Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on Customs Service's efforts to correct the management and technical weaknesses of its Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed efforts by the Customs Service to interdict drugs, allocate inspectional personnel, and develop performance measures, including information on Customs' action plan for resolving management problems."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the issues related to the District of Columbia (DC) Courts' financial operations for fiscal year (FY) 1998, focusing on: (1) identifying DC Courts' total obligations for fiscal years 1996, 1997, and 1998; (2) whether DC Courts had a spending plan for FY 1998, and whether it obligated funds consistent with available resources; (3) why payments to court-appointed attorneys were deferred between July and September 1998; and (4) whether DC Courts processed payments to court-appointed attorneys in accordance with policies and procedures."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO provided information on the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Airport Improvement Program discretionary spending for fiscal years (FY) 1996-1998, focusing on: (1) the selection process that FAA used to establish priorities for allocating the Airport Improvement Program's discretionary grant awards; (2) the extent to which the highest priority projects were funded; (3) identifying the political party (Majority or Minority) of the congressional representative from the congressional district in which the airport is located; and (4) the amount of time required to release Airport Improvement Program grants to airports."

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether development of an assured-isolation facility for low-level radioactive waste would satisfy the requirements of the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact, and whether a law enacted for the purpose of precluding private disposal facilities from accepting waste generated by the U.S. Departmetn of Energy would be valid (RQ-0033)

The DOE's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program employs both upward- and downward-looking remote-sensing instruments to measure the horizontal and vertical distributions of clouds across its Southern Great Plains (SGP) site. No single instrument is capable of completely determining these distributions over the scales of interest to ARM's Single Column Modeling (SCM) and Instantaneous Radiative Flux (IRF) groups; these groups embody the primary strategies through which ARM expects to achieve its objectives of developing and testing cloud formation (USDOE, 1996). Collectively, however, the data from ARM's cloud-detecting instruments offer the potential for such a three-dimensional characterization. Data intercomparisons, like the ones illustrated here, are steps in this direction. Specifically, they are valuable because they help: provide a measure of uncertainty in ARM's measurement capabilities, calibrate retrieval methods and refine algorithms and concepts. In the process, we are forced to think of meaningful ways in which measurements from different instruments can be compared and, perhaps, combined. While the ultimate goal of this particular effort is to develop the ability to accurately characterize cloud fields in three dimensions over time at the SGP site, along the way we will address such questions as ''which source, or combination of cloud data sources, offers a …

This report evaluates Enhanced Design Alternative (EDA) IV as part of the second phase of the License Application Design Selection (LADS) effort. The EDA IV concept was compared to the VA reference design using criteria from the ''Design Input Request for LADS Phase II EDA Evaluations'' (CRWMS M&O 1999b) and (CRWMS M&O 1999f). Briefly, the EDA IV concept arranges the waste packages close together in an emplacement configuration known as ''line load''. Continuous pre-closure ventilation keeps the waste packages from exceeding the 350 C cladding and 200 C (4.3.13) drift wall temperature limits. This EDA concept keeps relatively high, uniform emplacement drift temperatures (post-closure) to drive water away from the repository and thus dry out the pillars between emplacement drifts. The waste package is shielded to permit human access to emplacement drifts and includes an integral filler inside the package to reduce the amount of water that can contact the waste form. Closure of the repository is desired 50 years after first waste is emplaced. Both backfill and a drip shields will be emplaced at closure to improve post-closure performance.

The Gas Research Institute (GRI) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), along with several industry partners, are collaborating with SuperShuttle of Denver, Colorado, to evaluate natural gas vans added to the SuperShuttle fleet in 1999. Brand new (1999 model year) dedicated and bi-fuel compressed natural gas (CNG) vans manufactured by Ford Motor Company will be operated side-by-side with several similar gasoline vehicles in normal revenue service. Once the study is complete, DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory will analyze and compile the results for release.

ROSE represents a programmable preprocessor for the highly aggressive optimization of C++ object-oriented frameworks. A fundamental feature of ROSE is that it preserves the semantics, the implicit meaning, of the object-oriented framework's abstractions throughout the optimization process, permitting the framework's abstractions to be recognized and optimizations to capitalize upon the added value of the framework's true meaning. In contrast, a C++ compiler only sees the semantics of the C++ language and thus is severely limited in what optimizations it can introduce. The use of the semantics of the framework's abstractions avoids program analysis that would be incapable of recapturing the framework's full semantics from those of the C++ language implementation of the application or framework. Just as no level of program analysis within the C++ compiler would not be expected to recognize the use of adaptive mesh refinement and introduce optimizations based upon such information. Since ROSE is programmable, additional specialized program analysis is possible which then compliments the semantics of the framework's abstractions. Enabling an optimization mechanism to use the high level semantics of the framework's abstractions together with a programmable level of program analysis (e.g. dependence analysis), at the level of the framework's abstractions, allows for the design …

