Machine Learning for Fluid Mechanics

The field of fluid mechanics is rapidly advancing, driven by unprecedented volumes of data from field measurements, experiments and large-scale simulations at multiple spatiotemporal scales. Machine learning offers a wealth of techniques to extract information from data that could be translated into knowledge about the underlying fluid mechanics. Moreover, machine learning algorithms can augment domain knowledge and automate tasks related to flow control and optimization. This article presents an overview of past history, current developments, and emerging opportunities of machine learning for fluid mechanics. It outlines fundamental machine learning methodologies and discusses their uses for understanding, modeling, optimizing, and controlling fluid flows. The strengths and limitations of these methods are addressed from the perspective of scientific inquiry that considers data as an inherent part of modeling, experimentation, and simulation. Machine learning provides a powerful information processing framework that can enrich, and possibly even transform, current lines of fluid mechanics research and industrial applications.Comment: To appear in the Annual Reviews of Fluid Mechanics, 202

In pursuit of high resolution radar using pursuit algorithms

Radar receivers typically employ matched filters designed to maximize signal to noise ratio (SNR) in a single target environment. In a multi-target environment, however, matched filter estimates of target environment often consist of spurious targets because of radar signal sidelobes. As a result, matched filters are not suitable for use in high resolution radars operating in multi-target environments. Assuming a point target model, we show that the radar problem can be formulated as a linear under-determined system with a sparse solution. This suggests that radar can be considered as a sparse signal recovery problem. However, it is shown that the sensing matrix obtained using common radar signals does not usually satisfy the mutual coherence condition. This implies that using recovery techniques available in compressed sensing literature may not result in the optimal solution. In this thesis, we focus on the greedy algorithm approach to solve the problem and show that it naturally yields a quantitative measure for radar resolution. In addition, we show that the limitations of the greedy algorithms can be attributed to the close relation between greedy matching pursuit algorithms and the matched filter. This suggests that improvements to the resolution capability of the greedy pursuit algorithms can be made by using a mismatched signal dictionary. In some cases, unlike the mismatched filter, the proposed mismatched pursuit algorithm is shown to offer improved resolution and stability without any noticeable difference in detection performance. Further improvements in resolution are proposed by using greedy algorithms in a radar system using multiple transmit waveforms. It is shown that while using the greedy algorithms together with linear channel combining can yield significant resolution improvement, a greedy approach using nonlinear channel combining also shows some promise. Finally, a forward-backward greedy algorithm is proposed for target environments comprising of point targets as well as extended targets

A Multi-GPU Programming Library for Real-Time Applications

We present MGPU, a C++ programming library targeted at single-node multi-GPU systems. Such systems combine disproportionate floating point performance with high data locality and are thus well suited to implement real-time algorithms. We describe the library design, programming interface and implementation details in light of this specific problem domain. The core concepts of this work are a novel kind of container abstraction and MPI-like communication methods for intra-system communication. We further demonstrate how MGPU is used as a framework for porting existing GPU libraries to multi-device architectures. Putting our library to the test, we accelerate an iterative non-linear image reconstruction algorithm for real-time magnetic resonance imaging using multiple GPUs. We achieve a speed-up of about 1.7 using 2 GPUs and reach a final speed-up of 2.1 with 4 GPUs. These promising results lead us to conclude that multi-GPU systems are a viable solution for real-time MRI reconstruction as well as signal-processing applications in general.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure