Award Data

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Ship groundings can cause sever environmental damage to the delicate ecosystems such as coral reefs, seagrass beds, and beaches. At present, survey work is performed by hand – a method that is inefficient and difficult to perform reliably. Improved bottom survey tools are clearly needed to evaluate the extent and type of damage and assist in determining remediation efforts. ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: NOAA and the National Weather Service maintain an immense network of automated maritime, surface, and upper-air observing stations throughout the world and at great expense. These automated stations provide regularly updated data for both short-term weather prediction and long-term climate models. Maritime and surface observations occur as frequently as every 10 to 20 minutes, ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Creare proposes to develop a self-sustained small-scale power conversion system to power NOAA’s weather monitoring network stations located in harsh uninhabited locations. Our miniature heat engine will take advantage of the existing year-round thermal gradients found between water and air in Arctic regions. Our baseline approach is the development of a compact Turbo-Rankine ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Animal-borne electronic instruments (tags) are critical tools for monitoring the behavior and ecology of cetaceans, providing data needed for managing their populations and mitigating the threats they face. Although remote-deployment of tags onto cetaceans that cannot be captured has provided valuable data, attachment durations have been frustratingly short and variable. Our Ph ...

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a promising manufacturing technique for end-use parts that can solve challenges for American manufacturers in many industries, e.g. aerospace, defense, automotive, energy, and healthcare. However, despite the potential that AM offers, the rate of AM adoption in industry is very slow. This is because AM suffers from low repeatability and quality consistency issues, wh ...

Next-generation high-performance computing (HPC) hardware, such as the Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing Many-Integrated-Core processor, provide new deep memory architectures that offer the promise of increased performance. The challenge in taking full advantage of this architecture is selecting which data structures will be placed in the high-bandwidth memory. Optimizing data structure placement in ...

Infrasound and seismic measurements are used by DTRA and the DoD for nuclear test monitoring, terrorist blast forensics, battle damage assessment, and environmental monitoring. However, these long wavelength physical signals are typically recorded through single-point sensors or sparse low density arrays. As a result, the critical signals of interest are often corrupted or masked by noise or inter ...

A significant performance gap exists between the theoretical number of Floating Point Operations (FLOPS) that a HPC machine is capable of sustaining and the number of FLOPS realized by real-world HPC applications. One of the principle reasons for this gap is the parasitic work that computational processes must do to communicate with one another. It has been shown that this communication work can b ...

ABSTRACT: Autonomous vehicles lack a standardized mechanism for seamless cross-platform sharing of testing frameworks and evaluations of basic tasks. The ability to execute common tests on various hardware platforms is essential in order to be able to e

ABSTRACT: The PNTS team has team has defined a schema using an active metamaterial exhibiting an externally driven electromagnetic response driven by the sensing of external radiation effects. The novel, groundbreaking concept, employs a semiconductor slab hosting BENEFITS: The team feels that its novel capabilities, with the potential for low cost for manufacturing and implementation, in the mos ...