Computer Animation
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Gary B. Wilcox

2. Associated Investigators: John Leckenby, Francesca Talenti, Wayne Danielson

3. Technical Support Contact: Charles Soto

4. Project Abstract:

   The Animation/Interactive project will investigate new applications of computer animation in a multimedia Web environment in terms of both content creation and consumption. Following the trajectory of the price-performance curve, computer animation projects can increasingly migrate to more widely available Intel platforms. The Web provides an ideal environment for the delivery of computer generated animation as part of larger entertainment, advertising or educational content.

5. Equipment Status:

   The Digital Interactive Studio has the following equipment installed:

   • 9 Dual Pentium II/300, 512MB RAM, 4GB HD, Iomega Jaz & ZIP, 20" color monitor, flatbed color scanner, 6x9" Wacom drawing tablet, speakers
   • 1 Single Pentium II/300, 256MB RAM, 2GB HD, Iomega Jaz & ZIP, 20" color monitor, flatbed color scanner, 6x9" Wacom drawing tablet, speakers
   • One system has an Intel Smart Video Recorder III video capture card and an 800x600 dpi NTSC scan converter. This allows the digitizing and taping of media to/from an SVHS video tape recorder.
   • One system is attached to a 1024x768 dpi color LCD projector for demonstration purposes.
   • Two Quad-Pentium Pro/200 servers have been set up to support the lab. They provide basic NT file services, as well as HTTP and FTP services. One system is to be configured as a test system (with access restricted to the lab workstation IP range), while the other is for actual production/web content serving.

6. Research Progress:

   The arrival of the equipment the week before classes presented several technical challenges for the tech team as well and the investigators. Most of these problems were solved throughout the semester, but the workstations will be re-built this summer.

   In the area of content creation, Professor Talenti worked with 18 upper-division students in the course Digital Animation during the Spring. Skills developed were: working knowledge of 2-D and 3-D animation; concepts of movement, design, key frames, cycles, layering, lighting, editing, and sound. Programs used: Macromedia Director 6.0 for 2-D animation; Infini-D 4.0 for 3-D animation. Students each completed one flip-book; one 2-D cycle; one 2-D animation using a scanned image; one 3-D tutorial; and a final project, with sound.

   In the area of consumption, Professor Leckenby's Interactive Advertising Graduate Seminar focused on the following five goals:

   • To Develop an Understanding of IMPORTANT Issues in Interactive Advertising.
   • To Get a Sense of What Other "Thinkers" are Thinking about Interactive Advertising.
   • To Develop Ideas about How New Media Fit with Old Media in Advertising.
   • To Achieve Understanding of the Socio-Cultural Impact of Advertising in Computer-mediated environments.
   • To Create Knowledge about the "How to" of Interactive Advertising.

   As a part of research projects of the Seminar, each seminar participant created a Web site dealing with the issue of web audience measurement. The main objective of this project is to provide a knowledge base to those who wish to understand how to MEASURE the "audience size" of Internet Advertising and Marketing Communication for their company (profit-making enterprise) or organization (such as non-profit). This is currently one of the most perplexing and pressing issues facing Interactive Advertising planners.

   It is essentially to be a tutorial and "how to do it" with respect to audience measurement on the Web which has become an increasingly complex task. The sites explore the current measurement systems available and include such information. These Web sites aim to serve as a vehicle to express some sense of what is needed to develop our understanding of measuring advertising audiences on the Internet. This project is published at URL:

   http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~admedium/ADV391K_Spring1998_wam.html

   In addition to the above projects, Professor Wayne Danielson worked with a class of students on the redesign of the journalism department web site. Its value is that it provides a mechanism for the department to keep its web pages updated and innovative. At the same time, it gives students valuable experience in web page organization, management and design (http://www.utexas.edu/coc/journalism/).

   The purpose in the spring was to offer a good picture of what the department does. In the fall, Professor Danielson will move toward offering more supplementary materials for instruction across the department and some actual units of on-line instruction. They will also increase the amount of multimedia material-- in particular, they will feature a section called "soundbytes" to display brief audio and video clips from the work of broadcast journalism students. The Intel facility played a key role in the project.

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Digital Video Telecommunications Research and Teaching
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Al Bovik

2. Associated Investigator: Brian Evans

3. Project Progress:

   We have further developed our innovative approach for achieving high quality, low bitrate video communication over computer networks and over wireless communications channels: foveated video compression. In this strategy, digital video is resampled at a nonuniform spatial density, reflecting the human eye's own foveated retinal sampling. In this way, video/image compression is multiplied by factors of 5-10. We have successfully implemented such an algorithm on H.263 / MPEG-I / MPEG-II standard-compliant video streams. Several demonstrations of the foveated compressed video algorithm can be seen at: http://pineapple.ece.utexas.edu/class/Video/demo.html, for both H.263 and MPEG-II.

4. Publications:
   • S. Lee and A.C. Bovik, "Optimal rate control for real-time, low bitrate foveated video coding," IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, to appear.
   • S. Lee and A.C. Bovik, "Traffic smoothing for variable bit rate video transmission," IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, to appear.
   • J. Kim, A.C. Bovik and B.L. Evans, "Generalized predictive binary shape coding using polygonal approximation," Signal Processing: Image Communication, to appear.
   • T.D. Kite, B.L. Evans and A.C. Bovik, "Modeling and quality assessment of halftoning by error diffusion," IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, to appear.
   • D. Craievich, B.S. Barnett and A.C. Bovik, "A stereo visual pattern image coding system," Image and Vision Computing, to appear.
   • S. Lee and A.C. Bovik, "Very low bit rate foveated video coding for H.263," IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Phoenix, Arizona, March 15-19, 1999.

   
   

5. Grants Directly Related (Leveraged)
   • "Objective quality assessment for high quality digital video," Unrestricted Research Grant, Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, $30,000, 1998-1999.
   • "Automatic assessment of compressed digital video quality using human visual criteria," Dell Computer Corporation, $38,320, 1999-2000.
   • "Wireless video coding," Lucent Technologies, $30,000, 1999-2000.
   • "Web-based instruction of digital signal, image and video processing," TxTEC Consortium Curriculum Grant, $11,700, 1999-2000.
   • "Web-based instruction of digital signal, image and video processing," TxTEC Consortium Faculty Incentive Grant, $4,000, 1999-2000.
   • "Standards-compliant high-quality low-bitrate video communications using the TMS320C62x processor," Texas Instruments, Incorporated, $198,712, 1999-2001.
   • ":Foveated Wireless Video Communications," Texas Advanced Technology Program, $197,000, 2000-2002.

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Multimedia Delivery Systems
November 1999

1. Principal investigator: Harrick M. Vin

2. Associated Investigators: Jayadev Misra

3. Summary of Project's Progress since August 1999

   Emerging distributed multimedia applications require the networks and operating systems to export a much richer class of services than that offered by the current best-effort Internet. The concept of service differentiation---differentiating among the services provided by a network to different customers and applications---is at the core of designing next-generation Internet. Although there has been considerable amount of discussion on the network architectures for providing service differentiation, very little is known about how these architectures can be instantiated and how effective they are at providing service differentiation.

   Over the past few months, we have initiated a project (1) to evaluate existing architectures for providing service differentiation and to identify their limitations; (2) to develop novel techniques for addressing these limitations; and (3) to instantiate these novel techniques in a programmable network testbed.

