Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “PROCESSOR”

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.

At least 829 records · Page 46

Optimization of Elastodynamic Finite Integration Technique on Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing Processors

This work describes the development and optimization of an implementation of an isotropic elastodynamic finite integration technique (EFIT) code for parallelized computation on Intel Knights Landing (KNL) hardware. EFIT is a numerical approach resulting in standard staggered-grid finite difference equations for the elastodynamic equations of motion to simulate bulk waves is solids. The computationally efficient simulation of elastodynamic wave propagation and interactions in aerospace materials is of high-interest in the fields of nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and structural health monitoring (SHM). Ultrasonic inspection uses an ultrasonic signal, generated at the surface of the material/structure via use of a piezoelectric transducer, to propagate sound waves into the material where it interacts with any existing defects, as well as with structural boundaries and any material inhomogeneity. Reflections from defects and boundaries are then measured by a transducer. Realistic ultrasound simulation tools can significantly aid the development and optimization of inspection techniques and can assist in the interpretation of experimental data. The optimization of an elastodynamics simulation code for the KNL Many Integrated Core processor was performed. The optimization focused on data locality and vectorization. Results show that tiling of the data to exploit the cache behavior and allow for significant utilization of the KNL hardware. The MPI implementation allows for a scalable implementation enabling large problems to be simulated. The model results were validated against theoretical dispersion curves to within 2% of the group velocity, and within 0.5% of the phase velocity of the A0 mode. Aggressive use of tiling, threading, and vectorization techniques allowed for dramatically improved time to solution.

William C. Schneck↗

Upgrades to the International Space Station Urine Processor Assembly

The ISS Urine Processor Assembly (UPA) began operations in November 2008. Though the UPA has successfully generated distillate from crew urine, several modifications and upgrades have been implemented to improve overall system performance throughout the years. Current and future upgrades to the UPA will continue to focus on improved system performance and reliability, focusing primarily on the Distillation Assembly and upgrades to the UPA vacuum pump. Work towards a flight demonstration experiment of a vacuum pump utilizing scroll pump technologies has also continued forward. The following paper discusses progress on these various concepts, including the implementation of a more reliable drive belt, improved methods for managing condensate in the stationary bowl of the Distillation Assembly, installation of improved centrifuge bearings, implementation of a liquid level sensor, and upgrades to the UPA vacuum pump.

Williamson, Jill P.↗

Upgrades to the International Space Station Urine Processor Assembly

The ISS Urine Processor Assembly (UPA) began operations in November 2008. Though the UPA has successfully generated distillate from crew urine, several modifications and upgrades have been implemented to improve overall system performance throughout the years. Current and future upgrades to the UPA will continue to focus on improved system performance and reliability, focusing next on a flight demonstration experiment of a vacuum pump utilizing scroll pump technologies. The upgraded Distillation Assembly, described in further detail in previous publications, will also be available for on-orbit integration within the year. The following paper discusses progress on the Purge Pump and Separator Assembly (PPSA), and concept considerations for future UPA upgrades.

Jill P Williamson↗

Towards a Qualification Data Set: Expanded SEE Data on the P2020 Processor

Earlier P2020 SEE data are compared and expanded to a recent die revision, significantly increasing samples tested by protons by five devices, and by heavy ions by five devices. Earlier tested SEE types are found to be fairly similar in register, L1 cache, L2 cache, and CPU crashes. New test methods give SEE performance for the flash memory controller, watchdog circuit, and a built-in Ethernet port on the P2020 processor. Results from heavy ion and proton tests are presented, with data separated over a large number of specific error types and test programs.

Vartanian, Sargeh↗

UAVSAR real-time embedded GPU processor

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can provide high-resolution imagery regardless of cloud cover or lighting conditions. These qualities make SAR potentially well-suited for informing response efforts to natural and man-made disasters, but such applications require data products with minimal latency. To meet this challenge, we implemented a real-time SAR processor capable of producing 10 m imagery using an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 embedded GPU module. With its low mass (87 g module) and power consumption under 8 W, the system also holds promise for spaceborne applications.

