A highly efficient novel azimuthal heliotrope

A new type of a single-axis azimuthal tracker is presented. The novel feature of this tracker is the ability to move the collector’s plane in two directions through a special support structure. This structure consists of a sliding mechanism on the central axis and a curved window on the cylindrical surface coaxial to the central axis. Consequently, the proposed novel heliotrope behaves similarly to a two-axis tracker. Two different windows designed on the cylindrical surface may be used to provide very high efficiencies throughout a year. Several performance measurements have been conducted on this novel tracker, a polar tracker and the reference two-axis tracker. Pyranometers, appropriately calibrated, were installed on all three systems to record the global incoming irradiance on the collector’s plane. It is shown that the new tracker system can be very efficient since its plane intercepts, at least, 98% of the insolation with respect to a two-axis tracker. The proposed system can be utilized in solar-related applications (photovoltaic or thermal).     

星上多载波解调技术研究

新一代具有星上处理的卫星将急剧降低地球站的复杂度,星上多载波解调(MCD)技术就是在星上分离出各个信道然后再独立解调。研究了星上多路信号即FDMA/QPSK信号的多载波技术,这是一种重要的星上处理技术,它包括频分多路信号的FFT分路算法、频偏估计、多路QPSK信号的全数字化解调算法和解调算法中的位定时恢复方法等。对主要的关键技术进行了计算机仿真。     

Hardware system of the Earth Simulator

The Earth Simulator (ES), developed under the Japanese government’s initiative “Earth Simulator project”, is a highly parallel vector supercomputer system. In this paper, an overview of ES, its architectural features, hardware technology and the result of performance evaluation are described.

In May 2002, the ES was acknowledged to be the most powerful computer in the world: 35.86 teraflop/s for the LINPACK HPC benchmark and 26.58 teraflop/s for an atmospheric general circulation code (AFES). Such a remarkable performance may be attributed to the following three architectural features; vector processor, shared-memory and high-bandwidth non-blocking interconnection crossbar network.

The ES consists of 640 processor nodes (PN) and an interconnection network (IN), which are housed in 320 PN cabinets and 65 IN cabinets. The ES is installed in a specially designed building, 65 m long, 50 m wide and 17 m high. In order to accomplish this advanced system, many kinds of hardware technologies have been developed, such as a high-density and high-frequency LSI, a high-frequency signal transmission, a high-density packaging, and a high-efficiency cooling and power supply system with low noise so as to reduce whole volume of the ES and total power consumption.

For highly parallel processing, a special synchronization means connecting all nodes, Global Barrier Counter (GBC), has been introduced.     

An immune oriented multi-agent system for biological image processing

In this article, we present a parallel image processing system based on the concept of reactive agents. Our system lies in the oRis language, which allows to describe finely and simply the agents’ behaviors to detect image features. We also present a method of segmentation using a multi-agent system, and two biological applications made with oRis. The stopping of this multi-agent system is implemented through a technique issued from immunology: the apoptosis.     

一种基于FPGA的图像中值滤波器的硬件实现

随着超大规模集成电路 (VLSI)技术的不断发展 ,图像的并行处理技术也得到飞速发展。现场可编程门阵列 (FPGA)是在专用集成电路 (ASIC)的基础上发展起来的一种可动态编程的器件 ,与其他中小规模集成电路相比 ,其优点主要在于它有很强的灵活性 ,即其内部的具体逻辑功能可以根据需要配置 ,对电路的修改和维护很方便 ,设计周期短 ,可重构 ,扩展性好等 ,特别适用于流水线方式的数据处理。文中以XILINX公司的XVC30 0 5BG35 2型FPGA芯片为平台构建图像中值滤波实时处理模块 ,并成功地实现了对一帧 1 2 8× 1 2 8× 8像素的灰度图像的滤波处理。     

小波提升算法及其在图像处理中的应用

小波提升算法是一种新的双正交小波构造方法，通过预测算子，确定高频信息，并初步确定低频信息，然后通过更新算子，对初步确定的低频信息进行修正，从而确定低频信息。它在空域对信号进行变换，完成了对信号频域的分析。在图像处理中，基于离散小波变换的提升算法比传统的卷积算法运算简单，实时性好，易于实现，因而被新一代图像压缩标准JPEG2000所采用。文中简要介绍了小波提升算法的原理，分析了其特点，并介绍了JPEG2000标准中采用的W5／3、D9／7两种小波的提升格式和实现算法。     

通信瓶颈下的实时并行任务分配研究

提出了实时并行任务粒度划分的具体设计方法，采用了系统内通信迟延最小的约束条件进行多处理器上的任务分配，解决了高速实时信号处理中的数据通信瓶颈问题。在自行设计的超立方体结构的通用信号处理机上，实现了空时二维自适应信号处理和SAR实时成像，显著减小了数据通信迟延，提高了并行效率和性价比。     

Plasma spraying of nanostructured partially yttria stabilized zirconia powders

Nanosized partially yttria stabilized zirconia particles, prepared using a co-precipitation method, were reprocessed into agglomerate powders using two methods for plasma spraying. The first method was to make micrometer-sized agglomerates directly following the grinding of the calcined yttria–zirconia agglomerates. The second method was to reconstitute the nanosized particles into micrometer agglomerates using spray drying. The deposition efficiency, porosity, microhardness and average grain size of the deposits made from these two reprocessed powders were studied. Distinct results related to the process parameters were obtained for the two types of powders. The second type of powder was more suitable for plasma spraying than the first one. Using the second type of powder, some unique results distinguished from those of the conventional partially yttria stabilized zirconia powders were observed and an optimized coating with a porosity of 3.8%, Hv_0.3 of 953 and mainly consisting of 1–3 μm columnar grains in the columnar direction and smaller than 100 nm in their cross-sections was achieved.     

Exploring spatial datasets with histograms

As online spatial datasets grow both in number and sophistication, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to decide whether a dataset is suitable for their tasks, especially when they do not have prior knowledge of the dataset. In this paper, we propose browsing as an effective and efficient way to explore the content of a spatial dataset. Browsing allows users to view the size of a result set before evaluating the query at the database, thereby avoiding zero-hit/mega-hit queries and saving time and resources. Although the underlying technique supporting browsing is similar to range query aggregation and selectivity estimation, spatial dataset browsing poses some unique challenges. In this paper, we identify a set of spatial relations that need to be supported in browsing applications, namely, the contains, contained and the overlap relations. We prove a lower bound on the storage required to answer queries about the contains relation accurately at a given resolution. We then present three storage-efficient approximation algorithms which we believe to be the first to estimate query results about these spatial relations. We evaluate these algorithms with both synthetic and real world datasets and show that they provide highly accurate estimates for datasets with various characteristics. Recommended by: Sunil Prabhakar Work supported by NSF grants IIS 02-23022 and CNF 04-23336. An earlier version of this paper appeared in the 17th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2001).     

Linear predictive transform of monochrome images

Digital monochromatic images are encoded using a novel minimum mean square error (MSE) linear predictive transform (LPT) coding formulation. The new formulation is appealing for two important reasons. First, it leads to simple coder implementation with a satisfactory signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Second, it provides a general theoretical framework from which minimum MSE predictive coding and minimum MSE transform coding arise as special cases. Some specific results of this paper that illustrate the previous ideas are: a simple and generally suboptimum two-dimensional LPT coder operating at 2 bit pixer⁻¹ has approximately one third the complexity of a 4 × 4 Hadamard coder while yielding a better SNR; an optimum 2D LPT coder operating at 2 bit pixer⁻¹ has approximately one sixth the complexity of a 4 × 4 Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT) coder while yielding a better SNR.