4. Related Publications

   [1]  R. Tewari, H.M. Vin, A. Dan, and D. Sitaram, ``Resource-based Caching for Web Servers,'' ACM Multimedia Systems Journal (to appear), 1999

   [2]  P. Shenoy, P. Goyal, and H.M. Vin, ``Architectural Considerations for Next Generation File Systems,'' In Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Multimedia, pp. 457-468, November 1999.

   [3]  J. Sahni, P. Goyal, and H.M. Vin, ``Scheduling CBR Flows: FIFO or Fair Queuing?'' In Proceedings of 9th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV99), pp. 13-27, June 1999

   [4]  P. Goyal and H.M. Vin, ``Statistical Delay Guarantee of Virtual Clock,'' In Proceedings of IEEE Real-time Systems Symposium (RTSS), December 1998

   [5]  P. Goyal and H.M. Vin, ``On the Effectiveness of Buffer in Deterministic and Statistical Services,'' In Proceedings of 8th International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV'98), July 1998

5. Related Grants
   • Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Advanced Technology Program, $142,604, 1/1/00 - 12/31/01.
   • Intel Corporation, $75,000 + equipment grant ($19,297), 1999-2000.
   • Microsoft, Software Grant ($11,982), 1999-2000.
   • LARIAT: Strategic partnership between Dell Computer Corporation and UT-Austin, 2 grants totaling $50,000, 1999-2000
   • Novell at UTAustin Program, $183,800, 1999-2000
   • Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Advance Technology Program, ATP-443, $132,749, 1/1/98 - 12/31/99
   • IBM University Partnership Program, $70,000, 9/1/97-8/31/99
   • Dell, Equipment grant (quad-processor servers), 1998
   • Lucent Bell Laboratories, Equipment grant (video compression hardware), 1998
   • AT&T Foundation, $20,000, 1997

6. Related Web Sites

   Distributed Multimedia Computing Laboratory URL:
   http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dmcl

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Virtual Museum Project
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator:
   

   Timothy Rowe, Department of Geological Sciences and Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory, The University of Texas at Austin

2. Associated Investigators:
   

   Dr. Mark Norell, American Museum of Natural History, New York
   Dr. Richard Cifelli, Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, Norman
   Dr. Zhexi Luo, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh
   Dr. Phil Currie, Royal Tyrell Museum, Drumheller
   Dr. Jacques Gauthier, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven
   Dr. Chris Bell, University of Texas at Austin
   Ms. Pamela Owen, University of Texas at Austin
   Ms. Kyoko Kishi, Center for Instructional Technologies, the University of Texas at Austin
   Dr. Xu Xing, Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing
   

3. Project Overview:

   The Virtual Museum Project aims to train faculty and students in advanced instructional technologies, by developing multimedia and novel visualizations highlighting the special collections of UT¼s many museums and galleries. A network of highly skilled technical staff already in place, has begun to train students, staff, and faculty as they assist them in developing state-of-the-art instructional multimedia. Our instructional materials are now being distributed via Internet and CD-ROM, and as interactive museum and gallery exhibits. The Virtual Museums Project will break new ground in multimedia development in a highly visible way, while training strategically positioned groups of faculty and students.

   Our training focus is the development of premiere instructional materials that utilize the vast holdings of the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, the Texas Memorial Museum, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The grand technical challenge for the Virtual Museum Project is in digitizing in great detail the many delicate, complex 3-D objects from art and natural history collections. We will use everything from simple scanners to high resolution X-ray CT scanning, laser surface scanning, video digitization, and other techniques will be used to build highly detailed models of the gems of UT¼s special collections.

4. Summary of Recent Progress:

   In the last six months we have worked on CT scanning important specimens from some of the world's finest natural history museums. These include an egg containing an embryo of the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar from the National Geographic Society, several Mesozoic dinosaurs and primitive mammal fossils from Asia, and several modern lizards and mammals. We have also been image-processing some of these and other datasets for both research and for the Web. We mounted several new datasets on our Digital Morphology Group Web site (below), a site designed to serve 3-D data volumes for natural history specimens. We have also tested new VRML software and imaging boards for manipulating 3-D datasets, and we are in the process of updating our CT Lab Web site to demonstrate the new visualization capability that this offers us. We have trained 15 students in 3-D image processing and visualization techniques using CT datasets from natural history museum collections. We have begun to incorporate 2-D and 3-D imagery into our natural history collections database. Based on the technology that we have mastered to date, we submitted a $1.6 MM grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health to incorporate important research laboratory species like the mouse and rat into our growing digital library.

5. Related Grants Received:

   1999-2002 National Science Foundation Grant: A Digital Library of Vertebrate Morphology Using High-Resolution X-ray CT (IIS-9874781), $500,000.

6. Related Publications:
   • Rowe, T., C. A. Brochu, K. Kishi, M. Colbert, J. W. Merck, Jr., E. Saglamer, and S. Warren. 1999 Alligator: Digital Altas of the Skull. Interactive Multimedia on CD-ROM for Macintosh and PC computers. in: T. Rowe, C. A. Brochu, and K. Kishi (eds.). Cranial morphology of Alligator and phylogeny of Alligatoroidae. Memoir 6, Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
   • Rowe, T., C. A. Brochu, and K. Kishi (eds.). 1999. Cranial morphology of Alligator and phylogeny of Alligatoroidae. Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir 6, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 19, supplement to number 2.

7. Pertinent Web sites:
   • UT CT Lab - http://www.ctlab.geo.utexas.edu/
   • Digital Morphology Group - http://www.ctlab.geo.utexas.edu/dmg/index.html

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Multimedia Navigation Systems
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Russell Pinkston

2. Associated Faculty:
   
   

   Fritz Schwentker
   Yacov Sharir
   Darlene Wiley

   Graduate and Technical Assistants:

   Tyson Breaux (Office of Computing Technologies)
   Anderson Mills (Engineering/Acoustics)
   Larisa Montanaro (Music/Voice)

3. Technical Support Contact: Russell Pinkston

4. Current Project Status and Summary:
   

   VR Project (Mills/Pinkston/Sharir)

   Work continues on adding support for interactive music and 3D sound to the Minimum Reality Toolkit implementation of the virtual world "Dancing with the Virtual Dervish," which was successfully mounted last summer on the CASA Onyx RE II system. Professor Pinkston is currently on a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition. During the spring semester, he will begin composing music for this world at CASA.

   Vocal Arts Lab Project (Montanaro/Wiley)

   During the fall semester, the CASA Vocal Arts Lab was utilized in a course dealing with the use of technology in the study of vocal pedagogy. Preparations were also made for Professor Wiley's Cassabatical grant, which will enable her to focus exclusively on this project during the spring semester.

5. Additional Funding Obtained

   No new funding external funding received since our August Report.

6. Related Links:

   Main CASA Web Page: http://casa.pac.utexas.edu
   Electronic Music Studio Page: http://www.utexas.edu/cofa/music/ems
   Professor Schwentker's Project: http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~fritzs/CasaMidi.htm
   Vocal Pedagogy Web Page: http://www.utexas.edu/cofa/music/voice
   

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Distributed Visualization
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Chandrajit Bajaj

2. Equipment:

   Six Dual 400 Mhz Intel Zeon Processors PC with 5 12 Mbytes of RAM and Intergraph Intense 3D Pro 3410T Graphic adapters

   • 16 Mbytes of video RAM
   • no Geometry acceleration
   • 9.1 Gybyte Ultra-2 SCSI hard drive

   Six Dual 550 Mhz Intel Zeon Processors PCs with 512 Mbytes of RAM and Intergraph Intense 3D Wildcat 4000 Graphic adapters

   • 16 Mbytes of video frame buffer
   • 64 Mbytes of texture memory
   • 2 Gflops of geometry accelleration allowing 3.4 Million Triangles/second
   • 9.1 Gybyte Ultra-2 SCSI hard drive

   These machines are intended for two experiments (subprojects A and B) in distributed visualization.

