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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 145 records · Page 8

An object-oriented approach to nested data parallelism

This paper describes an implementation technique for integrating nested data parallelism into an object-oriented language. Data-parallel programming employs sets of data called 'collections' and expresses parallelism as operations performed over the elements of a collection. When the elements of a collection are also collections, then there is the possibility for 'nested data parallelism.' Few current programming languages support nested data parallelism however. In an object-oriented framework, a collection is a single object. Its type defines the parallel operations that may be applied to it. Our goal is to design and build an object-oriented data-parallel programming environment supporting nested data parallelism. Our initial approach is built upon three fundamental additions to C++. We add new parallel base types by implementing them as classes, and add a new parallel collection type called a 'vector' that is implemented as a template. Only one new language feature is introduced: the 'foreach' construct, which is the basis for exploiting elementwise parallelism over collections. The strength of the method lies in the compilation strategy, which translates nested data-parallel C++ into ordinary C++. Extracting the potential parallelism in nested 'foreach' constructs is called 'flattening' nested parallelism. We show how to flatten 'foreach' constructs using a simple program transformation. Our prototype system produces vector code which has been successfully run on workstations, a CM-2, and a CM-5.

Sheffler, Thomas J.↗

Transforming AdaPT to Ada9x

How the concepts of AdaPT can be transformed into programs using the object oriented features proposed in the preliminary mapping for Ada9x are described. Emphasizing, as they do, the importance of data types as units of program, these features match well with the development of partitions as translations into Abstract Data Types which was exploited in the Ada83 translation covered in report R3. By providing a form of polymorphic type, the Ada83 version also gives support for the conformant partition idea which could be achieved in Ada83 only by using UNCHECKED CONVERSIONS. It is assumed that the reader understands AdaPT itself, but the translation into Ada83 is briefly reviewed, by applying it to a small example. This is then used to show how the same translation would be achieved in the 9x version. It is important to appreciate that the distribution features which are proposed in current mapping are not used or discussed in any detail, as those are not well matched to the AdaPT approach. Critical evaluation and comparison of these approaches is given in a separate report.

Goldsack, Stephen J.↗

TraceContract

TraceContract is an API (Application Programming Interface) for trace analysis. A trace is a sequence of events, and can, for example, be generated by a running program, instrumented appropriately to generate events. An event can be any data object. An example of a trace is a log file containing events that a programmer has found important to record during a program execution. Trace - Contract takes as input such a trace together with a specification formulated using the API and reports on any violations of the specification, potentially calling code (reactions) to be executed when violations are detected. The software is developed as an internal DSL (Domain Specific Language) in the Scala programming language. Scala is a relatively new programming language that is specifically convenient for defining such internal DSLs due to a number of language characteristics. This includes Scala s elegant combination of object-oriented and functional programming, a succinct notation, and an advanced type system. The DSL offers a combination of data-parameterized state machines and temporal logic, which is novel. As an extension of Scala, it is a very expressive and convenient log file analysis framework.

Kavelund, Klaus↗

Space languages: Solving the classic scheduling problem in Ada and Lisp

The comparison of programming languages is best seen while evaluating similar systems. The strengths and weaknesses of both languages were investigated as the scheduler was being implemented. Some features used in both languages shall be object-oriented paradigms, parallel programming, search and production heuristics, and other classical artificial intelligence implementations.

Davis, Stephen↗

TraceContract: A Scala DSL for Trace Analysis

In this paper we describe TRACECONTRACT, an API for trace analysis, implemented in the SCALA programming language. We argue that for certain forms of trace analysis the best weapon is a high level programming language augmented with constructs for temporal reasoning. A trace is a sequence of events, which may for example be generated by a running program, instrumented appropriately to generate events. The API supports writing properties in a notation that combines an advanced form of data parameterized state machines with temporal logic. The implementation utilizes SCALA's support for defining internal Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Furthermore SCALA's combination of object oriented and functional programming features, including partial functions and pattern matching, makes it an ideal host language for such an API.

log file analysis↗

Performance Analysis of an Actor-Based Distributed Simulation

Object-oriented design of simulation programs appears to be very attractive because of the natural association of components in the simulated system with objects. There is great potential in distributing the simulation across several computers for the purpose of parallel computation and its consequent handling of larger problems in less elapsed time. One approach to such a design is to use "actors", that is, active objects with their own thread of control. Because these objects execute concurrently, communication is via messages. This is in contrast to an object-oriented design using passive objects where communication between objects is via method calls (direct calls when they are in the same address space and remote procedure calls when they are in different address spaces or different machines). This paper describes a performance analysis program for the evaluation of a design for distributed simulations based upon actors.

Schoeffler, James D.↗

Fiats: Functional inference and training for surrogates

Fiats provides a platform for research on the training and deployment of neural-network surrogate models for computational science. Fiats also supports exploring, advancing, and combining functional, object-oriented, and parallel programming patterns in Fortran 2023. As such, the Fiats name has dual expansions: “Functional Inference And Training for Surrogates” or “Fortran Inference And Training for Science.” Fiats inference and training procedures are pure and therefore satisfy a language constraint imposed on procedure invocations inside Fortran’s parallel loop construct: do concurrent. Furthermore, the Fiats training procedures are built around a do concurrent parallel reduction. Several compilers can automatically parallelize do concurrent on Central Processing Units (CPUs) or Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Fiats thus aims to achieve performance portability through standard language mechanisms.

