ALBERT

Description: A progress report on the IRAF stellar photometry package DIGIPHOT, with emphasis on algorithm enhancements and photometry catalog processing tools is presented. The IRAF implementation of Stetson's DAOPHOTII algorithms and improvements to the sky fitting algorithms is briefly discussed and results obtained with the new algorithms for NOAO direct imaging data are shown. New interactive photometry catalog examining and editing tool PEXAMINE, and plans for future photometry catalog analysis tools are discussed.

Description: The IRAF photmetric calibration package PHOTCAL is discussed. PHOTCAL is a set of tasks designed to derive the transformation from the instrumental photometric system to the standard photometric system, and apply the transformation to the observations. The PHOTCAL package contains tasks for: (1) creating and/or editing standard star catalogs and observations catalogs, (2) creating, checking and editing the configuration file which specifies the format of the standard star and observations catalogs and the form of the transformation equations, (3) solving the transformation equations interactively or non-iteractively using non-linear least squares fitting routines, and (4) applying the transformation to the observations. PHOTCAL standard star and observations catalogs are simple text files, whose columns are delimited by whitespace, and whose first column contains the star names. This format makes it relatively easy to interface the output of non-IRAF photometry programs as well as the output of the IRAF APPHOT and DAOPHOT photometry packages to PHOTCAL. PHOTCAL maintains a standard star catalog directory for the convenience of the user, but users can easily create their own standard star catalogs and/or define their own standard star catalog directory. Separate observations files produced by APPHOT, DAOPHOT or a user program containing data for stellar fields taken through different filters, can be combined into observations catalogs using one of the PHOTCAL preprocessor tasks. The input configuration file required by PHOTCAL is a text file, consisting of a series of instructions written by the user in a mini-language understood by the PHOTCAL parser. These instructions: (1) assign names to the input data columns in the standard star and observations catalogs, (2) assign names and initial values to the parameters to be fit, (3) define and describe how to solve the transformation equations. The mini-language approach permits great flexibility in the format of the input catalogs and the form of the transformation equations.

Description: A user's manual is presented for MacPASCO, which is an interactive, graphic, preprocessor for panel design. MacPASCO creates input for PASCO, an existing computer code for structural analysis and sizing of longitudinally stiffened composite panels. MacPASCO provides a graphical user interface which simplifies the specification of panel geometry and reduces user input errors. The user draws the initial structural geometry and reduces user input errors. The user draws the initial structural geometry on the computer screen, then uses a combination of graphic and text inputs to: refine the structural geometry; specify information required for analysis such as panel load and boundary conditions; and define design variables and constraints for minimum mass optimization. Only the use of MacPASCO is described, since the use of PASCO has been documented elsewhere.

Description: In a distributed memory multicomputer that has no global clock, global processor synchronization can only be achieved through software. Global synchronization algorithms are used in tridiagonal systems solvers, CFD codes, sequence comparison algorithms, and sorting algorithms. They are also useful for event simulation, debugging, and for solving mutual exclusion problems. For the Intel iPSC/860 in particular, global synchronization can be used to ensure the most effective use of the communication network for operations such as the shift, where each processor in a one-dimensional array or ring concurrently sends a message to its right (or left) neighbor. Three global synchronization algorithms are considered for the iPSC/860: the gysnc() primitive provided by Intel, the PICL primitive sync0(), and a new recursive doubling synchronization (RDS) algorithm. The performance of these algorithms is compared to the performance predicted by communication models of both the long and forced message protocols. Measurements of the cost of shift operations preceded by global synchronization show that the RDS algorithm always synchronizes the nodes more precisely and costs only slightly more than the other two algorithms.