15,412 research outputs found
Parallel Architectures for Planetary Exploration Requirements (PAPER)
The Parallel Architectures for Planetary Exploration Requirements (PAPER) project is essentially research oriented towards technology insertion issues for NASA's unmanned planetary probes. It was initiated to complement and augment the long-term efforts for space exploration with particular reference to NASA/LaRC's (NASA Langley Research Center) research needs for planetary exploration missions of the mid and late 1990s. The requirements for space missions as given in the somewhat dated Advanced Information Processing Systems (AIPS) requirements document are contrasted with the new requirements from JPL/Caltech involving sensor data capture and scene analysis. It is shown that more stringent requirements have arisen as a result of technological advancements. Two possible architectures, the AIPS Proof of Concept (POC) configuration and the MAX Fault-tolerant dataflow multiprocessor, were evaluated. The main observation was that the AIPS design is biased towards fault tolerance and may not be an ideal architecture for planetary and deep space probes due to high cost and complexity. The MAX concepts appears to be a promising candidate, except that more detailed information is required. The feasibility for adding neural computation capability to this architecture needs to be studied. Key impact issues for architectural design of computing systems meant for planetary missions were also identified
Optimal expression evaluation for data parallel architectures
A data parallel machine represents an array or other composite data structure by allocating one processor (at least conceptually) per data item. A pointwise operation can be performed between two such arrays in unit time, provided their corresponding elements are allocated in the same processors. If the arrays are not aligned in this fashion, the cost of moving one or both of them is part of the cost of the operation. The choice of where to perform the operation then affects this cost. If an expression with several operands is to be evaluated, there may be many choices of where to perform the intermediate operations. An efficient algorithm is given to find the minimum-cost way to evaluate an expression, for several different data parallel architectures. This algorithm applies to any architecture in which the metric describing the cost of moving an array is robust. This encompasses most of the common data parallel communication architectures, including meshes of arbitrary dimension and hypercubes. Remarks are made on several variations of the problem, some of which are solved and some of which remain open
Distributed Binary Detection over Fading Channels: Cooperative and Parallel Architectures
This paper considers the problem of binary distributed detection of a known
signal in correlated Gaussian sensing noise in a wireless sensor network, where
the sensors are restricted to use likelihood ratio test (LRT), and communicate
with the fusion center (FC) over bandwidth-constrained channels that are
subject to fading and noise. To mitigate the deteriorating effect of fading
encountered in the conventional parallel fusion architecture, in which the
sensors directly communicate with the FC, we propose new fusion architectures
that enhance the detection performance, via harvesting cooperative gain
(so-called decision diversity gain). In particular, we propose: (i) cooperative
fusion architecture with Alamouti's space-time coding (STC) scheme at sensors,
(ii) cooperative fusion architecture with signal fusion at sensors, and (iii)
parallel fusion architecture with local threshold changing at sensors. For
these schemes, we derive the LRT and majority fusion rules at the FC, and
provide upper bounds on the average error probabilities for homogeneous
sensors, subject to uncorrelated Gaussian sensing noise, in terms of
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of communication and sensing channels. Our
simulation results indicate that, when the FC employs the LRT rule, unless for
low communication SNR and moderate/high sensing SNR, performance improvement is
feasible with the new fusion architectures. When the FC utilizes the majority
rule, such improvement is possible, unless for high sensing SNR
A biconjugate gradient type algorithm on massively parallel architectures
The biconjugate gradient (BCG) method is the natural generalization of the classical conjugate gradient algorithm for Hermitian positive definite matrices to general non-Hermitian linear systems. Unfortunately, the original BCG algorithm is susceptible to possible breakdowns and numerical instabilities. Recently, Freund and Nachtigal have proposed a novel BCG type approach, the quasi-minimal residual method (QMR), which overcomes the problems of BCG. Here, an implementation is presented of QMR based on an s-step version of the nonsymmetric look-ahead Lanczos algorithm. The main feature of the s-step Lanczos algorithm is that, in general, all inner products, except for one, can be computed in parallel at the end of each block; this is unlike the other standard Lanczos process where inner products are generated sequentially. The resulting implementation of QMR is particularly attractive on massively parallel SIMD architectures, such as the Connection Machine
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