Tung, Wayne↗

A Prototype Early Planetary Organic Processor Assembly (OPA) Based on Dual-Stage Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactor (AnMBR) for Fecal and Food Waste Treatment and Resource Recovery

Long-duration, deep-space exploration and habitation missions demand robust and reliable technologies to ensure crew health, safety, and mission success. Local food production will be essential for crew nutrition and morale. However, at $10,000/lb, the payload costs and mass/volume limitations to transport and provide the necessary resources, including fertilizer, for an anticipated 30-month mission become challenging over time. For mission success and sustainability, the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) of the near future will need to recover resources from all “waste” sources and be near-closed loop. Organic wastes (e.g., fecal and food) offer a renewable source of C, N, P, water and other trace elements necessary to sustain crop production. However, these high solidwastes are often difficult to treatdue to factors includingheterogeneity, complexity, high organic strength, and the presence of pathogens. To date, there is no flight-ready technology capable of treating mixed organic wastes, creating a technology gap for future space missions. To address this need, a prototype Organic Processor Assembly (OPA) was developed through collaboration between the University of South Florida (USF) and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The OPA is based on the anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR), a hybrid technology coupling high-rate anaerobic digestion with membrane filtration. The system is designed for an early planetary base (EPB) scenario to aid in closing the resource recovery loop and decreaseresupply dependence. This presentation discusses initial research pertaining to: 1) design challenges in maximizing hydraulic/organic throughputandReliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety(RAMS)while minimizingmass and volume; 2) create capabilities for treating simulated high solids waste under steady and non-steady state conditions; and 3) measuresolids performance parameter(s). Future research and development pertaining to further optimization on system operation, performance, and expanded treatment capabilities arepresented.

Bioreactor↗

Nutrient Limitation Predisposes A Cultivate of Burkholderia Contaminans From the ISS Water Processor Assembly to Biofilm Formation Under Simulated Microgravity.

The International Space Station (ISS) Water Processor Assembly (WPA) experiences intermittent dormancy between water recycling events thus promoting biofilm formation within the system. In this work we aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of nutrient limitation on bacterial growth and biofilm formation under microgravity in support of biofilm mitigation efforts in exploration water recovery systems. A representative species of bacteria that is commonly cultured from the ISS WPA was cultured in an WPA influent water ersatz formulation tailored for microbiology studies. Burkholderia contaminans was cultured under a simulated microgravity (SµG) treatment in a vertically rotating high-aspect rotating vessel (HARV), with a rotating control (R) in the horizontal plane at the determined optimal rpm of 15 along with a stationary (S) control. At different time points, the bacterial culture and ersatz were harvested for bacterial counts, transcriptomic and nutrient content analyses. Under the test conditions, the culture under SµG treatment consumed the essential nutrients faster than the R and S control cultures in the early stage of growth, thus approaching a nutrient limited growth condition earlier than the controls. The rapid uptake and subsequent depletion of essential nutrients was further illustrated in the transcriptomic response of the SµG culture when compared to the transcriptomic response of the R and S control conditions. The observed starvation response may serve as one element to explain a moderate enhancement of biofilm formation in the SµG treatment. One implication of this investigation is that biofilm mitigation in the ISS environment could be supported by ensuring a steady flow of water as a vehicle for essential nutrients within the WPA to avoid complete consumption which occurs in times of no flow lending to undesired biofilm formation.

Angie Diaz↗

Development and Testing of a New Partial Gravity Urine Processor Design and Urine Pretreatment

The Planetary Urine Processor (PUP) is a urine distillation system for lunar or planetary applications, taking advantage of local gravity for phase separation as well as the movement and storage of waste feeds and distillate. The PUP utilizes a stationary evaporator with an integrated disposable bag to process urine and capture remaining precipitates. This system aims to increase water reclamation percentage to greater than 96%, reduce resource requirements, and enhance reliability and maintainability due to lower system complexity over the existing water recovery system on the International Space Station (ISS). This paper focuses on the hardware development, testing efforts, and the associated urine pretreatment development work.