With the increasing complexity and interdisciplinary nature of scientific applications, code reuse is becoming increasingly important in scientific computing. One method for facilitating code reuse is the use of components technologies, which have been used widely in industry. However, components have only recently worked their way into scientific computing. Language interoperability is an important underlying technology for these component architectures. In this paper, we present an approach to language interoperability for a high-performance parallel, component architecture being developed by the Common Component Architecture (CCA) group. Our approach is based on Interface Definition Language (IDL) techniques. We have developed a Scientific Interface Definition Language (SIDL), as well as bindings to C and Fortran. We have also developed a SIDL compiler and run-time library support for reference counting, reflection, object management, and exception handling (Babel). Results from using Babel to call a standard numerical solver library (written in C) from C and Fortran show that the cost of using Babel is minimal, where as the savings in development time and the benefits of object-oriented development support for C and Fortran far outweigh the costs.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) provides broad-based, integrated scientific and engineering capabilities to address some of the nation's top national security and environmental priorities. National security priorities are to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction; environmental priorities are to keep our environment healthy for the long term and to assess the consequences of environmental change. The Earth and Environmental Sciences (E&ES) Directorate at LLNL pursues applied and basic research across many disciplines to advance the technologies needed to address these national concerns. Our current work focuses on: Storage and ultimate disposition of U.S. spent reactor fuel and other nuclear materials; Assessment of the current global climate and simulation of future changes caused by humans or nature; Development of broadly applicable technologies for environmental remediation and risk reduction; Tools to support U.S. goals for verifying the international Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty; subcritical tests for stockpile stewardship; Real-time assessments of the health and environmental consequences of atmospheric releases of radioactive or other hazardous materials; and Basic science research that investigates fundamental physical and chemical properties of interest to these applied research programs. For each of these areas we …

Semiweekly newspaper from Boerne, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

In support of Fiscal Year 1998 Performance Agreement TWR1.4.3, ''Replace Compensatory Measures,'' the Tank Waste Remediation System is documenting the completion of field modifications supporting the removal of the temporary exemptions from the approved Tank Waste Remediation System Technical Safety Requirements (TSRs), HNF-SD-WM-TSR-006. These temporary exemptions or compensatory measures expire September 30, 1998.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Emory, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Policy, and other, efforts by the European Union have resulted in a dramatic increase in non-hydro renewable generating capacity in the European Union countries since 1990. These policies are aimed at reducing the cost of renewable technologies and at reducing market risks by making investments in renewable technologies more favorable. These efforts have substantially reduced the existing gap between installed renewable capacity in the United States and the European Union. This brief examines the policies that were most effective to promote renewables as well as lessons learned.

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

While the Integrated Safety Management System (ISMS) program is a fairly rational approach to safety, it represents the culmination of several years of hard-earned lessons learned. Considering the size and the diversity of interrelated elements which make up the USDOE complex, this result shows the determination of both the USDOE and its contractors to bring safety hazards to heel. While these lessons learned were frustrating and expensive, the results were several key insights upon which the ISMS was built: (1) Ensure safety management is integral to the business. Safety management must become part of each work activity, rather that something in addition to or on top of. (2) Tailor the safety requirements to the work and its hazards. In order to be cost-effective and efficient, safety management should have flexibility in order to match safety requirements with the level of the hazards in a graded manner. (3) Safety management must be coherent and integrated. Large and complex organizations are no excuse for fragmented and overlapping safety initiatives and programs. Simple, from the ground up objectives and principles must be defined and used to guide a comprehensive safety management program. (4) A safety management system must balance resources and priorities. The …

Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Incomplete convergence in numerical simulation such as computational physics simulations and/or Monte Carlo simulations can enter into the calculation of the objective function in an optimization problem, producing noise, bias, and topo- graphical inaccuracy in the objective function. These affect accuracy and convergence rate in the optimization problem. This paper is concerned with global searching of a diverse parameter space, graduating to accelerated local convergence to a (hopefully) global optimum, in a framework that acknowledges convergence uncertainty and manages model resolu- tion to efficiently reduce uncertainty in the final optimum. In its own right, the global-to-local optimization engine employed here (devised for noise tolerance) performs better than other classical and contemporary optimization approaches tried individually and in combination on the "industrial" test problem to be presented.

The ingestion pathway consequences following an accidental tritium release from the Savannah River Site Tritium Facilities are evaluated.

Hybrid power towers offer a number of advantages over solar-only power tower systems for early commercial deployment of the technology. These advantages include enhanced modularity, reduced financial and technical risks, and lower energy costs. With the changes in the domestic and world markets for bulk power, hybrid power towers are likely to have the best opportunities for power projects. This paper discusses issues that are likely to be important to the deployment of hybrid power towers in the near future. A large number of alternative designs are possible, and it is likely that there is no single approach that can be considered best or optimal for all project opportunities. The preferred design will depend on the application, as well as the unique objectives and perspectives of the person evaluating the design.

The Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) is an emerging standard for interconnecting commodity computing nodes into a cluster. Since VIA protocol. operations are implemented outside the operating system kernel (often, entirely in hardware), VIA transfers can be performed at very low delay, high throughput, and minimal CPU overhead. This makes VIA ideal when building large clusters that perform complex simulations of physical events, However, the scaling properties of VIA are less clear. This paper describes the design and results of a simulation model developed in OPNET to investigate VIA's ability to scale to clusters of> 1000 nodes.