In any given year, EOL hosts upwards of 500 visitors and collaborators in events such as the 7th International Symposium on Tropospheric Profiling, which took place in Boulder, Colorado in June 2006. The symposium attracted an international group of scientists, engineers, and program managers with broad experience in atmospheric measurement and modeling. EOL supports NCAR's strategic priority to provide many such avenues for professional development by creating Science and Engineering Visitor Programs to allow EOL staff to share developments and approaches with industry and university scientific and engineering researchers.
Priority 4: Maintaining an Innovative and Creative Workplace
Science and Engineering Visitor Program
Background
EOL supports NCAR's strategic priority to provide many avenues for professional development by creating Science and Engineering Visitor Programs to allow EOL staff to share developments and approaches with industry and university scientific and engineering researchers. In any given year, EOL hosts upwards of 500 such visitors.
Progress
This past year included a visit by Dr. Sunil Khatri, an expert in Software Digital Signal Processors from Texas A&M, and one of his Masters level graduate students, Suganth Paul.
Dr. Khatri worked with with EOL engineers to develop a reconfigurable, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based radar processing environment. Unlike custom Integrated Circuits (ICs), the functionality of FPGAs can be reconfigured, allowing such a platform to be utilized acrossthe breadth of NCAR's radars, lidars and profilers. The use of such a generic radar processing platform would help reduce engineering development and maintenance costs. Sunil also offered a 10-session course on FPGA programming to EOL engineers. Dr. Khatri is also exploring high performance Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) as a means to perform fast computation for NCAR's products. In addition, during his while visiting EOL he is explored extreme low energy circuit design approaches to enable NCAR's ASA systems to perform energy efficient computation and communication. His masters' student, Suganth Paul, developed code for the FPGA based radar processor platform.
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