Water Recovery↗

Development and Testing of a New Partial Gravity Urine Processor Design and Urine Pretreatment

The Planetary Urine Processor (PUP) is a urine distillation system for lunar or planetary applications, taking advantage of local gravity for phase separation as well as the movement and storage of waste feeds and distillate. The PUP utilizes a stationary evaporator with an integrated disposable bag to process urine and capture remaining precipitates. This system aims to increase water reclamation percentage to greater than 96%, reduce resource requirements, and enhance reliability and maintainability due to lower system complexity over the existing water recovery system on the International Space Station (ISS). This paper focuses on the hardware development, testing efforts, and the associated urine pretreatment development work.

Water Recovery↗

Sample Processor for Life on Icy Worlds (SPLIce): Monolithic Manifold-Based System to Recover, Prepare, and Deliver Samples and Standards to Instrumentation Suites for Ocean World Life-Search Missions

A claim of life detection on one of the solar system’s icy ocean worlds would necessitate extraordinarily convincing evidence. Limited energy availability in the oceans of such bodies as Europa and Enceladus argues for microbes as most probable among possible life forms, but evidence of their existence in the surface layers of an icy moon or in a frozen plume ejected into space could take various forms, pointing to instrumentation suites as a preferred means to detect diverse molecular and morphological life indicators. Multiple disparate categories of positive detections could provide truly convincing evidence from samples that may be only a few micro-liters. SPLIce’s Foundation. Teams led by NASA’s Ames Research Center have developed and operated numerous small, live-biology and astrobiology science payloads in space over two decades. Since 2016, we have adapted and augmented their biological sample-handling systems to create compact, robust search-for-life fluidic processors designed to function after a decade or more in transit, in environments with very little gravity and lots of radiation: up to 100’s of kilorads.

Instrumentation suite↗

Processor Emulator with Benchmark Applications

A processor emulator and a suite of benchmark applications have been developed to assist in characterizing the performance of data-centric workloads on current and future computer architectures. Some of the applications have been collected from other open source projects. For more details on the emulator and an example of its usage, see reference [1].

Lloyd, G. Scott↗

Roofline Analysis in the Intel® Advisor to Deliver Optimized Performance for applications on Intel® Xeon Phi™ Processor

In this session we show, in two case studies, how the roofline feature of Intel Advisor has been utilized to optimize the performance of kernels of the XGC1 and PICSAR codes in preparation for Intel Knights Landing architecture. The impact of the implemented optimizations and the benefits of using the automatic roofline feature of Intel Advisor to study performance of large applications will be presented. This demonstrates an effective optimization strategy that has enabled these science applications to achieve up to 4.6 times speed-up and prepare for future exascale architectures. # Goal/Relevance of Session The roofline model [1,2] is a powerful tool for analyzing the performance of applications with respect to the theoretical peak achievable on a given computer architecture. It allows one to graphically represent the performance of an application in terms of operational intensity, i.e. the ratio of flops performed and bytes moved from memory in order to guide optimization efforts. Given the scale and complexity of modern science applications, it can often be a tedious task for the user to perform the analysis on the level of functions or loops to identify where performance gains can be made. With new Intel tools, it is now possible to automate this task, as well as base the estimates of peak performance on measurements rather than vendor specifications. The goal of this session is to demonstrate how the roofline feature of Intel Advisor can be used to balance memory vs. computation related optimization efforts and effectively identify performance bottlenecks. A series of typical optimization techniques: cache blocking, structure refactoring, data alignment, and vectorization illustrated by the kernel cases will be addressed. # Description of the codes ## XGC1 The XGC1 code [3] is a magnetic fusion Particle-In-Cell code that uses an unstructured mesh for its Poisson solver that allows it to accurately resolve the edge plasma of a magnetic fusion device. After recent optimizations to its collision kernel [4], most of the computing time is spent in the electron push (pushe) kernel, where these optimization efforts have been focused. The kernel code scaled well with MPI+OpenMP but had almost no automatic compiler vectorization, in part due to indirect memory addresses and in part due to low trip counts of low-level loops that would be candidates for vectorization. Particle blocking and sorting have been implemented to increase trip counts of low-level loops and improve memory locality, and OpenMP directives have been added to vectorize compute-intensive loops that were identified by Advisor. The optimizations have improved the performance of the pushe kernel 2x on Haswell processors and 1.7x on KNL. The KNL node-for-node performance has been brought to within 30% of a NERSC Cori phase I Haswell node and we expect to bridge this gap by reducing the memory footprint of compute intensive routines to improve cache reuse. ## PICSAR is a Fortran/Python high-performance Particle-In-Cell library targeting at MIC architectures first designed to be coupled with the PIC code WARP for the simulation of laser-matter interaction and particle accelerators. PICSAR also contains a FORTRAN stand-alone kernel for performance studies and benchmarks. A MPI domain decomposition is used between NUMA domains and a tile decomposition (cache-blocking) handled by OpenMP has been added for shared-memory parallelism and better cache management. The so-called current deposition and field gathering steps that compose the PIC time loop constitute major hotspots that have been rewritten to enable more efficient vectorization. Particle communications between tiles and MPI domain has been merged and parallelized. All considered, these improvements provide speedups of 3.1 for order 1 and 4.6 for order 3 interpolation shape factors on KNL configured in SNC4 quadrant flat mode. Performance is similar between a node of cori phase 1 and KNL at order 1 and better on KNL by a factor 1.6 at order 3 with the considered test case (homogeneous thermal plasma).