3. Current Project Status:

   Sub-project A is peer-to-peer collaborative visualization on the multimedia desktop . Our current collaboration architecture defines an extensible environment for developing collaborative visualization applications that support large scale geographically dispersed interaction amongst multiple participants and systems. The architecture is connectionless, scalable, supports multi-group federation, has an adaptable data location model, supports flexible applications coupling, , multiple coordination strategies, dynamic downloading of executable code and is event driven. Interoperable implementations exist in C, C++. and Java.
   

   Sub-project A	Sub-project B

   Sub-project B is on multi-pipe, multi-projector distributed visualization on a panoramic power wall. The cluster of Intel machines shall be connected using a high speed switch (fast, low latency). Three of the machines shall initially serve as display or graphics servers and drive a set up of three electrohome projectors in a rear projection panoramic power wall. The research challenges include dynamic resolutions visualization with guaranteed display frame rates, scalability across diverse network bandwith, disk transfer rates and inter-processor communication latency.

4. Grants related to the use of the Intel machines include:

• "Modeling and Visualization with algebraic surfaces and splines"; National Science Foundation
• "Data Intensive Visualization"; National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• "Data and Display Intensive Visualization"; Sandia National Laboratories
• "Terascale Data Visualization"; National Science Foundation
• "MetaBuffer: Combining Realtime Parallel Graphics with Multiresolution VR Display"; Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Leveraging from other projects we have obtained the following necessary equipment utilizing funds from NSF/KDI, and DOE-ASCI grants:	Additionally we plan to obtain the following:
(1.) 6 Extron 112+ (2.) 3 flat panel displays (3.) Altinex 8 x 4 RGBHV matrix switcher (4.) 3 electrohome 9500projectors with fast phosphor (5.) 3 extended range stereo emitters and 3 active LCD stereo glasses (6.) an 8 port KVM Switch allowing a single control point to an 8 machine cluster.	(1.) An additional cluster of 6 Merced based Intel machines(as they become available.) (2.) an 8 port Myrinet switch (3.) 8 Myrinet NICS for the Intel PCs (4.) 4 Top of the line 21" monitors or flat panel digital displays

5. Related Publications:
   • C. Bajaj, I. Ihm, G-b Koo, S. Park, "Parallel Ray Casting of Visible Human on Distributed Memory Architectures," Proceedings of Joint EUROGRAPHICS - IEEE TCCG Symposium on Visualization May 26-28, 1999 Vienna, Austria. pp. 269-276
   • C. Bajaj, V. Pascucci, D.Thompson, X.Y. Zhang, "Parallel Accelerated Isocontouring for Out-Of-Core Visualization," accepted for presentation in IEEE Parallel Symposium on Visualization, October 24-29,1999 San Francisco, CA
   • C. Bajaj, S. Cutchin, "Web based Collaborative Visualization of Distributed and Parallel Simulation", accepted for presentation in IEEE Parallel Symposium on Visualization. October 24-29,1999 San Francisco, CA
   • C. Bajaj, V. Pascucci, G. Zhuang, "Progressive Compression and Transmission of Arbitrary Triangular Meshes," presentation in IEEE Visualization Conference, October 24-29,1999 San Francisco, CA

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Internet City
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Dr. David Maidment (bio) (Center for Research in Water Resources)
   

2. Associated Investigators: Dr. Ken Foote (The Department of Geography) and Dr. Barbara Parmenter (Community and Regional Planning Program in The School of Architecture)
   

3. Technical Support Contact: Ty Lehman lehman@mail.utexas.edu 512-471-3111
   

4. Project Summary:
   

   We are creating and currently serving our www and ftp site on our Intel equipment. We are working with the city of Austin to serve some of the data on our ftp site as well as work with Texas natural resource and conservation commission (tnrcc) and the LCRA on web mapping projects. We are working with ESRI to beta test Arc Info 8.0, which will help us create the next generation of web based map sharing.

5. Related Publications:
   

   Center for Research in Water Resources and CRWR ftp site

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Virtual Laboratories and Examinations
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: John Kappelman, Professor, Department of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin

2. Associated Investigators: None

3. Technical Support Contact: John Kappelman, Greg Weiner

4. Project Summary:

   We are continuing to test the VExams® program in its beta phase. The program was used in Anthropology 301 during the fall of 1999 and served out approximately 8,000 exams and quizzes. It was also used in the UT School of Nursing. We have integrated a series of course management tools into the program. The program will be fully ported over to the Intel computers at the end of Spring 2000.

   I have given presentations on the VExams© program to the following groups:

   • 1999, 15 December. "Presentation of VExams." To Dr. Kenneth Diller, Bio-Medical Engineering, UT Austin.
   • 1999, 9 December. "Presentation of VExams." To C. S. Gaede, Associate Director, and staff, the Measurement and Evaluation Center, University of Texas at Austin.
   • 1999, 2 December. "Online Testing: Assessment and evaluation of distance learners." Invited participant, PBS Adult Learning Service . An interactive national satellite broadcast produced by Dallas TeleLearning.
   • 1999, 29 October. "A computer program for delivering virtual multimedia examinations across secure networks and the web." National Association of Biology Teachers, Fort Worth, Texas. Invited speaker.

5. Related publications

   None since August 1999.

6. Related Web Sites:
   

   http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/anthro/kappelman/kapp.html
   Virtual laboratories in physical anthropology

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Computational Fluid Dynamics and HPC

(or HYDRA: A Prototype PC Cluster System for Flow and Transport Simulation)

December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Graham F. Carey

2. Associate Investigators: W. Barth, R. McLay, A. Ardelea, B. Kirk

3. Project Summary:

   Over the course of the past six months, work on the Beowulf cluster research in the CFDLab has progressed in three main areas: 1) the solution of coupled viscous flow and heat transfer problems including surface tension effects, 2) the simulation of sub-surface transport of a dilute chemical contaminant, and 3) the numerical modeling of pattern formation and evolution in chemically reacting systems. The work has involved both performance studies and phenomenological investigations of these problems. We have continued to investigate the effects of thermocapillary surface tension in a low gravity environment, and we have added the effects of a deformable free surface. We have also begun extending the coupled flow and viscous transport code to unstructured hexahedral grids. This code has also been used to do preliminary simulations of dilute contaminant transport in porous media. The latest results of the performance and application studies are available on the CFDLab website. In the case of the pattern studies, we have applied the cluster to investigate the structure and formation of patterns in coupled non-linear reactive transport problems. We have compared these results with experimental studies performed in the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics by Harry Swinney and his associates. In this case we have performed numerous parallel simulations on high-resolution grids. Sample results are provided on the website. We are currently performing statistical studies of joint failure in geomechanical problems on the cluster. We anticipate results in time for the next report.

