Principal Accomplishments

Lincoln Laboratory Grid
  • The Laboratory developed a new airborne radar concept for wide-area detection of moving targets concealed under foliage. This concept uses a multichannel sparse antenna and adaptive signal processing to combine synthetic aperture radar images from each transmit-and-receive channel to reject ground clutter returns. An experimental prototype was designed and successfully tested using the Laboratory’s airborne test bed.
  • A novel nonlinear equalization algorithm was developed to reduce the nonlinear distortion produced by analog receivers and analog-to-digital converters in the front ends of many ISR systems. Computationally efficient approaches have been developed and shown to provide beyond 20 dB improvement in linear dynamic range. A nonlinear equalization very large-scale integration chip that operates at 1,500 million samples per second is currently in fabrication.
  • The Laboratory developed adaptive beamforming algorithms for submarine hydrophone arrays that provide significantly improved detection capability in noisy undersea acoustic environments. The Laboratory also developed a classification algorithm architecture that provides an operator with reliable alerts and the automation to manage large search spaces. The Laboratory utilized operational sensor data and transitioned improved capability to fielded sensor systems.
  • Lincoln Laboratory continues to pioneer advanced software technology to provide highly efficient, platform-independent, signal and image processing functions for embedded systems. Development of the next-generation middleware, the Parallel Vector Tiled-Optimized Library (PVTOL), is well underway. PVTOL employs automated mapping and hierarchical memory management to enhance the performance and programmability of the emerging generation of multicore microprocessors.
  • A knowledge-management system called Structured Knowledge Spaces was created to automatically link human-generated exploitation products back to their supporting sensor data. The system helps to improve an operator’s ability to quickly find and correlate high-level information.
  • The Lincoln Laboratory Grid (LLGrid) computing capability was established with the award of a large computing cluster from the Department of Defense’s High Performance Computing Modernization Office. LLGrid now contains 1,500 processors and nearly a petabyte of disk storage. An integral component of the Laboratory’s computing infrastructure, LLGrid is used to conduct large simulations, analyze large data sets, and prototype complex processing algorithms. LLGrid supports several programming languages. Laser radar technologies were combined with other sensing modalities such as electrooptics to improve the ability to discriminate targets and structural features in three dimensions.

 

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