature of MFA is equivalent to the gain of the sigmoid function of a Hopfield network. In our early work, we developed the hybrid Hopfield network (HHN) for fast and reliable matching. However, HHN doesn't guarantee global solutions and yields false matching under heavily occluded conditions because HHN is dependent on initial states by its nature. In this paper, we present the annealed Hopfield network (AHN) for occluded object matching problems. In AHN, the mean field theory is applied to the hybird Hopfield network in order to improve computational complexity of the annealed Hopfield network and provide reliable matching under heavily occluded conditions. AHN is slower than HHN. However, AHN provides near global solutions without initial restrictions and provides less false matching than HHN. In conclusion, a new algorithm based upon a neural network approach was developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the automated inspection of threat objects from x-ray images. The robustness of the algorithm is proved by identifying occluded target objects with large tolerance of their features.

Kim, Jung H.↗

A Simple XML Producer-Consumer Protocol

There are many different projects from government, academia, and industry that provide services for delivering events in distributed environments. The problem with these event services is that they are not general enough to support all uses and they speak different protocols so that they cannot interoperate. We require such interoperability when we, for example, wish to analyze the performance of an application in a distributed environment. Such an analysis might require performance information from the application, computer systems, networks, and scientific instruments. In this work we propose and evaluate a standard XML-based protocol for the transmission of events in distributed systems. One recent trend in government and academic research is the development and deployment of computational grids. Computational grids are large-scale distributed systems that typically consist of high-performance compute, storage, and networking resources. Examples of such computational grids are the DOE Science Grid, the NASA Information Power Grid (IPG), and the NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computing Infrastructure (PACIs). The major effort to deploy these grids is in the area of developing the software services to allow users to execute applications on these large and diverse sets of resources. These services include security, execution of remote applications, managing remote data, access to information about resources and services, and so on. There are several toolkits for providing these services such as Globus, Legion, and Condor. As part of these efforts to develop computational grids, the Global Grid Forum is working to standardize the protocols and APIs used by various grid services. This standardization will allow interoperability between the client and server software of the toolkits that are providing the grid services. The goal of the Performance Working Group of the Grid Forum is to standardize protocols and representations related to the storage and distribution of performance data. These standard protocols and representations must support tasks such as profiling parallel applications, monitoring the status of computers and networks, and monitoring the performance of services provided by a computational grid. This paper describes a proposed protocol and data representation for the exchange of events in a distributed system. The protocol exchanges messages formatted in XML and it can be layered atop any low-level communication protocol such as TCP or UDP Further, we describe Java and C++ implementations of this protocol and discuss their performance. The next section will provide some further background information. Section 3 describes the main communication patterns of our protocol. Section 4 describes how we represent events and related information using XML. Section 5 describes our protocol and Section 6 discusses the performance of two implementations of the protocol. Finally, an appendix provides the XML Schema definition of our protocol and event information.

Smith, Warren↗

Secure Enclaves: An Isolation-centric Approach for Creating Secure High Performance Computing Environments

High performance computing environments are often used for a wide variety of workloads ranging from simulation, data transformation and analysis, and complex workflows to name just a few. These systems may process data at various security levels but in so doing are often enclaved at the highest security posture. This approach places significant restrictions on the users of the system even when processing data at a lower security level and exposes data at higher levels of confidentiality to a much broader population than otherwise necessary. The traditional approach of isolation, while effective in establishing security enclaves poses significant challenges for the use of shared infrastructure in HPC environments. This report details current state-of-the-art in virtualization, reconfigurable network enclaving via Software Defined Networking (SDN), and storage architectures and bridging techniques for creating secure enclaves in HPC environments.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Grid Infrastructure for Supporting Space-based Science Operations

Emerging technologies for computational grid infrastructures have the potential for revolutionizing the way computers are used in all aspects of our lives. Computational grids are currently being implemented to provide a large-scale, dynamic, and secure research and engineering environments based on standards and next-generation reusable software, enabling greater science and engineering productivity through shared resources and distributed computing for less cost than traditional architectures. Combined with the emerging technologies of high-performance networks, grids provide researchers, scientists and engineers the first real opportunity for an effective distributed collaborative environment with access to resources such as computational and storage systems, instruments, and software tools and services for the most computationally challenging applications.

Bradford, Robert N.↗

XploreNAS : Explore Adversarially Robust and Hardware-efficient Neural Architectures for Non-ideal Xbars

Compute In-Memory platforms such as memristive crossbars are gaining focus as they facilitate acceleration of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with high area and compute efficiencies. However, the intrinsic non-idealities associated with the analog nature of computing in crossbars limits the performance of the deployed DNNs. Furthermore, DNNs are shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks leading to severe security threats in their large-scale deployment. Thus, finding adversarially robust DNN architectures for non-ideal crossbars is critical to the safe and secure deployment of DNNs on the edge. This work proposes a two-phase algorithm-hardware co-optimization approach called XploreNAS that searches for hardware efficient and adversarially robust neural architectures for non-ideal crossbar platforms. We use the one-shot Neural Architecture Search approach to train a large Supernet with crossbar-awareness and sample adversarially robust Subnets therefrom, maintaining competitive hardware efficiency. Our experiments on crossbars with benchmark datasets (SVHN, CIFAR10, CIFAR100) show up to ~8–16% improvement in the adversarial robustness of the searched Subnets against a baseline ResNet-18 model subjected to crossbar-aware adversarial training. We benchmark our robust Subnets for Energy-Delay-Area-Products (EDAPs) using the Neurosim tool and find that with additional hardware efficiency–driven optimizations, the Subnets attain ~1.5–1.6× lower EDAPs than ResNet-18 baseline.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Decentralized Signal Processing and Distributed Control of Collaborative Autonomous Networks (17-ERD-101 LDRD Final Report)