4. Project website:

   http://www.cfdlab.ae.utexas.edu/intel_beowulf

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Deep Submicron Process and Device Modeling and Analysis
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Al F. Tasch

2. Associated Investigators: Sanjay Banerjee

3. Research Progress:

   We have completed the development of rigorous, physically based damage models for Ge and In implants into Si. These models are based on the original Kinetic Accumulative Damage Model (KADM) approach developed by Tian et al. in the UT-Austin ion implant modeling program. These new models provide the required as-implanted impurity profiles and damage profiles, which can be used as inputs for transient enhanced diffusion simulation, and for the simulation of multiple implants. These models have explicit dependence on all of the major implant parameters and have been extensively validated by a large range of experimental SIMS and RBS data for both single and multiple implants. The models have been implemented in UT-MARLOWE Version 5.0 and have been proactively transferred to at least 20 individuals in Intel at Hillsboro, Oregon and Santa Clara, California.

   We have completed the development of TOMCAT, a new physically based Monte Carlo ion implantation simulator which is capable of simulating 2-D implants into arbitrary topography with multiple layers, both crystalline and amorphous. Emphasis has been placed on computational efficiency, and improvements over previous simulators ranging from 1-3 orders of magnitude in CPU time have been observed. The accuracy of the simulation is observed not to be compromised by the algorithms for improved computational efficiency. This contract funded the development of the computationally efficient damage models in TOMCAT.

   The new simulator has been implemented in UT-MARLOWE Version 5.0 and has been proactively transferred to at least 20 individuals in Intel at Hillsboro, Oregon and Santa Clara, California.

   New Features of UT-MARLOWE 5.0

   1. Portability across all major UNIX platforms (AIX, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, SGI, DEC), as well as Windows NT.
   2. Improved 2-D capability (TOMCAT).
   3. Physics models for germanium and indium implants.
   4. Dose-splitting method of statistical enhancement of impurity and defect profiles.
   5. 3-D defect output.
   6. User-defined oxide density.
   7. Improved defect placement model.
   8. Experimentally verified low-energy scattering model for sub-keV implant energies.

   Major Features of TOMCAT

   1. Native 2-D simulator - does not rely on postprocessors.
   2. Capable of simulating implants into arbitrary topography.
   3. Simple user-interface for topography generation.
   4. Import/export capability for standard process simulator meshes.
   5. Uses physics model from UT-MARLOWE.
   6. Topography-aware lateral trajectory replication for greatly enhanced computational efficiency.
   7. Improved deterministic propagation algorithm for improved computational efficiency.
   8. Use of stochastic MC algorithms for ion propagation in amorphous materials for greatly improved computational efficiency.
   9. Dose-splitting method of statistical enhancement of impurity and defect profiles.
   10. Multiple implant capability is supported in 2-D. Arbitrary sequences of implants can be performed with accurate modeling of implant history on current implant.
   11. Both dopant and defect information are available. Although the supported KP model is simple, it is nevertheless quite accurate in modeling the dose dependence of implants, and reasonably accurate in modeling defect concentrations. User-defined +n net defect density is available.

   It should be kept in mind that all of the models developed and implemented in UT-MARLOWE 5.0 and TOMCAT have been extensively verified with experimental data in almost every case. This includes both the ultra-low and MeV energy ranges, for all implant species available (B, BF2, As, P, Ge, In, Si).

   We have proactively transferred User's manuals, model information, and source code (for UT-MARLOWE Version 5.0) for those models to at least 20 individuals in Intel at Hillsboro, Oregon and Santa Clara, California

4. Relevant Publications:

   The documents in which these results are described are:

   • "Physically Based Models for Indium and Germanium Ion Implants into Silicon," Y. Chen, B. Obradovic, M. Morris, G. Wang, G. Balamurugan, D. Li, A.F. Tasch, D. Kamenitsa, W. McCoy, S. Baumann, R. Bleier, D. Sieloff, D. Dyer, and P. Zeitzoff, Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Process Physics and Modeling in Semiconductor Device Manufacturing, Spring Meeting of the Electrochemical Society, Seattle, May 2-6, 1999.

   • "Monte Carlo Simulation of Heavy Species (Indium and Germanium) Ion Implantation into Silicon," Y. Chen, B. Obradovic, M. Morris, G. Wang, G. Balamurugan, D. Li, A.F. Tasch, D. Kamenitsa, W. McCoy, S. Baumann, R. Bleier, D. Sieloff, D. Dyer, and P. Zeitzoff, IEEE Journal on TCAD, http://www.ieee.org/products/online/journal/tcad/accepted/chen-feb99/final.pdf.

   • "UT-MARLOWE 5.0 with TOMCAT," B. Obradovic, G. Wang, Y. Chen, D. Li, C. Snell, and A.F. Tasch, User's Manual, April 20, 1999, available directly from Al F. Tasch, University of Texas at Austin.

   • "Monte Carlo Simulation of Ion Implantation into Topographically Complex Structures," B.J. Obradovic, G. Balamurugan, G. Wang, Y. Chen, and A.F. Tasch, Technical Digest of the IEEE 1998 IEDM, pp. 513-516, San Francisco, CA, December 6-9, 1998.

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Reservoir Simulation
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Dr. Kamy Sepehrnoori

2. Associated Investigator: Dr. Gary A. Pope

3. Technical Support Contact: Jason Abate, abate@ticam.utexas.edu, 512-471-6947

4. Project Abstract:

   Accurate and efficient reservoir simulation is of critical importance to the economic well-being of the United States. Future oil and gas production in this country is dependent upon improved oil recovery, reservoir simulation and reservoir characterization technologies. Intense computer simulation is essential for effective reservoir management. Parallel reservoir simulators have the potential to solve larger and more realistic problems than previously possible. Our research involves development of new physical and chemical models, accurate numerical methods, new reservoir description techniques and their implementation in parallel environments. In particular, we investigate porting of reservoir simulators to a distributed memory cluster of Intel processors. By performing this task, the feasibility of using a cluster of Intel processors for solving large-scale reservoir simulations will be assessed.

5. Equipment status:

   At this time all equipment anticipated for this project has been received and assembled. This equipment includes the following:

   • Quantity 16 - Single processor Intel Pentium-II 300Mhz with MMX technology, 256 MB of memory, and 4 GB of disk.
   • Quantity 8 - Dual processor 400 MHz Intel Pentium II Xeon, 512 MB of memory and 9 GB of disk
   • Quantity 3 - Intel Ether Express PRO/100 LAN Adapter, 5 pack.
   • Quantity 3 - Intel 510T Switch.
   • Quantity 2 - Ultrascan 20T monitor.
   • Quantity 8 - 1000HS monitor

   We have ordered an additional 128 MB of memory for each of the original cluster machines, bringing the total to 384 MB per processor.

   The machines are currently setup as two separate clusters, one of the 16 300 MHz Pentium IIs and one of the 8 dual Xeon machines. Each cluster is connected by one of the 510T switches, and both switches are connected to a file server/development machine. We hope to connect the two switches with a 2.2 Gbps switch interconnect, which would allow us to utilize all of the machines as a single cluster, and make simulation runs with 750,000 gridblocks.

   Each machine runs RedHat Linux 5.1, which provides the standard development tools and utilities, including the GNU C/C++ compilers. Additionally, Portland Group Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 compilers are being used. All parallel communication is done with MPICH, the implementation of the standard Message Passing Interface developed by Argonne National Laboratory. We also installed PBS, the Portable Batch System to handle batch queueing of parallel jobs.