Rouson, Damian [Lawrence Berkeley National Laborat↗

Object-oriented productivity metrics

Software productivity metrics are useful for sizing and costing proposed software and for measuring development productivity. Estimating and measuring source lines of code (SLOC) has proven to be a bad idea because it encourages writing more lines of code and using lower level languages. Function Point Analysis is an improved software metric system, but it is not compatible with newer rapid prototyping and object-oriented approaches to software development. A process is presented here for counting object-oriented effort points, based on a preliminary object-oriented analysis. It is proposed that this approach is compatible with object-oriented analysis, design, programming, and rapid prototyping. Statistics gathered on actual projects are presented to validate the approach.

Connell, John L.↗

Knowledge-based processing for aircraft flight control

This Contractor Report documents research in Intelligent Control using knowledge-based processing in a manner dual to methods found in the classic stochastic decision, estimation, and control discipline. Such knowledge-based control has also been called Declarative, and Hybid. Software architectures were sought, employing the parallelism inherent in modern object-oriented modeling and programming. The viewpoint adopted was that Intelligent Control employs a class of domain-specific software architectures having features common over a broad variety of implementations, such as management of aircraft flight, power distribution, etc. As much attention was paid to software engineering issues as to artificial intelligence and control issues. This research considered that particular processing methods from the stochastic and knowledge-based worlds are duals, that is, similar in a broad context. They provide architectural design concepts which serve as bridges between the disparate disciplines of decision, estimation, control, and artificial intelligence. This research was applied to the control of a subsonic transport aircraft in the airport terminal area.

Painter, John H.↗

Atic Experiment: Flight Data Processing

The Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) is a balloon borne experiment to measure the composition and energy spectra of Z = 1 to 28 cosmic rays over the energy range approx. 30 GeV - 100 TeV. The instrument consists of a fully active 320-crystal Bismuth Germanate (BGO) calorimeter, 202 scintillator strips in 3 hodoscopes interleaved with a graphite target, and a 4480-pixel silicon matrix charge detector. ATIC has had two successful Long Duration Balloon flights from McMurdo, Antarctica: from 12/28/00 to 01/13/01 and from 12/29/02 to 01/18/03. We have developed the ATIC Data Processing System (ADPs), which is an Object Oriented data processing program based on ROOT. In this paper, we describe the processing scheme used in handling the flight data, especially the calibration method and the event reconstruction algorithm.

Ahn, H. S.↗

Demonstration and Verification of Thermo-Mechanical Bowing in a Limited Free-Bow SFR Concept Using MOOSE

Core bowing due to thermal gradients and irradiation induced swelling and creep introduces significant reactivity feedback effects in liquid metal-cooled fast spectrum reactors. During startup, normal operations, and transient events, differential thermal and flux gradients cause expansion, creep, and swelling, which results in bowing in preferential directions depending on local material properties and load-pad and restraint-ring design. The bowing phenomenon produces negative reactivity during accident conditions provided the restraint system has been properly designed to optimally guide the deformation outwards in the active core region. Under the Department of Energy Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program, a Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE)-based multiphysics approach to model core bowing is being developed. The present work expands on previous modeling of simpler International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verification problems with these tools by modeling IAEA Verification Problem 4, which involves a symmetric sector of a reactor core with ducted assemblies undergoing differential thermal expansion due to thermal gradients bowing outward with duct-to-duct contact. This model is available on the National Reactor Innovation Center Virtual Test Bed repository. This example was verified against benchmark participant results, which includes bowing deformation evaluation and duct-to-duct interactions at load pads with mechanical contact.

22 - GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

General object-oriented software development

Object-oriented design techniques are gaining increasing popularity for use with the Ada programming language. A general approach to object-oriented design which synthesizes the principles of previous object-oriented methods into the overall software life-cycle, providing transitions from specification to design and from design to code. It therefore provides the basis for a general object-oriented development methodology.

Seidewitz, Edwin V.↗

Automatically parallelizing batch inference on deep neural networks using Fiats and Fortran 2023 `do concurrent`

This paper introduces novel programming strategies that leverage features of the Fortran 2023 standard of the International Standards Organization (ISO) to automatically parallelize computations on deep neural networks. The paper focuses on the interplay of object-oriented, parallel, and functional programming paradigms in the Fiats deep learning library. We demonstrate how several infrequently used language features play a role in enabling efficient, parallel execution. Specifically, the ability to explicitly declare that a procedure is pure facilitates inference in the context of the language’s loop-parallelism construct `do concurrent`. Also, explicitly prohibiting the overriding of a parent type’s type-bound procedures eliminates the need for dynamic dispatch in performance-critical code. Finally, this paper uses batch inference calculations on a neural network surrogate for atmospheric aerosol dynamics to demonstrate that LLVM Flang compiler’s automatic parallelization of `do concurrent` achieves roughly the same performance and scalability as achieved by OpenMP compiler directives. We also demonstrate that double-precision inference costs 37–72% longer runtime than default-real precision with most values in the range 57-60%.