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Processor-in-memory-and-storage architecture

A method and apparatus for performing reliable general-purpose computing. Each sub-core of a plurality of sub-cores of a processor core processes a same instruction at a same time. A code analyzer receives a plurality of residues that represents a code word corresponding to the same instruction and an indication of whether the code word is a memory address code or a data code from the plurality of sub-cores. The code analyzer determines whether the plurality of residues are consistent or inconsistent. The code analyzer and the plurality of sub-cores perform a set of operations based on whether the code word is a memory address code or a data code and a determination of whether the plurality of residues are consistent or inconsistent.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Spasers to speed up CMOS processors

A processor includes a transistor pair of a first transistor and a second transistor. The first transistor of the transistor pair is coupled to a Spaser and configured to output a drive current to the Spaser to pump the Spaser. Responsive to the drive current, the Spaser outputs surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) which are fed to a plasmonic interconnect wire. The plasmonic interconnect wire propagates the SPPs. Further, the SPPs propagated on the plasmonic interconnect wire are detected by a phototransistor. Responsive to detecting the SPPs, the phototransistor generates an output current that is fed to a gate terminal of the second transistor to charge the second transistor.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Processor power monitoring and control with dynamic load balancing

Apparatus and methods may provide for subscribing a thread to a resource monitor through a machine specific register and subscribing the thread to a class of service through the machine specific register. The resource monitor or the class of service for the thread may be changed without interrupting the thread. The power allocated to the processor core may be changed based on the selected class of service for the thread.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Arrangements for communicating data in a computing system using multiple processors

Data employed in computations amongst multiple processors in a computing system is processed so that less bits than a full representation of the data needs to be communicated yet all of the relevant information is communicated. More specifically, a sensitivity value is determined for various items of the data which reflect the number of bits in the data items that are not garbage bits, and only information in the data items that are indicated by the sensitivity value to not be garbage bits are necessarily effectively retained. At least the information that is not garbage bits and the corresponding associated sensitivity are packed together. The results of computations that are performed using the data items as at least one of the operands for the computation are associated with a sensitivity that is derived from the individual sensitivities of the operands used in the computation.

Gonzalez, Juan Guillermo↗

Compressing micro-operations in scheduler entries in a processor

An electronic device includes a processor having a micro-operation queue, multiple scheduler entries, and scheduler compression logic. When a pair of micro-operations in the micro-operation queue is compressible in accordance with one or more compressibility rules, the scheduler compression logic acquires the pair of micro-operations from the micro-operation queue and stores information from both micro-operations of the pair of micro-operations into different portions in a single scheduler entry. In this way, the scheduler compression logic compresses the pair of micro-operations into the single scheduler entry.

Boyer, Michael W.↗