   A summary of the current hardware status and individual machine software configuration may be found at http://topeka.cpge.utexas.edu/status.html.

6. Research Progress:

   After installing the software, we have run a number of tests and benchmarks to veryify the machines were working correctly. Following that, the IPARS (Integrated Parallel Accurate Reservoir Simulator) framework [1,2,3] was ported to Linux, which required a few minor modifications to the framework. IPARS provides support for input/output, memory management, domain decomposition and message passing between the processors. The simulator is a new, fully-implicit EOS (equation of state) compositional model which uses PETSc, the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation for solving large, sparse linear systems which arise during the simulation. The simulator is a module which was developed under the IPARS framework.

   Once the simulator results were verified through comparison with results from other machines, several test problems were run to study the range of simulation possible with a cluster of PCs. A modified Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) 5th comparative solution problem [4] which uses three-phase flow throughout the simulation was used to benchmark the cluster. A paper describing this work has been submitted for publication [5], and was also presented at the 1999 SIAM Conference on Mathematical and Computational Issues in the Geosciences, March 24-26, San Antonio.

   We have also run performance tests on the Xeon machines, and found them to exhibit excellent performance. They perform nearly twice as fast as the 300 MHz Pentium IIs, mainly due to the faster clock speed and the 100 MHz system bus. They are very competitive with the 160 Mhz P2SC nodes in the IBM SP we use at the Maui High-Performance Computing Center. The table below shows the execution time in seconds for one of our benchmark tests on each of these platforms:

   Number of Processors	300 MHz Pentium II	400 MHz Xeon	160 MHz P2SC
   1	1112	645	554
   2	483	281	242
   4	245	143	126
   8	133	74	66

   We have recently tested the Xeon cluster in dual-processor mode under MPI using the shared memory capabilities of MPICH. We have found that the dual-processor machines perform well, although there is some penalty for sharing a single memory bus and network interface between two processors.

   We have recently begun a comparison study of cluster networking performance using a variety of available technologies. We will be comparing the performance of 100 Mbps Ethernet, Myrinet and Scali. Our goal is to determine how significant of an effect the use of higher bandwidth, lower latency networking has on real-world reservoir simulation problems, and whether they are worth the additional expense. Initial experiments with Myrinet suggest that it significantly improves the parallel performance past 16 processors:

   

   Additionally, we will be serving as a beta test site, evaluating GigaNet's networking hardware under Linux.

   Work has continued on development of a new Fortran 90-based framework for reservoir simulation, named STAMPEDE (the Simulation Toolbox for Advanced Modelling for Parallel Experimentation, Design and Execution), and a new simulator which uses this framework, GPAS (the General Purpose Adaptive Simulator). All development work is being done locally on our clusters, which have proven to be a very efficient, convenient resource for developing parallel programs. We expect to make the first test runs of GPAS in the coming months, which will be followed by benchmarking the simulator on both of our clusters.

   This work has demonstrated that clusters of PCs are a viable platform for making large-scale simulation runs, that they perform competitively with traditional parallel machines (especially the latest PC hardware), and that they make very good development platforms for parallel simulation codes.

   Further details of these results will be reported in upcoming papers and presentations and our cluster website. The current draft of the paper Parallel Compositional Reservoir Simulation on a Cluster of PCs can be found here.

7. References:
• Peng Wang, Ivan Yotov, Mary Wheeler, Todd Arbogast, Clint Dawson, Manish Parashar and Kamy Sepehrnoori, A New Generation EOS Compositional Reservoir Simulation: Part I - Formulation and Discretization, Paper SPE 37979 presented at the 1997 SPE Reservoir Simulation Symposium, San Antonio, June 8-11, 1997

• Manish Parashar, John A. Wheeler, Gary Pope, Kefei Wang and Peng Wang, A New Generation EOS Compositional Reservoir Simulation: Part II - Framework and Multiprocessing, Paper SPE 37977 presented at the 1997 SPE Reservoir Simulation Symposium, San Antonio, June 8-11, 1997

• Gary Pope, Kamy Sepehrnoori, Mary Wheeler, and Tom Morgan. Advanced computational technology initiative: New generation framework for petroleum reservoir simulation first annual report. Technical report, Argonne National Laboratory and The University of Texas at Austin, 1996.

• J. E. Killough and C. A. Kossack. Fifth Comparative Simulation Project: Evaluation of Miscible Flood Simulators, February 1-4, 1987, Paper SPE 16000 Presented at the Ninth SPE Symposium on Reservoir Simulation, San Antonio, TX

• Jason Abate, Peng Wang and Kamy Sepehrnoori, Parallel Compositional Reservoir Simulation on a Cluster of PCs, Submitted to Communications in Numerical Methods in Engineering, December, 1999.

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Real-Time Process Control
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: T. F. Edgar, edgar@mail.utexas.edu, (512) 475-9201

2. Associated Investigators: Prof. J. Qin, Dept. of Chemical Engineering

3. Technical Support Contact: Tyler Soderstrom, 471-1046

4. PI Assistant: Maria Cruz, m.cruz@cc.utexas.edu, (512) 475-9239

5. Project Abstract:

   This project deals with the application of PC's for real-time modeling and control of chemical processes. The goal of the research is to demonstrate the use of Intel PC's in a real-time, computationally demanding environment where advanced optimization and control algorithms are employed. The experimental applications under study include a batch distillation column, a reactive distillation column (currently under construction) and a rapid thermal chemical vapor deposition system. In addition, we are using PC's off-line to carry out optimization and estimation with chemical dynamic simulators such as Dynaplus from Aspentech.

6. Equipment Status:

   So far we have received one dual Pentium PC and three single Pentiums. All computers are operational.

7. Research Progress.

   A visual basic application has been developed to act as an intermediary between the Fisher-Rosemount Delta V control system and advanced control applications. At present the application is only used for data collection, however it can be easily modified to interface with advanced control and monitoring applications to provide real time data for other higher level on-line applications. The intermediary application's functionality includes the ability to provide process data to other programs as well as to directly implement changes in control system parameters requested by such programs. This allows advanced control and monitoring applications access to data as well as the ability to change process setpoints, implement control moves directly, or even change controller attributes such as tuning parameters. Currently an optimization based technique combining data reconciliation and gross error detection is being developed and tested. This monitoring strategy will eventually be implemented on-line using the pilot scale distillation column in the Chemical Engineering Department teaching laboratory. In addition, the Delta V software is in the process of being upgraded for the purpose of testing model predictive control and system identification function blocks which will be included in a future release.

   
   
8. Publications.

   Dr. Edgar recently gave two named lectures on high performance information technology, which are to be published by the respective universities:

   • "Process Engineering in the 21st Century: The Impact of Information Technology," Phillips Lecture, Department of Chemical Engineering, Oklahoma State University
   • "Information Technology and Chemical Engineering Education: Evolution or Revolution?", Chemical Academy Lecture, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Missouri ‚ Rolla

   Accompanying slides are available for the Rolla lecture. Download the PDF version or the Powerpoint version.

   (Visit Adobe to get a FREE copy of the Adobe Acrobat Reader needed to view the PDF documents.)

9. Related Web Sites
   • TWMCC (Texas-Wisconsin Modeling and Control Consortium)
     
   • Dr. Thomas F. Edgar's Homepage
     
   • Automatic Process Control (ChE 360) Homepage
     
   • Process Modeling and Control: A Vision of the Future
     (Visit Adobe to get a FREE copy of the Adobe Acrobat Reader needed to view this document.)