Intelligent autonomous sensor networks, often comprised of large numbers of sensors, must be capable of jointly exploiting data collected at each agent in the network, and using that data to optimize their future actions towards multiple mission objectives. Centralized signal processing and optimization solutions process all data and determine all future actions at a single agent, and the resulting information and commands are disseminated back to the network. The communications bandwidth this requires and the single point of failure the central agent represents often make these solutions untenable for national security applications. In this project, several fundamental algorithms for solving both the decentralized signal processing and network optimization were developed, as well as simulation software to validate the results of these algorithms at scale. Specifically, novel algorithms for Bayesian decentralized estimation and decentralized detection and optimization based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) were developed for autonomous sensor networks and published in the literature. The first large scale simulation of autonomous sensor networks (1000 agents) was conducted on this project, validating the performance of the developed algorithms. These algorithms and simulation tools are critical components of any decentralized autonomous network and have current and future national security applications, including distributed sensor networks for detection, estimation, and tracking problems, and large decentralized cyber-physical infrastructure such as the power grid.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Using Splunk® Enterprise Search Commands for Advanced Analysis of Ivanti Connect Secure© Logs

Analyzing the logs of even the smallest Information Technology (IT) system can be a challenge considering they can generate millions of lines of log data in a very short time. Splunk® Enterprise is an industry leading tool that allows analysis of log data, which can enhance troubleshooting capabilities, improve system performance, and improve the security posture of an IT system. Ivanti Connect Secure© (ICS) is a market-leading platform powered by the Ivanti Secure Socket Layer Virtual Private Network (SSL VPN) appliance, providing an architecture for secure access to and protection of network resources. This paper describes an approach for using Splunk Enterprise search capabilities to perform advanced data analysis of ICS logs.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Time Synchronization Prototype, Server Upgrade Procedure Support and Remote Software Development

Networks are roadways of communication that connect devices. Like all roadways, there are rules and regulations that govern whatever (information in this case) travels along them. One type of rule that is commonly used is called a protocol. More specifically, a protocol is a standard that specifies how data should be transmitted over a network. The project outlined in this document seeks to implement one protocol in particular, Precision Time Protocol, within the Kennedy Ground Control Subsystem network at Kennedy Space Center. This document also summarizes work completed for server upgrades, remote software developer training and how all three assignments demonstrated the importance of accountability and security.

Computer Science↗

A Scalable HPC Insider Threat Monitoring System

Cyber Equations, Inc. is reporting on the results of its DOE SBIR Phase I project for the development of a Scalable HPC Insider Threat Monitoring System. This final report to the Department of Energy for Task DE-FOA-0001618 covers the period from 02/21/2017 to 02/20/2018 and summarizes the larger research accomplishments, which can be divided in theoretical and laboratory experiments. One of the many challenges for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is the support of the high-performance computing (HPC) centers while providing quality information services, strategic vision, leadership, technical expertise, and capabilities necessary to enable the DOE to deliver effective, efficient, economical, and secure HPC services. In order to realize a secure DOE laboratory enterprise, DOE facilities operations must counter a wide range of cyber insider threats, from unsophisticated adversaries up to advanced, nation state sponsored actors. The DOE laboratories also presents an enormous insider attack surface of an ever-growing number of computers, networks, and devices all running a myriad of software. In addition, the DOE laboratories are connected to a variety of external organizations which multiplies the possibility of insider threat. During this SBIR project Cyber Equations developed a strategic combination of supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques to control scale and classify whether entities, such as hosts, actors, or documents, are showing suspicious insider behavior. We conducted experiments using real cyber data to show that changes in observable behavior (e.g., changes in outbound traffic patterns) are indicative of attacks executing (e.g., insiders exfiltrating data, bots calling home, or an attack spreading). The features and methods we use, have been used in the anomaly detection research and development community for a significant amount of time and robust implementations are openly available. K-Means clustering, Decision Trees, and Support Vector Machine based classifiers are readily available through the R language and open source H20 machine learning framework. The Cyber Equations approach is novel in its use of these classifiers combined with Hadoop based parallel processing technology. The five stages of processing used by CyberInsider improve scalability and reduce the high number of false positives normally associated with network anomaly detection. In summary, the Cyber Equations has successfully accomplished all of its Phase I tasks and demonstrated the feasibility of the Insider Threat Monitoring System.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Universal Polarization Transformations: Spatial Programming of Polarization Scattering Matrices Using a Deep Learning‐Designed Diffractive Polarization Transformer

Abstract Controlled synthesis of optical fields having nonuniform polarization distributions presents a challenging task. Here, a universal polarization transformer is demonstrated that can synthesize a large set of arbitrarily‐selected, complex‐valued polarization scattering matrices between the polarization states at different positions within its input and output field‐of‐views (FOVs). This framework comprises 2D arrays of linear polarizers positioned between isotropic diffractive layers, each containing tens of thousands of diffractive features with optimizable transmission coefficients. After its deep learning‐based training, this diffractive polarization transformer can successfully implement N i N o = 10 000 different spatially‐encoded polarization scattering matrices with negligible error, where N i and N o represent the number of pixels in the input and output FOVs, respectively. This universal polarization transformation framework is experimentally validated in the terahertz spectrum by fabricating wire‐grid polarizers and integrating them with 3D‐printed diffractive layers to form a physical polarization transformer. Through this set‐up, an all‐optical polarization permutation operation of spatially‐varying polarization fields is demonstrated, and distinct spatially‐encoded polarization scattering matrices are simultaneously implemented between the input and output FOVs of a compact diffractive processor. This framework opens up new avenues for developing novel devices for universal polarization control and may find applications in, e.g., remote sensing, medical imaging, security, material inspection, and machine vision.

Optical neural networks↗