Policy and Practice Brief: State and Federal Vocational Rehabilitation Programs

This brief provides an introduction to the state and federal vocational rehabilitation system outlined in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It provides a review of how the vocational rehabilitation system is integrated within the broader Workforce Investment Act along with a break down for eligibility and available services. Discussed is financial need criteria, statutory requirements for maximization of employment, comparable services requirements and individual rights and appeals

Interim Service ISDN Satellite (ISIS) network model for advanced satellite designs and experiments

The Interim Service Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) Satellite (ISIS) Network Model for Advanced Satellite Designs and Experiments describes a model suitable for discrete event simulations. A top-down model design uses the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS) as its basis. The ISDN modeling abstractions are added to permit the determination and performance for the NASA Satellite Communications Research (SCAR) Program

Effect of damper on overall and blade-element performance of a compressor rotor having a tip speed of 1151 feet per second and an aspect ratio of 3.6

The overall and blade-element performance of two configurations of a moderately high aspect ratio transonic compressor rotor are presented. The subject rotor has conventional blade dampers. The performance is compared with a rotor utilizing dual wire friction dampers. At design speed the subject achieved a pressure ratio of 1.52 and efficiency of 0.89 at a near design weight flow of 72.1 pounds per second. The rotor with wire dampers gave consistently higher pressure ratios at each speed, but efficiencies for the two rotors were about the same. Stall margin for the subject rotor was 20.4 percent, but for the wire damped rotor only 4.0 percent

Traffic model for advanced satellite designs and experiments for ISDN services

The data base structure and fields for categorizing and storing Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) user characteristics is outlined. This traffic model data base will be used to exercise models of the ISDN Advanced Communication Satellite to determine design parameters and performance for the NASA Satellite Communications Applications Research (SCAR) Program

Performance interface document for users of Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) electromechanically steered antenna systems (EMSAS)

Satellites that use the NASA Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) require antennas that are crucial for performing and achieving reliable TDRSS link performance at the desired data rate. Technical guidelines are presented to assist the prospective TDRSS medium-and high-data rate user in selecting and procuring a viable, steerable high-gain antenna system. Topics addressed include the antenna gain/transmitter power/data rate relationship; Earth power flux-density limitations; electromechanical requirements dictated by the small beam widths, desired angular coverage, and minimal torque disturbance to the spacecraft; weight and moment considerations; mechanical, electrical and thermal interfaces; design lifetime failure modes; and handling and storage. Proven designs are cited and space-qualified assemblies and components are identified

Performance of a 1380-foot-per-second-tip-speed axial-flow compressor rotor with a blade tip solidity of 1.3

Aerodynamic design parameters are presented along the overall and blade element performance, of an axial flow compressor rotor designed to study the effects of blade solidity on efficiency and stall margin. At design speed the peak efficiency was 0.844 and occurred at an equivalent weight flow of 63.5 lb/sec with a total pressure ratio of 1.801. Design efficiency, pressure ratio, and weight flow 0.814, 1.65, and 65.3(41.1 lb/sec/sq ft of annulus area), respectively. Stall margin for design speed was 6.4 percent based on the weight flow and pressure ratio values at peak efficiency and just prior to stall

Hybrid-parallel sparse matrix-vector multiplication with explicit communication overlap on current multicore-based systems

We evaluate optimized parallel sparse matrix-vector operations for several representative application areas on widespread multicore-based cluster configurations. First the single-socket baseline performance is analyzed and modeled with respect to basic architectural properties of standard multicore chips. Beyond the single node, the performance of parallel sparse matrix-vector operations is often limited by communication overhead. Starting from the observation that nonblocking MPI is not able to hide communication cost using standard MPI implementations, we demonstrate that explicit overlap of communication and computation can be achieved by using a dedicated communication thread, which may run on a virtual core. Moreover we identify performance benefits of hybrid MPI/OpenMP programming due to improved load balancing even without explicit communication overlap. We compare performance results for pure MPI, the widely used "vector-like" hybrid programming strategies, and explicit overlap on a modern multicore-based cluster and a Cray XE6 system.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication on GPGPU clusters: A new storage format and a scalable implementation

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (spMVM) is the dominant operation in many sparse solvers. We investigate performance properties of spMVM with matrices of various sparsity patterns on the nVidia "Fermi" class of GPGPUs. A new "padded jagged diagonals storage" (pJDS) format is proposed which may substantially reduce the memory overhead intrinsic to the widespread ELLPACK-R scheme. In our test scenarios the pJDS format cuts the overall spMVM memory footprint on the GPGPU by up to 70%, and achieves 95% to 130% of the ELLPACK-R performance. Using a suitable performance model we identify performance bottlenecks on the node level that invalidate some types of matrix structures for efficient multi-GPGPU parallelization. For appropriate sparsity patterns we extend previous work on distributed-memory parallel spMVM to demonstrate a scalable hybrid MPI-GPGPU code, achieving efficient overlap of communication and computation.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Added reference to other recent sparse matrix format

Radial propagation of geodesic acoustic modes

The GAM group velocity is estimated from the ratio of the radial free energy flux to the total free energy applying gyrokinetic and two-fluid theory. This method is much more robust than approaches that calculate the group velocity directly and can be generalized to include additional physics, e.g. magnetic geometry. The results are verified with the gyrokinetic code GYRO [J. Candy and R. E. Waltz, J. Comp. Phys. 186, pp. 545-581 (2003)], the two-fluid code NLET [K. Hallatschek and A. Zeiler, Physics of Plasmas 7, pp. 2554-2564 (2000)], and analytical calculations. GAM propagation must be kept in mind when discussing the windows of GAM activity observed experimentally and the match between linear theory and experimental GAM frequencies.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. This article has been published in Physics of Plasmas 5, 072503 (2009). It can be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?PHPAEN/16/072503/