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Subsurface Modeling
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Mary F. Wheeler

2. Associated Investigators: Steve Bryant, Clint Dawson, Todd Arbogast, and Joe Eaton

3. Technical Support Contact: Chris McGraw

4. Project Abstract:

   Develop parallel and accurate simulators for modeling subsurface and surface flow.

5. Equipment Status:

   16 Intel machine cluster fully operational for over 18 months.

6. Research Progress:

   Application of Parssim, a flow and reactive transport simulator, has focused on a study of heirarchies of uncertainty in geological models. Tracer transport simulations clearly showed the importance of a trend in rock permeability with depth in determining large-scale flow behavior, despite the fact that this trend constituted only a small part of the overall variability of permeability in the formation. The PC cluster made feasible simulations on large 3D realizations of the geological models; previous studies were limited to 2D.

   Simulation s of highly coupled reactive flow in these media revealed intriguing evolution patterns; remarkably few dissolution channels were initiated, and competition between these soon left a single dominant channel. Evaluation of run performance for this class of problems has l ed to a new research project, in which the flow calculation will be run on a platform tailored for linear algebra operations while the CPU-intensive transport calculations are run on a different platform. Visualizations of these simulations were featured at SuperComputing '99.

   Development of the IPARS new generation framework for parallel reservoir simulation on the original 16-node cluster has shown very encouraging scaling on CSM's new 64-node PC cluster, with 93% of optimal speedup achieved.

7. Related Web Site: :
   Please visit the progress page for the IPARS development at:
   http://www.ticam.utexas.edu/CSM/ACTI/ipars.html

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Wireless & High Performance Telecommunication Networks
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Gustavo de Veciana
2. Associated Investigators: Takis Konstantopoulos, Sanqi Li, Ed Powers, Guanghan Xu

3. Research Progress:

   The project has made significant inroads on various problems in the high-speed and wireless communications arena. Specifically contributions were made in modeling and approximate simulation joint bandwidth sharing and routing on large-scale communication networks. This work is pertinent to answering large-scale resource allocation question for networks such as the Internet. Our research on spatial diversity multiple access techniques for wireless systems has focused on the use of computational electromagnetics techniques. The aim of this work was to experimentally assess and simulate SDMA vector channel models with a view on estimating high-level system performance. Additional results on the design of pth order predistorer's to overcome nonlinearities typical in satellite communication systems suggest new approaches to the design of such systems.

   1) Performance modeling and quality of service for the Internet:

   Our recent research has addressed the fundamental issue of providing per-flow fairness for TCP within the Internet. In particular, it focuses on fairness within the Diffserv framework. We first provide background of Diffserv framework and TCP behavior. We then present our current work: a traffic conditioner READ (Rate Regulation via Early Adaptive Detection) and a fair share estimation algorithm FADE (Fair Allocation Derivative Estimation). READ uses the knowledge of TCP congestion control behavior to proactively regulate flow throughput. The FADE mechanism uses a modified Quasi-Newton method for obtaining fair share values without per-flow information. Combining the two techniques results in a highly predictable and effective solution for guaranteeing fair rate allocation. The Intel donated PCs have been used to provide part of the simulation result.

   Related publications:

   • Na Li, Marissa Borrego, San-qi Li, ``Achieving Per-Flow Fair Rate Allocation within Diffserv."

   • Na Li, Marissa Borrego, San-qi Li, ``Guaranteeing Fair Rate Allocation for TCP over Diffserv"

     Available at http://38.229.41.135/papers.htm

   2) Scalability and Large scale modeling of Communication Networks:

   We are investigating approaches to routing traffic on large-scale communication networks. In particular we have focused on the interaction between flow/congestion control and routing and their impact on overall performance. Our theoretical models and network level simulations suggest interesting stability and performance issues will need to be addressed in designing the next generation of networks to meet quality of service specifications. Our current research focuses on new routing paradigms for the proposed differentiated services framework, and as well as generic multi-service network systems. We believe that routing mechanisms that differentiate about traffic types can present significant advantages when there are geographic or temporal inhomogeneities in the network traffic loads on the networks.

   In order to analyze the large scale dynamics of a network such as the Internet, one must simulate the interaction of bandwidth sharing mechanisms such as TCP/RED and FIFO scheduling with the routing mechanisms. We have developed fast approximate methods that enable dynamic simulation of reasonably sized networks, and topologies. Simulations on Intel equipment has enabled us to quickly explore the benefits to the users of various new state dependent flow control/routing policies.

   Further work explores the use of analytical/numerical methods for the estimation of the probability of overflow in a network node, when the traffic is bursty. One way to deal with sudden bursts of work is by paying attention to the tails of the distribution of the cumulative arrival process, instead of, say, the mean and variance. We follow an approach that is based on large deviations techniques for point processes and are able to obtain estimates for the tails of buffer occupancies. These estimates are inverse polynomials or rational functions. The quantities of interest (exponents and approximating processes) are identified with the aid of simulation techniques. This work has relied extensively on scientific software running on the donated Intel Machines.

   References:

   • G. de Veciana, T.-J. Lee, and T. Konstantopoulos. ``Stability and Performance Analysis of Networks Supporting Services with Rate Control-- Could the Internet be unstable?" in Proc. 18th IEEE Infocom'99, New York, NY, March 1999.

   • S.H. Rhee and T. Konstantopoulos. ``Virtual path capacity allocation: user-optimal equilibrium," in Proc. 18th IEEE Infocom'99, New York, NY, March 1999. Estimates of buffer overflows in presence of heavy tails

   3) Vector Channel Propagation Study for Wireless Communications

   The Intel Equipment donation has been extremely valuable for wireless communications research at UT Austin. This research focuses on the study of Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) systems that use antenna arrays to exploit the spatial diversity of mobile users for the purpose of increasing cellular communications system quality and capacity. In SDMA systems, mobile users transmitting at the same time and frequency can be distinguished since they are transmitting from different locations. The communications channel encountered by the array of antennas in SDMA systems is referred to as the vector channel.

   Equipment from the Intel donation has been applied to SDMA vector channel research in several ways ranging from low level electromagnetics simulations up to high level system performance characterization studies. Computational electromagnetics techniques, including ray tracing and the Method of Moments, have been applied to study vector channel RF propagation characteristics and mutual coupling characteristics as well as cellular system planning issues. These electromagnetics techniques are computationally intense, requiring us in the past to wait for days or weeks for simulations to complete. Equipment from the Intel donation has effectively allowed us to reduce this simulation time to hours. As a specific example, computational electromagnetic ray tracing techniques have been applied to a model of downtown Austin, Texas (illustrated below). Whereas past ray tracing studies took weeks to complete, a typical simulation of the complex model below can now be completed in under twelve hours with Intel equipment.

   

   We have also used the preliminary results of this area of research to apply for and receive a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Advanced Technology Program grant for 2000-2001. This grant, entitled, Development of Wideband Vector Channel Models and Testbed for 3rd Generation Wireless Mobile Systems, represents a joint Communications/Electromagnetics study between Dr. Guanghan Xu and Dr. Hao Ling at UT Austin and Dr. Heinrich Foltz at UT Pan American.

   Related Publications:

   • Alberto Arredondo, Kapil R. Dandekar and Guanghan Xu, The Quantitative Effects of Inaccurate Uplink Spatial Signature Observations on Downlink Signal to Interference Ratio, IEEE Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications, Annapolis, MD, May 1999.

