Anna Klein

The Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), conducted asteroid search from 1998 to 2013 using two 1m optical telescopes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory (MITLL) Experimental Test Site (ETS) in Socorro, NM. During this period, the LINEAR program made significant contributions to the discovery of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), thereby improving knowledge of the NEO size distribution and… Show more

The Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), conducted asteroid search from 1998 to 2013 using two 1m optical telescopes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory (MITLL) Experimental Test Site (ETS) in Socorro, NM. During this period, the LINEAR program made significant contributions to the discovery of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), thereby improving knowledge of the NEO size distribution and helping to characterize the threat from NEOs. The LINEAR program has now transitioned to operations using the new 3.5 m wide-field-of-view Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) located at the Atom Site on White Sands Missile Range, NM. The SST was developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) by MITLL to advance the nation's capabilities in space situational awareness. The goals of LINEAR using SST are to continue discovering NEOs, to improve knowledge of the NEO size distribution down to 140 m, and to discover small (2-15 m diameter) NEOs potentially suitable for a NASA asteroid retrieval mission. This paper will describe the capabilities of SST for asteroid search, the strategy for LINEAR search using SST, and the new LINEAR SST processing pipeline. Recent simulation, observing, and detection results will also be presented, along with planned improvements to the system. Show less

Recent projections suggest that applications and architectures will need to attain 75 GFLOPS/W in order to support future DoD missions. Meeting this goal requires deeper understanding of kernel and application performance as a function of power and architecture. As part of the PAKCK study, a set of DoD application areas, including signal and image processing and big data/graph computation, were surveyed to identify performance critical kernels relevant to DoD missions. From that survey, we… Show more

Recent projections suggest that applications and architectures will need to attain 75 GFLOPS/W in order to support future DoD missions. Meeting this goal requires deeper understanding of kernel and application performance as a function of power and architecture. As part of the PAKCK study, a set of DoD application areas, including signal and image processing and big data/graph computation, were surveyed to identify performance critical kernels relevant to DoD missions. From that survey, we present the characterization of dense matrix-vector product, two dimensional FFTs, and sparse matrix-dense vector multiplication on the NVIDIA Fermi and Intel Sandy Bridge architectures. We describe the methodology that was developed for characterizing power usage and performance on these architectures and present power usage and performance per Watt for all three kernels. Our results indicate that 75 GFLOPS/W is a very challenging target for these kernels, especially for the sparse kernels, whose performance was orders of magnitude lower than dense kernels. Show less

additional co-authors: Hendry, R.; Bergman, K.; Carloni, L.P.

Communication in multi- and many-core processors has long been a bottleneck to performance due to the high cost of long-distance electrical transmission. This difficulty has been partially remedied by architectural constructs such as caches and novel interconnect topologies, albeit at a steep cost in terms of complexity. Unfortunately, even these measures are rendered ineffective by certain kinds of communication, most… Show more

additional co-authors: Hendry, R.; Bergman, K.; Carloni, L.P.

Communication in multi- and many-core processors has long been a bottleneck to performance due to the high cost of long-distance electrical transmission. This difficulty has been partially remedied by architectural constructs such as caches and novel interconnect topologies, albeit at a steep cost in terms of complexity. Unfortunately, even these measures are rendered ineffective by certain kinds of communication, most notably scatter and gather operations that exhibit highly nonlocal data access patterns. Much work has gone into examining how the increased bandwidth density afforded by chip-scale silicon photonic interconnect technologies affects computing, but photonics have additional properties that can be leveraged to greatly accelerate performance and energy efficiency under such difficult loads. This paper describes a novel synchronized global photonic bus and system architecture called P-sync that uses photonics' distance independence to greatly improve performance on many important applications previously limited by electronic interconnect. The architecture is evaluated in the context of a non-local yet common application: the distributed Fast Fourier Transform. We show that it is possible to achieve high efficiency by tightly balancing computation and communication latency in P-sync and achieve upwards of a 6× performance increase on gather patterns, even when bandwidth is equalized. Show less