Design of testbed and emulation tools

The research summarized was concerned with the design of testbed and emulation tools suitable to assist in projecting, with reasonable accuracy, the expected performance of highly concurrent computing systems on large, complete applications. Such testbed and emulation tools are intended for the eventual use of those exploring new concurrent system architectures and organizations, either as users or as designers of such systems. While a range of alternatives was considered, a software based set of hierarchical tools was chosen to provide maximum flexibility, to ease in moving to new computers as technology improves and to take advantage of the inherent reliability and availability of commercially available computing systems

Fourth Annual Workshop on Space Operations Applications and Research (SOAR 90)

The papers from the symposium are presented. Emphasis is placed on human factors engineering and space environment interactions. The technical areas covered in the human factors section include: satellite monitoring and control, man-computer interfaces, expert systems, AI/robotics interfaces, crew system dynamics, and display devices. The space environment interactions section presents the following topics: space plasma interaction, spacecraft contamination, space debris, and atomic oxygen interaction with materials. Some of the above topics are discussed in relation to the space station and space shuttle

A Practical Hardware Implementation of Systemic Computation

It is widely accepted that natural computation, such as brain computation, is far superior to typical computational approaches addressing tasks such as learning and parallel processing. As conventional silicon-based technologies are about to reach their physical limits, researchers have drawn inspiration from nature to found new computational paradigms. Such a newly-conceived paradigm is Systemic Computation (SC). SC is a bio-inspired model of computation. It incorporates natural characteristics and defines a massively parallel non-von Neumann computer architecture that can model natural systems efficiently. This thesis investigates the viability and utility of a Systemic Computation hardware implementation, since prior software-based approaches have proved inadequate in terms of performance and flexibility. This is achieved by addressing three main research challenges regarding the level of support for the natural properties of SC, the design of its implied architecture and methods to make the implementation practical and efficient. Various hardware-based approaches to Natural Computation are reviewed and their compatibility and suitability, with respect to the SC paradigm, is investigated. FPGAs are identified as the most appropriate implementation platform through critical evaluation and the first prototype Hardware Architecture of Systemic computation (HAoS) is presented. HAoS is a novel custom digital design, which takes advantage of the inbuilt parallelism of an FPGA and the highly efficient matching capability of a Ternary Content Addressable Memory. It provides basic processing capabilities in order to minimize time-demanding data transfers, while the optional use of a CPU provides high-level processing support. It is optimized and extended to a practical hardware platform accompanied by a software framework to provide an efficient SC programming solution. The suggested platform is evaluated using three bio-inspired models and analysis shows that it satisfies the research challenges and provides an effective solution in terms of efficiency versus flexibility trade-off

Aeronautical engineering: A cumulative index to a continuing bibliography

This bibliography is a cumulative index to the abstracts contained in NASA SP-7037 (197) through NASA SP-7037 (208) of Aeronautical Engineering: A Continuing Bibliography. NASA SP-7037 and its supplements have been compiled through the cooperative efforts of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This cumulative index includes subject, personal author, corporate source, foreign technology, contract, report number, and accession number indexes