   • Kapil R. Dandekar, Space Division Multiple Access Systems: Using Ray Tracing for Vector Channel Propagation Study. Master of Science in Engineering Thesis. University of Texas at Austin. December 1998

   • Kapil R. Dandekar, Alberto Arredondo and Guanghan Xu, "Using Ray Tracing to Study Urban Vector Channel Propagation Characteristics." In Proc. IEEE 49th Vehicular Technology Conference, May 16-19, 1999, Houston, TX

   • Kapil R. Dandekar, Alberto Arredondo and Guanghan Xu, "Using Ray Tracing to Evaluate Smart Antenna System Performance in Outdoor Wireless Communications," In Proc. SPIE's International Symposium on Aerosense, April 1999, Orlando, Florida

   • Hang Li and Guanghan Xu, Transmission optimization over Rayleigh flat fading channel Proceedings of 33rd Asilomar conference on signal, systems and computers, Pacific Grove, CA. Oct, 1999.

   • Adnan Kavak, Kapil R. Dandekar, Murat Torlak, Alberto Arredondo and Guanghan Xu, ``Uplink Transmit Diversity and TDD Downlink Performance for Smart Antennas in Fast Fading Scenarios", Submitted to IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Proc. (ICASSP) , June 5-9, 2000, Istanbul, Turkey

   • Adnan Kavak, Weidong Yang, Wolfhard J. Vogel, and Guanghan Xu, ``Effects of Non-Stationary Wireless Scenarios on Spatial Radio Channels", To be Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Antennas and Propagation

   • Adnan Kavak, Murat Torlak, Wolfhard J. Vogel, and Guanghan Xu, "Vector Channels for Smart Antennas: Measurements, Statistical Modeling, and Directional Properties in Outdoor Environments", Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Microwave Theory and Techniques

   • Adnan Kavak, Murat Torlak, Wolfhard J. Vogel, and Guanghan Xu, "Vector Propagation Channels for Smart Antenna Systems: Statistical Properties of Spatial Signature Variation in Outdoor Environments", In Proc. IEEE Radio and Wireless Conference (RAWCON'99), August 1-4, 1999, Denver, Colorado

   • Adnan Kavak, Weidong Yang, Kapil R. Dandekar, and Guanghan Xu, "Effects of Base Station Antenna Height and Mobile Terminal Movement on Vector Propagation Channels", In Proc. IEEE 49th Vehicular Technology Conference, May 16-19, 1999, Houston, TX

   • Weidong Yang, Adnan Kavak, Sang-Youb Kim, Guanghan Xu, and Lars Hansen, "Evaluation of Spatially Selective Receiving/Transmission Techniques for a Smart Antenna System Operating at 1.8 GHz in Non-Stationary Scenarios", In Proc. IEEE 49th Vehicular Technology Conference, May 16-19, 1999, Houston, TX

   • Adnan Kavak, Weidong Yang, Kapil R. Dandekar, and Guanghan Xu, "Experimental Studies of Indoor Propagation Characteristics of a Smart Antenna System at 1.8 GHz", In Proc. SPIE's International Symposium on Aerosense, April 1999, Orlando, Florida

   • Weidong Yang, Adnan Kavak and Guanghan Xu, "On the Multichannel Characteristics of a 1.8 GHz Smart Antenna System Using a Circular Array in Realistic Non-Stationary Wireless Scenarios", In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), vol. V, pp. 2607-2610, March 15-19,1999, Phoenix, Arizona

   • Adnan Kavak, Weidong Yang, and Guanghan Xu, "Characterization of Fast Fading Wireless Vector Channels", In Proc. Thirty-Second IEEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, vol. 1, pp. 780-784, November 1-4, 1998, Pacific Grove, CA

   4) A reconsideration of the pth-order inverse predistorter:

   The Volterra pth-order inverse has been used for nonlinearity compensation in communication systems for many years. According to the pth-order inverse theory, pth-order inverse predistorters and equalizers are identical. However, the performance of the predistorter is often poorer than that of the equalizer. This is due to a point often overlooked by many researchers. The pth-order inverse predistorter changes the input signal characteristics so that the Volterra model of the nonlinear system to be compensated, and upon which the pth-order inverse predistorter is designed, can no longer capture the nonlinear system behavior. This phenomenon will degrade the performance of the pth-order inverse predistorter. In a recent paper presented and published at the 1999 IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, this important, yet often overlooked, phenomenon is investigated in detail. Extensive simulations were carried out on an Intel-donated PC. The testing system consisted of a Butterworth lowpass transmitter filter, a traveling wave tube high power amplifier, and a Butterworth lowpass filter. Both 16-PSK and 16-QAM signals were used. The results clearly demonstrated the validity of the explanation for the relatively poor performance of predistorters stated above. The results also demonstrated that predistorters designed using multi-amplitude signals, such as QAM, were less susceptible to performance degradation than predistorters designed using constant-amplitude signals, such as PSK.

   • Chi-Hao Cheng and Edward J. Powers, "A Reconsideration of the Pth-Order Distorter," Proceedings of the Vehicular Technology Conference, Houston, Texas, May 16-19, 1999, 4 pages (CD ROM).

   ---

4. Industrial Interactions ---

   Southwestern Bell Corp. / Technology Resources Inc, TI Raytheon

5. Related Funded Projects ---
   • NSF Grant - Adaptive Resource Management for IP/ATM Hybrid Switching Systems (PI: San-qi Li)

   • NSF Career Award - Analysis and Design of Hierarchical Source Routing and Embedded ATM Networks (PI: G. de Veciana)

   • Southwestern Bell Corp./ Technology Resources Inc - Traffic Control and Management (PIs: S.-Q. Li and G. de Veciana)

   • National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, provide additional support for Prof. G. Xu's research.

   • DoD Joint Services Electronics Program, AFOSR F-49620-95-C-0045. (PIs: E. Powers)

   • Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Advanced Technology Program grant for 2000-2001. ``Development of Wideband Vector Channel Models and Testbed for 3rd Generation Wireless Mobile Systems" (PIs: G. Xu, H. Ling, and Dr. Heinrich Foltz at UT Pan American.)

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Distributed Simulation
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Dr. Craig M. Chase, ECE Dept, ENS 436 (512) 471-7457 chase@ece.utexas.edu

2. Associated Investigator: Dr. Suzanne Barber, ECE Dept, ENS 240 (512) 471-6152 barber@ece.utexas.edu

3. Technical Support Contact: Dr. Craig M. Chase, ECE Dept, ENS 436 (512) 471-7457 chase@ece.utexas.edu

4. Project Abstract:

   The goal of this project is to research next-generation distributed simulation technology. Our principle foci are:

   a) Support for System Area Networks (SANs) and cluster computing. Tandem's ServerNet system is the interconnection fabric for our system. This 50MByte/second, switched network provides less than 10 microsecond hardware latency and support for shared-memory operations. This combination of features and performance should allow us to dramatically reduce simulation overhead in our prototype.

   b) Integrating multi-resolution and multi-domain simulations. Isolated, single-purpose simulation systems are no longer acceptable for manufacturing, process control or other simulations. Regrettably, there are no established architectures or universal object models for sharing the results from different simulations. We are exploring integration and multi-resolution strategies for manufacturing and design simulation. The goal of this work is to permit the impact of a design change upon the manufacture and production process to be immediately apparent.

