arXiv subjects

Daniel J. Vickers

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel J. Vickers.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Real-Time Doppler and Ionospheric Dispersion Correction Techniques for Arbitrary Waveforms Utilizing GPU Compute

General requirements for radar digital signal processing are ionospheric distortion and Doppler dispersion correction, which has historically required radar-specific hardware to implement in real time. Although analog solutions are computationally efficient, they often come with system design drawbacks which limit waveform flexibility and can result in an overall increase of system complexity. With improvements in modern general compute systems, real-time digital signal processing is becoming more realizable using non-radar-specific high-performance compute. In this paper, we present an analysis of general Doppler and ionospheric correction algorithms for arbitrary waveforms for radar digital signal processing. We also include considerations for efficient implementation of these algorithms in software, specifically using GPU hardware. This analysis includes metrics of performance such as execution time and error correction accuracy. We also provide recommendations for application in radar signal processing. We identify two algorithms for dispersion correction: an FFT-based method for ionospheric dispersion and a numerical interpolation method via sinc interpolation for Doppler dispersion. Both of these algorithms are able to compensate for dispersion equivalent in accuracy to waveform-specific analytical methods and were able to be performed in real-time on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU. These methods are waveform agnostic and applied directly to the samples, improving system flexibility and making them easy to incorporate into existing software-defined radio systems.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Simulating many-engine spacecraft: Exceeding 1 quadrillion degrees of freedom via information geometric regularization

We present an optimized implementation of the recently proposed information geometric regularization (IGR) for unprecedented scale simulation of compressible fluid flows applied to multi-engine spacecraft boosters. We improve upon state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques along computational cost, memory footprint, and energy-to-solution metrics. Unified memory on coupled CPU--GPU or APU platforms increases problem size with negligible overhead. Mixed half/single-precision storage and computation on well-conditioned numerics is used. We simulate flow at 200 trillion grid points and 1 quadrillion degrees of freedom, exceeding the current record by a factor of 20. A factor of 4 wall-time speedup is achieved over optimized baselines. Ideal weak scaling is seen on OLCF Frontier, LLNL El Capitan, and CSCS Alps using the full systems. Strong scaling is near ideal at extreme conditions, including 80% efficiency on CSCS Alps with an 8-node baseline and stretching to the full system.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2025

MFC 5.0: An exascale many-physics flow solver

Many problems of interest in engineering, medicine, and the fundamental sciences rely on high-fidelity flow simulation, making performant computational fluid dynamics solvers a mainstay of the open-source software community. Previous work, MFC 3.0, was published, documented, and made open-source by Bryngelson et al. CPC (2021) features numerous physical features, numerical methods, and scalable infrastructure. MFC 5.0 is a significant update to MFC 3.0, featuring a broad set of well-established and novel physical models and numerical methods, as well as the introduction of GPU and APU (or superchip) acceleration. We exhibit state-of-the-art performance and ideal scaling on the first two exascale supercomputers, OLCF's Frontier and LLNL's El Capitan. Combined with MFC's single-accelerator performance, MFC achieves exascale computation in practice and has achieved the largest-to-date public CFD simulation at 200 trillion grid points, earning it a 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalist. New physical features include the immersed boundary method, $N$-fluid phase change, Euler-Euler and Euler-Lagrange sub-grid bubble models, fluid-structure interaction, hypo- and hyper-elastic materials, chemically reacting flow, two-material surface tension, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), and more. Numerical techniques now represent the current state-of-the-art, including general relaxation characteristic boundary conditions, WENO variants, Strang splitting for stiff sub-grid flow features, and low Mach number treatments. Weak scaling to tens of thousands of GPUs on OLCF's Summit and Frontier, and LLNL's El Capitan, achieves efficiencies within 5% of ideal to over 90% of their respective system sizes. Strong scaling results for a 16-fold increase in device count show parallel efficiencies exceeding 90% on OLCF Frontier.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2022

Understanding solutions of the angular Teukolsky equation in the prolate asymptotic limit

Solutions to the Angular Teukolsky Equation have been used to solve various applied problems in physics and are extremely important to black-hole physics, particularly in computing quasinormal modes and in the extreme-mass-ratio inspiral problem. The eigenfunctions of this equation, known as spin-weighted spheroidal functions, are essentially generalizations of both the spin-weighted spherical harmonics and the scalar spheroidal harmonics. While the latter functions are quite well understood analytically, the spin-weighted spheroidal harmonics are only known analytically in the spherical and oblate asymptotic limits. Attempts to understand them in the prolate asymptotic limit have met limited success. Here, we make use of a high-accuracy numerical solution scheme to extensively explore the space of possible prolate solutions and extract analytic asymptotic expansions for the eigenvalues in the prolate asymptotic limit. Somewhat surprisingly, we find two classes of asymptotic behavior. The behavior of one class, referred to as "normal", is in agreement with the leading-order behavior derived analytically in prior work. The second class of solutions was not previously predicted, but solutions in this class are responsible for unexplained behavior seen in previous numerical prolate solutions during the transition to asymptotic behavior. The behavior of solutions in this "anomalous" class is more complicated than that of solutions in the normal class, with the anomalous class separating into different types based on the behavior of the eigenvalues at different asymptotic orders. We explore the question of when anomalous solutions appear and find necessary, but not sufficient conditions for their existence. It is our hope that this extensive numerical investigation of the prolate solutions will inspire and inform new analytic investigations into these important functions.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2019

An unknown branch of the total-transmission modes for the Kerr-geometry

The gravitational modes of the Kerr geometry include both quasinormal modes and total-transmission modes. Sequences of these modes are parameterized by the angular momentum of the black hole. The quasinormal and total-transmission modes are usually distinct, having mode frequencies that are different at any given value of the angular momentum. But a discrete and countably infinite subset of the left-total-transmission modes are simultaneously quasinormal modes. Most of these special modes exist along previously unknown branches of the gravitational total-transmission modes. In this paper, we give detailed plots of the total-transmission modes for harmonic indices $\ell=[2,7]$, with special emphasis given to the $m=0$ modes which all contain previously unknown branches. All of these unknown branches have purely imaginary mode frequencies. We find that as we approach the Schwarzschild limit along these new branches, the mode frequencies approach $-i\infty$ in stark contrast to the finite mode frequency obtained in the Schwarzschild limit along the previously known branches. We explain when and why, at certain frequencies, the left-total-transmission modes are simultaneously quasinormal modes. At these same frequencies, the right-total-transmission modes are missing. We also derive analytic expressions for the asymptotic behavior of the total-transmission mode frequencies, and for the values of the angular momentum at which the modes are simultaneously quasinormal modes.

gr-qc↗