Rouson, Damian↗

Highly parallel structured adaptive mesh refinement using parallel language-based approaches

Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) calculations carried out on structured meshes play an exceedingly important role in several areas of science and engineering. A strategy for using Fortran 90 in an object-oriented fashion is presented. This permits AMR applications to be expressed in terms of familiar abstractions that are natural to the process of solving AMR hierarchies. The OpenMP features that are useful for parallel processing of AMR hierarchies in a load balanced fashion on multiprocessors is described.

computational↗

Object-Oriented/Data-Oriented Design of a Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Algorithm

Over the past decade, there has been much progress towards improved phenomenological modeling and algorithmic updates for the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method, which provides a probabilistic physical simulation of gas Rows. These improvements have largely been based on the work of the originator of the DSMC method, Graeme Bird. Of primary importance are improved chemistry, internal energy, and physics modeling and a reduction in time to solution. These allow for an expanded range of possible solutions In altitude and velocity space. NASA's current production code, the DSMC Analysis Code (DAC), is well-established and based on Bird's 1994 algorithms written in Fortran 77 and has proven difficult to upgrade. A new DSMC code is being developed in the C++ programming language using object-oriented and data-oriented design paradigms to facilitate the inclusion of the recent improvements and future development activities. The development efforts on the new code, the Multiphysics Algorithm with Particles (MAP), are described, and performance comparisons are made with DAC.

Liechty, Derek S.↗

Simplifying the construction of domain-specific automatic programming systems: The NASA automated software development workstation project

An overview is presented of the Automated Software Development Workstation Project, an effort to explore knowledge-based approaches to increasing software productivity. The project focuses on applying the concept of domain specific automatic programming systems (D-SAPSs) to application domains at NASA's Johnson Space Center. A version of a D-SAPS developed in Phase 1 of the project for the domain of space station momentum management is described. How problems encountered during its implementation led researchers to concentrate on simplifying the process of building and extending such systems is discussed. Researchers propose to do this by attacking three observed bottlenecks in the D-SAPS development process through the increased automation of the acquisition of programming knowledge and the use of an object oriented development methodology at all stages of the program design. How these ideas are being implemented in the Bauhaus, a prototype workstation for D-SAPS development is discussed.

Allen, Bradley P.↗

Simplifying the construction of domain-specific automatic programming systems: The NASA automated software development workstation project

An overview is presented of the Automated Software Development Workstation Project, an effort to explore knowledge-based approaches to increasing software productivity. The project focuses on applying the concept of domain specific automatic programming systems (D-SAPSs) to application domains at NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center. A version of a D-SAPS developed in Phase 1 of the project for the domain of space station momentum management is described. How problems encountered during its implementation led researchers to concentrate on simplifying the process of building and extending such systems is discussed. Researchers propose to do this by attacking three observed bottlenecks in the D-SAPS development process through the increased automation of the acquisition of programming knowledge and the use of an object oriented development methodology at all stages of the program design. How these ideas are being implemented in the Bauhaus, a prototype workstation for D-SAPS development is discussed.

Allen, Bradley P.↗

The Implementation of Satellite Control System Software Using Object Oriented Design

NASA established the Small Explorer (SMEX) program in 1988 to provide frequent opportunities for highly focused and relatively inexpensive space science missions that can be launched into low earth orbit by small expendable vehicles. The development schedule for each SMEX spacecraft was three years from start to launch. The SMEX program has produced five satellites; Solar Anomalous and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer (SAMPEX), Fast Auroral Snapshot Explorer (FAST), Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS), Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) and Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WIRE). SAMPEX and FAST are on-orbit, TRACE is scheduled to be launched in April of 1998, WIRE is scheduled to be launched in September of 1998, and SWAS is scheduled to be launched in January of 1999. In each of these missions, the Attitude Control System (ACS) software was written using a modular procedural design. Current program goals require complete spacecraft development within 18 months. This requirement has increased pressure to write reusable flight software. Object-Oriented Design (OOD) offers the constructs for developing an application that only needs modification for mission unique requirements. This paper describes the OOD that was used to develop the SMEX-Lite ACS software. The SMEX-Lite ACS is three-axis controlled, momentum stabilized, and is capable of performing sub-arc-minute pointing. The paper first describes the high level requirements which governed the architecture of the SMEX-Lite ACS software. Next, the context in which the software resides is explained. The paper describes the benefits of encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism with respect to the implementation of an ACS software system. This paper will discuss the design of several software components that comprise the ACS software. Specifically, Object-Oriented designs are presented for sensor data processing, attitude control, attitude determination and failure detection. The paper addresses the benefits of the OOD versus a conventional procedural design. The final discussion in this paper will address the establishment of the ACS Foundation Class (AFC) Library. The AFC is a large software repository, requiring a minimal amount of code modifications to produce ACS software for future projects, saving production time and costs.

Anderson, Mark O.↗