5. Equipment Status:

   All year-one equipment received, installed and operational with the following exceptions:

   a) 20" monitor was never received (3 of 4 monitors were received)

   b) A disk failed in one of the dual-processor desktop workstations. This disk has recently been replaced and the machine has just been brought back on line at the time this report is being written.

6. Research Progress:

   Two independent clusters are up. The "stable" cluster is made up of the complete set of six quad-processor servers. This 24-processor farm is in nearly continuous use as simulation engine. Most of the research being supported by this cluster is in the area of computer design. This research is the target of a recently awarded, three-year, National Science Foundation grant "Performance Impact of Contemporary Programming Paradigms and Workloads" (with Dr. Lizy K. John) in the amount of $350,000.

   The experimental cluster is in the process of being converted over to the Intel/Compaq/Microsoft "Virtual Interface Architecture" specification. VI is a software architecture for very high-speed, very low-latency system area interconnect. We have recently (in July, 1998) entered into a research agreement with Tandem (a Compaq company) that provides access to the Tandem VI software development kit. Benchmarking of the "ServerNet I VI" has recently begun and preliminary results will be posted to the project web page (http://www.ece.utexas.edu/projects/distsim/) shortly. In conjunction with the benchmarking study, a distributed object model (analogous to CORBA or Microsoft's DCOM) from Xerox PARC is being ported to the experimental cluster. We are optimistic that we'll be able to demonstrate (by end August '98) that the combination of Tandem's ServerNet, with the VI architecture and the Intel cluster permits remote method invocation on distributed objects up to 100 times faster than current commercial CORBA or DCOM solutions.

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Computational Finance Lab
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Patrick Jaillet

2. Co-Principal Investigator: Stathis Tompaidis

3. Active Associated Investigators:
   Stefano Grazioli, Prabhudev Konana, Ehud Ronn, Sheridan Titman (Faculty)
   Sergey Tsyplakov, Fei Zou, Zeigham Khokher, Greg Richardson, Jim Rath (PhD Students)

4. Project Summary:

   The computational finance lab - UTC 1.110 - created with the help of the Intel grant, continues to generate various research activities and educational purposes in the area of computational/mathematical finance. A latest addition to the special software and hardware available in the lab is a live financial data-feed from Bridge (installed early this spring).

   As explained in previous reports, research continues to be very active in the area of pricing of commercial mortgages and problems in optimal capital structure (requiring finding solutions to 4 dimension PDEs), of determining the effectiveness of momentum strategies (using very large databases and simulation), matching pursuit applications to hedging large portfolios (heavy calculations), pricing/hedging of complex derivatives in energy, the pricing and hedging of derivatives in the presence of jumps, and on an equilibrium model for capital structure.

5. Related Web Site:

   Computational Finance Lab - A Research Lab of the Center for Computational Finance

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Electronic Commerce Networks
December, 1999

1. Project PI: Andrew Whinston

2. Research progress summary:

   Previous research on virtual private network traffic pricing has worked out an optimum traffic pricing model for the VPN with round-robin bandwidth scheduling. The model has been tested with a network-based experiment system called VTPES (VPN Traffic Pricing Experiment System). A paper, entitled "Exploring Virtual Private Network Traffic Pricing" (http://crec.bus.utexas.edu/works/articles/vpn-pricing.pdf), has been accepted by WITS'99 to be held in Charlotte, North Carolina, December 11-12, 1999. The research in the next phase will be focused on digital contracting for VPN bandwidth market. There are four types of players in an Internet-based VPN: Internet backbone providers, ISPs, VPN administrators and VPN users. They form three intermediate network bandwidth service markets: (i) the interconnection market between backbone providers, (ii) the market in which backbone providers sell Internet access to the ISPs, and (iii) the market in which the ISPs provide VPN service to VPN administrators. This multi-level market structure complicates VPN traffic pricing. The proposed research focuses, in this enhanced context, for VPN bandwidth resource allocation include:

   1. The optimal bandwidth decision between an upstream supplier and a downstream retailer;
   2. The optimal traffic pricing strategy for the VPN administrator in this multi-tier infrastructure;
   3. Contractor behavior study, which requires game-theoretical analyses; and
   4. The implementation of a multi-layer digital contracting infrastructure.

   The outcomes from the above topics will definitely enrich our exploration in implementing a practically workable prototype VPN pricing system targeted at industry needs.

3. Related paper:

   "Exploring Virtual Private Network Traffic Pricing"
   (http://crec.bus.utexas.edu/works/articles/vpn-pricing.pdf)

4. Related URL:

   Intel Project Homepage: http://crec05.bus.utexas.edu/intel/

Previous Status Report

Back to Top

Enterprise Systems Management
December, 1999

1. Principal Investigator: Larry Leibrock, Patrick Jaillet

2. Associated Investigators: N/A

3. Technical Support Contact: Larry Leibrock

4. Status Report:

   Over the recent quarter a significant level of progress has been made in several inter-related projects at the Business School.

   Most of these efforts are under NDA's. (Non-Disclosure-Agreements).

   • These Intel systems have now supported deployment of over 700 notebooks and 500 desktop systems.

   • The Business School is the only academic entity in Microsoft's Office 2000, Windows 2000, Exchange 6 and Polar Early Deployment Programs. We are also in SAP's academic partnership program.

   • Enterprise Digital Certificate Servers - Public Key Infrastructures -

     We created a pilot test-bed of two X509 certificate servers that provide a repository for both public and private keys.

     Student teams researched three areas-

     1. Total cost of ownership
     2. Legal aspects of the key ceremony and
     3. A proposed deployment framework for certificate servers

   • Intel Servers - Three Tier Data Models

     A Team created and validated of an industry hierarchical data storage model for three tier data servers in a fast-Ethernet client/server environment.

   • Windows 2000 - Intel Server Business Model

     An inter-disciplinary team created and validated a TCO model that assessed both the costs and benefits of Windows 2000 in an enterprise setting.

   • Firewall Total Cost of Ownership Model

     A team tested an Intel-based firewall server in three differing policy scenarios and conducted intrusion comparative analysis.

   • Information Security Knowledge Base

     A student/faculty team continues work on the information security archive located at http://niim.bus.utexas.edu

   • Office 2000 Rapid Deployment

     We have completed testing and deployment for Office 2000. All Office 2000 collaborative servers are hosted on Intel servers.

   • Directory Project

     We are designing and testing LDAP directories on Intel enterprise servers. Directory replication models are being planned.

   • Thin Client Test bed

     We have deployed three thin client test models for then clients.

   • Advanced Encryption Standard

     (AES)

     Performance testing and models for the AES on both Pentium II and Pentium III has completed and the paper was accepted by National Institute of Standards and Technology.

   • A High-School Outreach Project (AMIGOS)

     The Business School is completing the 2nd high school project in Laredo, Texas.

     The project is on an Intel server at http://amigos.bus.utexas.edu

   • Performance Testing for Intel Servers

     Both AIM and BlueCurve performance metrics are in final completion.

5. Related Projects:

   Enterprise W2K Dell/Business School Project

   The Business School/Dell Spring Summer internship involved 12 MBA students working with Microsoft Solutions Framework in planning for Microsoft 2000. Detailed reports, statements of work were completed and the project was a success for both UT-Business School and Dell. The project is now complete. We have now moved to Windows 2000 RC1 and are planning a Q1 deployment on 4 - 8 way SMP servers.

Previous Status Report

Back to Top