System-Level Design talks with Bob Bluth of the Naval Postgraduate School about UAV design and debug challenges–and what’s inside of these devices. (The blue and green cellophane tape seal some of the access points prior to delivery–and the directions).

It may be one of the best equipped system-development labs on Earth, but it’s largely used to create designs that aren’t used on this planet.

David Patterson, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, presented his views to the Naval Postgraduate School about the prospects for multicore programming success. This video was excerpted from his presentation.

By Ed Sperling

Uncle Sam wants you—but not on the battlefield.

The diminished pool of qualified engineering and science graduates is having a major impact on the defense market. There simply are too few trained engineers to design complex systems for the military at the rate they’re needed, creating a huge hole in a system that has been humming along for the better part of a century. And with many existing engineers retiring or retired, the need will only grow.

The problem started in the early 1990s with acquisition reform, which began tackling problems of custom-made tools. Stories about hammers and toilet seats costing hundreds of dollars made headlines across the country, and Congress reacted by moving to commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts. In the name of efficiency, not to mention the defense cuts of the Clinton administration, the government turned what was once an attractive career option for engineering and science graduates into an extremely unattractive option.

While it has been relatively easy for a company to get on the list of accepted suppliers—they have to meet the triple standards of reliable, safe and secure, with an established production process—the number of engineers who actually work for these companies has been in sharp decline. And so far, they haven’t returned.

“Science, technology and the underlying math and physics has been waning in schools,” said Paul Shebalin, retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral and currently the director of the Wayne E. Meyer Institute of Systems Engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “That’s especially true for those individuals who are eligible for DoD (Department of Defense) clearance.”

Enrollment at engineering schools dropped precipitously in the beginning of the decade, but it appears to be on the rise. In fact, enrollment of full-time foreign graduate students on temporary visas in science and engineering grew 16 percent in 2006, compared with only 4 percent in 2005, according to the National Science Foundation. Those numbers dropped 19 percent after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Looked at differently, the number of U.S students in those programs is growing, as well. The percentage of U.S. students in science and engineering increased to 71% of the total students enrolled in 2005, up from 69% in 2003. The good news is that it’s far easier for U.S. citizens to get DoD clearance for sensitive defense projects. But what percentage push further into graduate education and then into complex system-level design remains to be seen.

“The typical curriculum is that in undergraduate you have electrical and mechanical engineering and computer science, and then you try to integrate all of that at the end. In graduate school, it’s a systems approach—systems process, engineering economics and process management,” Shebalin said. “What we need are people who can integrate thermal with electronics, structures, weight and propulsion. In the systems engineering process, you have to come up with a system specification that includes functional and non-functional requirements.”

He noted that the Secretary of the Navy already has issued a mandate to boost the numbers of engineers and scientists, as well as the quality of their training. “We’ve seen the problems of systems engineering done badly,” he said.

AI used to be the stuff of science fiction, but cheap processing power and storage has made it a reality. To find out what’s being developed, System-Level Design (www.chipdesignmag.com/sld) tracked down Rachel Goshorn, assistant professor of System Engineering at the Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Science in the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Check out what she has to say.

By Ed Sperling

Most of our weather predictions are developed from about 150 stationary government radar systems, which interlock and occasionally overlap to create a cohesive picture. The picture isn’t perfect—in fact, it’s probably the equivalent of looking at a large, grainy satellite photo—which creates plenty of wrong forecasts. But the system can track large storms across state borders and, in many cases, well into the ocean.

Getting insights into the inner workings of storms and how they are affected by a number of variables is generally left to amateurs, who have devised their own technology—sometimes crude, often innovative—to look into the center of hurricanes and tornadoes. But getting an up-close, crystal-clear look into the center of the beast, and being able to repeat that experience with consistency, has been impossible.

At least it was impossible until a piece of government radar fell into the hands of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. The radar originally belonged to the U.S. Army and was being used for mobile air defense. While it was considered outdated for military purposes, it proved to be incredibly advanced for scientific research. Weather researchers don’t typically acquire a $2 million piece of military radar for chasing storms.

“What we’ve been doing is casting versus forecasting,” said Jeffrey Knorr, professor and chairman of the Naval Postgraduate School’s department of electrical and computer engineering. “We thought we could use this for atmospheric science. This is a phased array, and it’s the only mobile phased array in existence.”

It became mobile when Knorr and his team mounted it on the back of a flatbed truck, added a diesel generator and developed some software programs to take advantage of the radar in real time.

“The National Weather System radar is a high-power S-band system, which is a parabolic antenna that basically can scan 360 degrees. There’s a clear-air mode and a precipitation mode, but it takes time to develop an image in 360 degrees. It’s about 5 to 6 minutes for a precipitation scan and about 10 minutes for a clear-air scan. With mobile radar, you can get the same data but you don’t have to scan 360 degrees. It’s all programmable from a laptop, so you can take a phased area and make it frequency agile,” he said.

The shape of things to come?

Weather radar can measure how hard it is raining through reflectivity, which includes the number of raindrops and the average velocity. It also can measure spectral spread of the precipitation, which includes turbulence and wind sheer, which is useful in measuring rainfall rates and predicting flash floods. But the speed of updates is a problem for making fast and accurate predictions.

Knorr’s system allows updates every 5 to 10 seconds through the addition of a high-speed digital signal processor. But it does more than that. Most radar is horizontally or vertically polarized. His team added a third axis, so instead of just seeing how hard it is raining and how many raindrops there are, it can measure the size of the raindrops. The larger they are, the flatter they are, which makes it impossible to pick up using ordinary polarization.

“What we’re able to measure now is the storm velocity, reflectivity, motion toward or away from the radar, and the gray area, which is zero radio velocity,” he said. “We also get a higher-resolution picture. Radar spreads as it goes out, so a 1 degree beam width has a certain cross-range resolution at 1 mile. Shorter-range radar has higher resolution.”

This is particularly important in tracking the path of tornadoes, which have a signature characteristic on weather radar. When weather experts look at a radar image, they can identify this signature and predict that tornadoes will form. What they can’t do is refresh the image frequently enough and look inside with a better image. That requires radar to be much more mobile, quicker and much more accurate.